Indexical ‘mismatch’; or, adaptability at work

Jef Verschueren | University of Antwerp

This epilogue reflects on the notions of ‘irregularity’ and ‘mismatch’ which form the leitmotiv for this issue on perspectivization in language use, and more specifically on perspective shift and perspective persistence. While endorsing the approach, it is suggested that, given the complexities involved (who orients to what aspects of context and how?) any stable form-function coding would probably fail to perform the communicative task at hand, so that adaptable structures and processes are predictable. It is also pointed out that the observed irregularities seem to show a high degree of persistence across time and space, and it is suggested that this ‘regularity’ may be the most useful focus for this type of research.

Keywords: perspective, form-function mapping, irregularity, mismatch, adaptability

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

Published online: 24 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19008.ver

Full-text

Indexical ‘mismatch’; or, adaptability at work

References

Bolinger, Dwight

1976 “Meaning and Memory.” Forum Linguisticum 1: 1–14.

Fauconnier, Gilles

1985 Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Francis, Elaine J., and Laura A. Michaelis

(eds) 2003 Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Gentens, Caroline, Maria Sol Sansiñena, Stef Spronck, and An Van linden

(eds) 2019 Irregular Perspective Shifts and Perspective Persistence: Discourse-Oriented and Theoretical Approaches. Special issue of Pragmatics 29:2.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGregor, William B.

2013 “Optionality in Grammar and Language Use.” Linguistics 51(6): 1147–1204.

Verschueren, Jef

2018 “Adaptability and Meaning Potential.” In The Dynamics of Language: Plenary and Focus Papers from the 20th International Congress of Linguists, Cape Town, July 2018, ed. by Rajend Mesthrie, and David Bradley, 93–109. Cape Town: UCT Press.

Forthc. “Diversity, Linguistic.” In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology ed. by James Stanlaw Hoboken, NJ John Wiley & Sons

Verschueren, Jef, and Frank Brisard

2002 “Adaptability.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Available online at https://benjamins.com/online/hop.

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

N. Silva, Daniel & Jacob L. Mey

2021. In The Pragmatics of Adaptability [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 319], ► pp. 1 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 09 september 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.