pragmatics
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 07, 2013
The former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was fond of the expression “totally and utterly”. We were regularly told that something was “totally and utterly unacceptable”, or that she “totally and utterly condemned” some recent outrage. (She wasn’t alone in favouring this combination: our corpus includes 130 examples.) Not one adverb but two! So Mrs [...]
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Posted by Simon Williams and Jules Winchester on July 23, 2012
As part of our continuing interest in pragmatics, we return to the subject of apologizing, which has been discussed before by Stan and by Michael. Our guest bloggers this week are Simon Williams and Jules Winchester of the University of Sussex. There’s quite a vogue nowadays for those in power to make apologies for wrongdoing. [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on April 16, 2012
Stan’s recent post on poppycock, bunkum, and similar words includes a huge collection of synonyms. They’re not identical in every respect: there are differences in regional distribution (some are used very widely, others only locally), in register (some being more formal, others verging on the offensive), and in currency (with some fading from use, and [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on April 10, 2012
Michael Rundell noted in his post a couple of weeks ago that there was a clear British/American divide in the use of the expression “Thanks a bunch”: it’s often used sincerely in American English, but ironically in British. That distinction, in one respect, is the tip of an iceberg: the iceberg of adverbial modification. In [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on March 28, 2012
In my last post I talked about things you say that actually accomplish something, such as warning, thanking, advising, and the like – and the idea that utterances like this, often formulaic, are called speech acts. A particular division of speech acts are characterized as illocutionary: illocutionary speech acts are ones in which the speaker, [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 22, 2012
In his recent post on speech acts, Orin made the point that “many of these formulas … can be used to convey a meaning very different from the one they’re usually used for; sometimes just the opposite”. A good example is the expression Yeah, right, which people use to signal that they don’t believe what [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on March 13, 2012
When we say something that brings about a change in the world — whether in a relationship, a process, or in the status of something — the thing we say is often called a speech act. Speech acts are an important area in the study of pragmatics and they cover a wide range of things [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on February 28, 2012
Stop and think: when was the last time you chose to pronounce a word or sentence, or carry on a conversation, in an accent that was not your normal one? What accent or manner of speech were you imitating, and what was your reason for doing this? The choice to add a linguistic twist to [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 16, 2012
There are certain situations in which English speakers switch to using French. We will say, admiringly, that something has ‘a certain je ne sais quoi’, or we might wish someone bon voyage when they set off on a journey. There is a variety of reasons for preferring a French way of saying things, and one [...]
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