Read more
Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a speaker's intended meaning
List of contents
1. Defining pragmatics: the what, the how and areas of disagreement; 2. Grice's monumental proposal and reactions to it; 3. The experimentalist's mindset; 4. A consideration of experimental techniques; 5. Early experimental pragmatics; 6. How logical terms can be enriched: exposing semantic-pragmatic divergences; 7. Grammatical or semantic approaches to scalar implicatures; 8. Conditionals; 9. Referring; 10. Speaking falsely and getting away with it: post-Gricean accounts of metaphor and other lexical adjustments; 11. Irony: shifting attention and reading intentions; 12. Pragmatic abilities among those with autism; 13. More topics for experimental pragmatics: an all you can eat buffet; 14. Opinionated conclusions and considerations for the future.
About the author
Ira Noveck is a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique's Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon. He is co-editor of the first volume on Experimental Pragmatics (2004), is responsible for creating a European research network of experimental pragmatists (called Euro-xprag), and consults with regional networks, such as xprag.de and xprag.it.
Summary
How do listeners understand what they are told? How do they make sense of ambiguities, understand irony, and - more generally - capture a speaker's intended meaning? Using interactions between philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience to craft innovative experiments, this book explains the phenomena of human communication.