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Article published In:
Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska and Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics 33:3] 2023
► pp. 343–367

Paralanguage and ad hoc concepts

ORCID logo | Universidad de Sevilla

Ad hoc concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel adjustment. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered by various linguistic elements. These include evaluative morphemes, lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words, and stylistic resources like repetition or rewording. This paper argues that paralanguage may fulfil a similar enacting function and finetune the conceptual representations arising from content words on the grounds of idiosyncratic, context-dependent features or shades, as well as propositional and non-propositional information about the speaker’s psychological states. However, the paper restricts this function to expressive interjections, prosodic inputs like pitch, contrastive stress and pace or tempo, and gestural inputs such as language-like gestures, pantomimes and emblems. Conative interjections, intonation and proper gesticulation would be excluded from contributing to lexical pragmatic processes.

Keywords: free enrichment, relevance theory, ad hoc concepts, lexical pragmatics, interjections, prosody, gestures
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Paralanguage: A brief overview
    • 2.1Interjections
    • 2.2Prosody
    • 2.3Kinesics
  • 3.Paralanguage in relevance-theoretic pragmatics
  • 4.Concepts and ad hoc concepts
  • 5.Paralinguistic markers of ad hoc concepts
    • 5.1Interjections
    • 5.2Prosodic/suprasegmental markers
    • 5.3Gestural markers
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21059.pad
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Cited by 1 other publications

Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2024. Irina T. Pandarova, Revisiting sentence adverbials and relevance (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 334). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2021. Pp. ix + 254. ISBN 9789027213730.. English Language and Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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