An analysis of the pragmatic functions of hispanicisms in Hemingway’s "Death in the Afternoon"

This paper seeks to explore the pragmatic functions of the Spanish-induced loanwords, or hispanicisms, used in the novel Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. These borrowed words have been manually extracted and through the software kit AntConc, each occurrence or word token was examined to determine the prevalent pragmatic motivation in each text string: ‘ideational’, ‘expressive’ or 'textual’. Findings suggest that unadapted borrowings are most widespread, and the vast majority of them correspond to ideationally or referentially motivated loanwords. The assimilation of new referents (i.e. nonexistent in English cultural frames), particularly those related with bullfighting jargon, is linked to the general stylistics of travelogues. Expressive and interpersonal motivations are less frequent but they might reflect the vernacularization of travel writing and the extended use of euphemisms through lexical borrowing. Alternatively, textual motivations are regularly found through the use of synomyms, co-hyponyms and paraphrases, which are intended to ensure text clarity and coherence.

Information Structure and Word Order Canonicity in the Comprehension of Spanish Texts: An Eye-Tracking Study

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context.

Development of contrastive-partitive in colloquial Persian

This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =eš in colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =eš in some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in the situational context. Instead, the function of =eš, namely contrastive-partitive, is to mark the host as a part and contrast it with other parts of the similar set. The same function is attested in a few languages of Uralic and Turkic group. We believe that the same development has been occurred in possessive =eš in Persian. To describe the process of the development of the contrastive-partitive function, authentic colloquial examples from Internet blogs and formal examples from a historical corpus of New Persian are investigated. It is argued that this non-possessive function of =eš has originated from the whole-part relation in cross-referencing possessives, where both the lexical and clitical possessor =eš are present. The presence of the lexical possessor facilitates the loss of referentiality in =eš and it is developed to denote partitivity. Furthermore, the pragmatic motivation of communicating contrast makes =eš to be further grammaticalized into denoting contrastive-partitive function.

First things first: The pragmatics of “natural order”

Classical rhetoricians dating back to Aristotle sought to define the principles of natural order that determine priority in sequences, especially in linguistic representations. Among the principles with the widest predictive power for the ancients and their modern heirs are those stating that A can be prior to B “with respect to temporal order”, that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “known or less informative” than what comes later, and that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “better” or “more worthy”. But when and how do these ordering principles influence the form of linguistic sequences, and how are conflicts between the principles resolved? What determines the priority between the principles of priority? What makes “natural order” natural? Drawing on over two millennia of scholarship, we explore the pragmatic motivation for the primary ordering principles, and in particular for those affecting the order of logically symmetric but rhetorically asymmetric conjunctions.

Rare and uncommon vocabulary as a pragmatic tool of modern French political discourse

The article deals with the rare and uncommon vocabulary used in contemporary French political discourse. Nowadays discourse studies are becoming increasingly complex and multidimensional. Political discourse is an essential component of everyday political life. The choice of research question is determined by its contribution to cross-cultural communication, as well as by the lack of discursive explorations regarding the rare and uncommon vocabulary. Our hypothesis is that this type of lexis would have some pragmatic motivation and may serve to realize a certain number of communication tasks. Thus, our research aims to describe the collected samples and reveal their pragmatic potential. Discursive analysis coupled with frequency evaluation shapes a methodological framework for our study. The total number of lexical samples is 32 units coming from public speeches, debates and interviews of contemporary French politicians. We have checked the frequency profile of all collected observations on the Google Books French Corpus Ngram Viewer. In order to test the relevance of the corpus and optimize the interpretation of results, we have also introduced a «control group», which contain 31 lexical units expectedly present in political lexicon. Our analysis shows that the rare and uncommon vocabulary serves various pragmatic goals, such as demonstrating the speaker’s performance, capture the audience's attention, achieving a euphemistic effect and some others. Our research gives us ground to affirm that the pragmatic effects of this type of lexical phenomena are due to its ability to break the functional isomorphism of discourse space. The arising disharmony may be caused by temporary disparity (obsolete words), topical mismatch (special vocabulary) or cultural variance (book words with complex semantics, little-known words or constructions, regional and foreign language borrowings). In general, our research leads us to conclude that the rare and uncommon vocabulary possess diverse pragmatic functions, which present an undoubted interest in further research.

An Event Structure Analysis of Object-oriented Adverbial Clauses

In Mandarin Chinese, there exists such adverbial clause as “Li Zhen cuicuide zhale yipan huashengmi” (Li Zhen fried a dish of peanuts crispy), in which the adverbial modifies the predicate verb but semantically orients to the object. This kind adverbial clause can be formulated as “NPs+APo+De+VP+NPo=NP+VP+O and O is characterized by the adverbial”. The object-oriented adverbial clause is a mismatched syntax-semantics phenomenon, with the mapping between form and meaning distorted. Many previous studies have proposed not fully identical analyses for the syntactic distribution, pragmatic motivation and constraints. However, few researches have made syntactic and semantic analyses from the perspective of event structure in the framework of formal linguistics, which leaves wide space for further study.Event structure theory is adopted in this paper to make analysis of object-oriented adverbial clauses in event semantics perspective. This paper aims to examine the syntactic structure from the perspective of event semantic structure and explore how event structure is represented in syntactic structure of object-oriented adverbial clause.

'A lo mejor and igual'. Epistemic and Non-Epistemic Meanings

This paper looks into the use of a lo mejor and igual (‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’) in oral texts of the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual where the speaker doesn’t show any lack of commitment to the proposition. In some of these texts, the speaker gives an example to substantiate his position; in others, he talks about everyday actions – characterized by showing an effective state of affairs and, as such, not subject to doubt –. To account for these uses – not described in grammar – we provide some explanatory hypotheses based on the primary meaning of these exponents, their stage of grammaticalization and their pragmatic motivation.

Interlanguage Pragmatic Motivation in EFL Context

This research sets out to explore the Interlanguage pragmatic motivation in EFL to their pragmatic production. This research is focus on the construct and impact of Interlanguage pragmatic motivation in EFL to their pragmatic production. The participants of the study were the university students chosen randomly from among intermediate EFL learners. There are three instruments in this study; there will be different types of analyses. Both general and speech-act-specific motivation questionnaires will be analysed by using factor analysis on a five-point Likert scale (1-5). Skewness and kurtosis will be calculated to investigate whether the questionnaires and the WDCT items fell within the normal range. Regression analysis will be done to measure how well general pragmatic motivation and Speech-act-specific motivation could predict pragmatic production. Several conclusions can be drawn from the resent study. First, language learners possess a specific type of motivation for the acquisition of interlanguage pragmatics, called pragmatic motivation, which refers to two interrelated types of motivation: general pragmatic motivation and speech-act-specific motivation. Second, EFL learners are strongly motivated to acquire and develop English pragmatic features, i.e. their pragmatic motivation is high; however, they do not have the necessary pragmatic knowledge. Third, predicting EFL learners’ pragmatic production based on their speech-act-specific motivation is somehow possible since both pragmatic production and speech-act-specific motivation focus on learners’ illocutionary competence, i.e. language functions and speech acts.

The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.