Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society

Jacob L. Mey is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense Main Campus. In 1977 he founded, with Hartmut Haberland, the Journal of Pragmatics, of which he is the chief editor. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Zaragoza, Spain in 1992.

Introduction.- PART I. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS. Pragmatics through the Prism of Society.- How can Intercultural Pragmatics bring in some new Insight into Pragmatics Theories?.- Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique and Trends.- Pronouns and Pragmatics.- Pragmatic Disorders and Social Functioning: a Lifespan  Perspective.- The Dialogic Principle Revisited, Speech Acts and Mental States.- Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, on «language-games» and Ethics.- The Individual and the Social Path of Interpretation:  The Case of Incomplete Disjunctive Questions.- Discourse and Racism.- Discourse Markers in Oral Narratives.- Propositional Attitudes and Cultural Scripts.- Modular, Cellular, Integral: A Pragmatic Elephant?.- What can Pragmatics Learn from the Law?.- PART II. LINGUISTICS AND PRAGMATICS. A Benchmark for Politeness.- Impoliteness Strategies.- Reconstructing ArgumentativeDiscourse with the Help of Speech Act Conditions.- Presupposition as Argumentative Reasoning.- Adpositions, Deixis, and Anti-Deixis.- Transparency and Context in Legal Communication: Pragmatics and Legal Interpretation.-Conversational Implicatures in Normative Texts.- PART III. DISCOURSE. Cultural Analysis of Discourse.- Transcription as Second-order Entextualizations: The Challenge of Heteroglossia.- Institutional Metadiscourse.- "Porque  in  Spanish  Oral  Narratives: Semantic porque, (meta) Pragmatic porque or Both?".- Argumentation and Connectives.- The Origin of Reason through an Outline of the Genealogy of Language in the Light of Homonymity, Analogy and Metaphor.- PART IV. THE PRAGMATICS OF UTTERANCE. Joint Utterances and the (Split-) Turn Taking Puzzle.- The Metapragmatics of Direct Utterances.- Exclamatives, Embedding and Grounded Belief.- An Assessment of the Negative and Positive Aspects of Stereotypes and the Derogatory and Non-Derogatory Uses of Slurs.- PART V. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES. A Critical Look at the Description of Speech Acts.-  The Pragmatics of 'can' in Singapore Mandarin.- Collectivism and Coercion: The Social Practice of 'sharing' and Distinctive uses of the Verb 'share' in Contemporary Singapore.- Emotional Feelings as a Form of Evidence: A Case Study of Visceral Evidentiality in Mormon Culture.- Rituals of Death as Staged Communicative Acts and Pragmemes.- Twenty-seven Views of Language Socialization.

"It successfully showcases interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary explorations of how pragmatics can provide new and renewed insights on linguistics knowledge, interpersonal interaction, cultural understanding and interpretation, and social progress. ... The editors must be credited for putting together such high-quality volume on pragmatics, characterized by thought-provoking theoretical underpinnings and sound empirical evidence. This book would be of great value for academics and graduate students looking for new trends and advances in pragmatic research." (Chaoqun Xie, Pragmatics and Society, Vol. 8 (4), 2017)

"Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society is a precious resource for anybody who studies language and society. As the authors note at the beginning of the book, societal pragmatics is only a drop in the ocean of language related studies. ... book shows that there are many aspects of pragmatic studies that are societally relevant. The volume makes a successful attempt in persuading the reader that societal pragmatics deserves to be admitted as a member of the linguistic club." (Valentina Cardella, Intercultural Pragmatics, Vol. 13 (4), November, 2016)