Norrick Neal R. Norrick – författare

This volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the cross-disciplinary role and impact of Pragmatics in relation to several areas of study that it interfaces with. Pragmatics has contributed significant insights to a range of disciplines, just as these disciplines have contributed to it. Borrowing and cross-pollination between disciplines is natural, as well as necessary, but at times it seems important to take a pause and reflect on and problematize the role of pragmatics at these interfaces. In an age when disciplinary boundaries are being blurred, we need to investigate the relationship and interplay between pragmatics and related or complementary fields of enquiry with the goal of broadening and deepening our understanding of the contributions and boundaries of pragmatics as such. Here in twelve original contributions, internationally recognized authorities explore the current state and future trends in Pragmatics vis-a-vis adjacent disciplines.

This study represents a contribution to the theory of meaning in natural language. It proposes a semantic theory containing a set of regular relational principles. These principles enable semantic theory to describe connections from the lexical reading of a word to its figurative contextual reading, from one variant reading of a polysemous lexical item to another, from the idiomatic to its literal reading or to the literal reading(s) of one or more of its component lexical items. Semiotic theory provides a foundation by supplying principles defining motivated expression-content relations for signs generally. The author argues that regular semantic relational principles must dervive from such semiotic principles, to ensures the psychological reality and generality of the semantic principles.

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in adjacent disciplines such as linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, gender and translation studies. The volume effectively offers an overview of the range of phenomena falling in the broad category of ‘conversational humor’, and convincingly argues for the many different functions humor can fulfill, bypassing simplistic humor theories reducing humor to one function. All the articles draw on empirical material from different countries and cultures, comprising conversations among friends and family, talk in workplace situations, humor in educational settings, and experimental approaches to humor in interaction. The book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of humor studies, pragmatics and (socio-)linguistics.