Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
This paper presents a corpus study of pragmatic factors involved in interpreting potentially ambiguous sentences with negation and universal quantifiers, as demonstrated by the Russian sentence Oni ne uspejut vsjo eto sdelat’ ‘They won’t have time to do all this.’ Ambiguity in such sentences results from potential differences in scope assignment. I...
Published in Multilingua
This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla 2009/2012/2014). Both genu...
Published in Wellcome open research
Background: Some individuals with autism find it challenging to use and understand language in conversation, despite having good abilities in core aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary. This suggests that pragmatic skills (such as understanding implied meanings in conversation) are separable from core language skills. However, it has b...
Published in Topics in Linguistics
This study aims to apply the Gricean theory of conversational cooperation to the example of inferential meaning in the oral speech of children with pragmatic deficit. Firstly, the analysis pays attention to the use of tropic inferences and particularized implicatures in conversation. Secondly, it focuses on the degree of maintenance or flouting wit...
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Contemporary semantics has uncovered a sophisticated typology of linguistic inferences, characterized by their conversational status and their behavior in complex sentences. This typology is usually thought to be specific to language and in part lexically encoded in the meanings of words. We argue that it is neither. Using a method involving "compo...
Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaph...
Pris dans son intégralité, le présent ouvrage s’attache à décrire et à illustrer, d’une part, les manières selon lesquelles les langues naturelles gèrent le conditionnement de l’information dans les énoncés oraux, en les dotant d’une Structure Informationnelle, distincte de la Structure Syntaxique et, d’autre part, la façon dont les éléments prosod...
Published in Topics in Linguistics
Some traditional accounts view literal meaning (LM) as the central component in the process of meaning interpretation. This paper supports this view while adding that LM is the first but not the only piece of evidence available to the hearer of the speaker’s meaning. After critically evaluating examples from previous studies and my own examples, th...
Published in Open Linguistics
This paper explores the connection between general pragmatic principles (Cooperation, Relevance). Implicit content is a broad category. Post-Gricean pragmatics has consistently shown that inferences already come into play in order to derive « what is said », or explicatures, rolling back the boundaries of the notion of implicit meaning. I argue tha...
