Principal stages of speech pragmasemantic sense formation and methods of its analysis

The article is devoted to peculiarities and differences of two linguistic fields semantics and pragmatics. The objective of the work is to state the extent of participation of semantic and pragmatic parameters in the process of sense formation. The relevance of the study is beyond doubt, since the pragmasemantic analysis of discourse functional space helps to identify the potential of linguistic means in the process of forming meanings and their transformation into integral sense under the influence of contextual factors, and to determine optimal ways of expressing communicative intention of the author of the discourse and of providing adequate understanding of the sense by the referent. The author also describes main features, differences and similarities of the concepts text and discourse. The specificity of semantic and pragmatic meanings, their correlation and the degree of participation in formation of discourse functional space are analyzed. On the basis of this, the algorithm for pragmasemantic sense formation is deduced. The author emphasizes that the initial meaning is formed by a semantic meaning, in the process of speech actualizing it is supplemented with a pragmatic meaning, which is further transformed into a pragmatic and semantic and communicative-pragmatic sense. This process is illustrated by fragments from works of fiction by contemporary English-speaking authors. The research uses semantic and pragmatic analysis and discourse analysis as the principal methods. The author describes their features, and proves the viability of their application to the object of the research. The author comes to the conclusion that the pragmasemantic analysis of English discourse makes it possible to understand the mechanisms of formation of meanings and sense of a speech work. The contribution of both semantics and pragmatics to the overall communicative interaction is undeniable, since any communication is necessarily analyzed taking into account semantic and pragmatic aspects.

Name of Russian Podcasts: Semantics and Pragmatics

This article addresses the issues of organizing the communicative space of modern media. The main focus is on considering the names of podcasts - audio blogs on the Internet - in terms of the various language techniques used in them. The material for the study was podcasts operating on the platforms of the Internet site YouTube and the social network Vkontakte in Russia. 9 groups of podcast titles were identified by the type of reception underlying each name. It has been established that the corpus of titles in the podcasting industry is characterized by a wide variety. Among them, original names predominate, built on the basis of a language game, precedent texts, borrowings from other languages, stylistically marked words or implicit meaning, metaphorical, symbolic, ironic component embedded in them, which work on the implementation of a contact-establishing strategy for subsequent communication between mediators and the audience listeners.

Naming and Indexicality

How do words stand for things? Taking ideas from philosophical semantics and pragmatics, this book offers a unique, detailed, and critical survey of central debates concerning linguistic reference in the twentieth century. It then uses the survey to identify and argue for a novel version of current 'two-dimensional' theories of meaning, which generalise the context-dependency of indexical expressions. The survey highlights the history of tensions between semantic and epistemic constraints on plausible theories of word meaning, from analytic philosophy and modern truth-conditional semantics, to the Referentialist and Externalist revolutions in theories of meaning, to the more recent reconciliatory ambition of two-dimensionalists. It clearly introduces technical semantical notions, theses, and arguments, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides. Wide-ranging in its scope, yet offering an accessible route into literature that can seem complex and technical, this will be essential reading for advanced students, and academic researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

Modular Design of Grammar

Modular design of grammar: Linguistics on the edge presents the cutting edge of research on linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure, with each module having its coherent properties and being related to each other by correspondence functions. Following a detailed introduction, Part I scrutinises the nature of linguistic structures, interfaces and representations in LFG’s architecture and ontology. Parts II and III are concerned with problems, analyses and generalisations associated with linguistic phenomena which are of long-standing theoretical significance, including agreement, reciprocals, possessives, reflexives, raising, subjecthood, and relativisation, demonstrating how these phenomena can be naturally accounted for within LFG’s modular architecture. Part IV explores issues of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of syntactic categories in grammar, such as unlike category coordination, fuzzy categorial edges, and consequences of decategorialization, providing explicit LFG solutions to such problems including those which result from language change in progress. The final part re-examines and refines the precise representations and interfaces of syntax with morphology, semantics and pragmatics to account for challenging facts such as suspended affixation, prosody in multiple question word interrogatives and information structure, anaphoric dependencies, and idioms.

STUDY OF PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF ANGLICISMS IN ITALIAN MEDIA TEXTS

Статья рассматривает изучение англицизмов в современных итальянских медиатекстах, а также их характеристики и прагматический потенциал. Актуальность исследования заключается в проведении когнитивного анализа семантики и прагматики англицизмов и установлении когнитивных и прагматических правил их использования в сообщениях средств массовой информации. Автор изучал архивы трех основных национальных итальянских широкоформатных газет и электронные корпусы английского и итальянского языков, применяя описательный метод, а также сравнительный и стилистический анализ, контекстуальный и прагматический анализ. На основании проведенных исследований был сделан вывод о том, что журналисты используют заимствования для введения новых денотативных значений и для возбуждения определенных эмоций и чувств у потенциальных читателей. Современные итальянские медиатексты передают личное сообщение автора, в котором коннотация и денотат заимствованного термина отличны от коннотации и денотата, принятых в языке-доноре. Основной причиной заимствований в итальянской прессе является тенденция заполнить имеющиеся лакуны иностранными понятиями и тегами. Автор пришел к заключению, что подавляющая часть заимствований относится к сфере политики, экономики, труда, коммерции, информационных технологий, моды, индустрии развлечений, музыки и спорта. This article considers the study of Anglicisms in contemporary Italian media texts as well as their characteristics and pragmatic potential. The relevance of the research lies in the implementation of cognitive analysis of semantics and pragmatics of Anglicisms and identifying cognitive and pragmatic rules of their use in modern Italian media reports. Having applied descriptive method, comparative and stylistic analyses, contextual and pragmatic analyses, the author attempted to research the archives of three national broadsheet newspapers and web-based English and Italian corpora. Journalists use borrowings for introducing new denotative meanings and evoking certain emotions and feelings of the potential readership. Contemporary Italian media text transmits a personal message of an author that is distinguished from the proper connotation and denotation of a term used in a source language. The principal motives for borrowings’ use in the Italian press comprise the tendency to fill the gaps with foreign labels and tags. It was concluded that the majority of the borrowings are attributed to the sphere of politics, economy, labour and commerce, information technologies, fashion, entertainment, music, and sport.