Pragmatic Intrusion into what is said: In Western linguistics and traditional Arabic linguistics

The present study is an attempt to answer the question about whether Arab linguists of the past were acquainted with the problem of pragmatic intrusion into the semantic or truth-conditional content of what is said. Using many quotations from the traditional Arabic books of "usül" (Islamic jurisprudence) and "balagha" (rhetoric), sufficient evidence was found to support the hypothesis that Arab linguists of the Middle Ages were well acquainted with the central ideas of the problem. They engaged in debates and controversies very similar to those we find in modern pragmatic literature.

Pre-semantic pragmatic enrichment

This chapter aims to show how long-distance reflexivization (LDR) is pragmatically enriched through the author’s version of neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora. By LDR is meant the phenomenon whereby a reflexive can be bound outside its local syntactic domain, which has long been posing serious problems for Chomsky’s generative syntactic theory. Unlike in English, where LDR is normally not allowed, LDR occurs in a wide range of the world’s languages as structurally and typologically diverse as Chinese, Icelandic, and modern Greek. The chapter considers the three distinct but related functions of a long-distance reflexive, namely contrastiveness/emphaticness, logophoricity, and de se attribution. Finally it consider the question of what the pragmatic intrusion under discussion is. Data are drawn from a variety of languages.

Neo-Gricean Pragmatics

The aim of this chapter is to provide a state-of-the-art survey of classical and especially neo-Gricean pragmatics, focusing on the bipartite model put forward by Horn and the trinitarian model advanced by Levinson. It assesses the role neo-Gricean pragmatics plays in effecting a radical simplification of the lexicon, semantics, and formal syntax in linguistic theory respectively, covering lexical narrowing, lexical cloning, lexical blocking, and lexicalization asymmetry in logical operators, and concentrating on pragmatic intrusion into what is said, Grice’s circle, and the pragmatics–semantics interface, and anaphora and binding.