This article is concerned with the history of "yours sincerely," a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of…

In current literature, metaphor is treated as either an instance of implicit comparison or as a nonliteral class-inclusion statement. I will argue that, contrary to these positions, the notions of comparison and class-inclusion are not mutually exclusive in character but rather complementary cognitive concepts which entail one another. While…

Examining grammatically idiosyncratic English expressions often helps reveal not only to ESL (English as a second language) teachers and learners but also to experts on English how intricately language is composed. This paper aims to expound one such idiomatic expression of the "try and V" construction by exploring the phenomenon from diverse…

We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain ("will" and "going to"). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of…

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

African American English (AAE) refers to the systematic, rule-governed linguistic patterns of found among African Americans. This article provides an overview of AAE. More specifically, the article enumerates the historical underpinnings associated with AAE, identifies a representative set of AAE characteristics, reviews relevant research, and…

When speakers refer to the same referent multiple times in a conversation, they tend to follow established patterns of usage, known as "conversational precedents." Research has found that listeners expect speakers to follow precedents, and that this expectation guides their search for referents (Barr, D. J., & Keysar, B. (2002). "Anchoring…

Our study explores the similarities and differences between a discourse completion task (DCT) and corpus data and discusses potential implications for using the two in a pedagogic context. The DCT has traditionally been used as an instrument for the study of interlanguage pragmatics while both spoken and written corpora have mainly been used to…

Singapore's annual Speak Mandarin Campaign has been largely successful in shifting the language patterns of its Chinese citizens from Chinese dialects to Mandarin in all sectors. However, there has been a notable exception: the effort to have Chinese Singaporeans give their children Mandarin names, rather than dialect ones. In this paper, we…

A discussion of markedness in English questions the value of markedness theory in constructing explanatory models of linguistic meaning. It challenges the claim that pairs of terms in sentences are in a single type of relation (marked/unmarked) that accounts for all differences between the two terms, including differences in use in measure…

Much of the confusion surrounding the meaning and distribution of "(i)ci and la" and other partially cognate deictic terms in French can be dissipated if the terms are assumed to be related to the three grammatical persons: "(i)ci" is confined to the first person, "la" has taken over the second person, and…

A study investigated the use of three pragmatic expressions ("you know, you see, I mean") by female and male British English speakers to (1) establish actual differences in usage over a number of functions of the three expressions, and (2) discover any correlation of usage with same-sex vs. mixed-sex interaction. (Author/MSE)

The book, designed as a textbook for introductory study of semantics within college-level linguistics, focuses on the study of meaning as it is systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. The term "semantics" is presumed here to include pragmatics. An introductory section explains fundamental theoretical and…

Analysis of the distribution of punctors, a class of markers commonly classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation, in one corpus of French is presented. Some aspects of their conditioning are explained in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints. (Author/MSE)

This article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study into the perception of conventionally indirect requests in British English and Peninsular Spanish, given the high incidence of the pragmatic category over others in its encoding of politeness in both related and unrelated languages (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). More specifically,…