Posts Tagged ‘pragmatics’
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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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Posted by Stan Carey on October 12, 2011
Michael wrote an interesting post last week about how a word (in this case, complete) can be used to convey things that are not obvious from the word itself – or even the sentence it’s in. This falls under the topic of pragmatics. According to David Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, pragmatics is one [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on October 06, 2011
A British newspaper recently featured one of those polls to find out what its readers thought about a new policy idea. The question was: “Are compulsory learning tests for two-year-olds a complete waste of public money?” A fair question – or was it? If the question had been ‘Are compulsory learning tests … a waste [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on July 11, 2011
During our Romantic English month, Dan Clayton reported on some research which suggested that couples whose speech styles matched one another closely were likely to get on well. Dan agreed, but then went on to say ‘This isn’t exactly news to linguists’. He could have said: ‘Linguists know this already’ but it’s a well-known characteristic [...]
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