Some aspects of pragmatics
Linguistic, cognitive, and intercultural
Chaoqun Xie | Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and University of Hamburg
Juliane House | University of Hamburg Research Center on Multilingualism
Part of current pragmatics research aims at opening up new avenues of inquiry by revisiting and revising some of its central topics and keywords, such as implicature, explicature, truth, varieties of meaning, meaning inference, relevance, politeness, and face. This review article attempts to contribute to this endeavor by making some comments on and beyond Kecskes and Horn’s (2007) Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects. With reference to certain Chinese linguistic and interactional actualities, this paper argues, among other things, that a speaker who conveys some truth to a hearer does not necessarily mean that the speaker is committed to that truth, that people with little social power may also manipulate the power of words in actual interaction, and that when it comes to making politeness evaluations, what one does may turn out to be more important and decisive than what one says.
Keywords: Chinese politeness, meaning inference, conventional implicature, power, meaning manipulation, social reality, salient meaning, truth commitment
Published online: 18 August 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17.2.10xie
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17.2.10xie
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Cited by 1 other publications
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