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Grice’s concern with utterance meaning was to define criteria that serve to draw a line between semantics and pragmatics. A class of words that have traditionally posed a challenge to his cause is sentence connectives. While Grice put a number of connectives under his microscope, his discussion of causal connectives basically focused on ‘therefore’ rather than other widely applied causal connectives—for instance ‘because’. Could Grice’s framework of analysis support an adequate treatment of the connective in question? In pursuit of an answer to this question, the aim of this paper is to restore proper regard for a meaning description of prototypical causal meaning, as this is encoded in because within the Gricean model; at the same time, the paper attempts to provide feedback on the sustainability of the model. It ultimately concludes that, unlike ‘therefore’, ‘because’ cannot be treated as a case of conventional implicature.

This study examines the use of language in two selected Nigerian libel cases: A. A. versus W. O. (1990) and C. O. & A. versus C. G. A. (2014). The study employs a pragmatic analysis to find out the indirect contextual meanings embedded in the defamatory texts in the selected libel cases. For its theoretical bases, the study leans towards Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, Austin’s speech acts theory, and Grice’s cooperative principle in conversation. It reveals that the defendants attacked the plaintiffs’ positive face and their own (the defendants’) negative face by not paying attention to politeness and cooperative principles in conversation when performing face-threatening acts. The face-threatening acts of the defendants which are classified as warnings, insults, accusations, and complaints express their negative assessment of the plaintiffs’ positive face. Our study thus concludes by suggesting that politeness strategies such as bald on-record, and off-record (indirect) as well as maxims of quality, quantity and relation should be considered when performing inevitable face-threatening acts to avoid liabilities in libel cases.

The study investigated the acquisition route of mass generics and the involvement of non-facilitative transfer in the interlanguage of L1 Moroccan Arabic-L2 French adults learning L3 English. Three learner groups and one of English native speakers completed a context-based acceptability judgment task. The results indicated that the pre-intermediate L3 learners initially transferred prior generic knowledge, incorrectly using definite nouns to express mass genericity. In a second developmental stage, the intermediate L3 learners allowed generic bare nouns interchangeably with transferred definite nouns. The data of the early developmental stages disconfirm the Cumulative Enhancement Model’s claim that non-facilitative prior knowledge remains neutral in L3 grammar construction. However, in the advanced stage, the L3 learners attained nativelike accuracy and used exclusively bare nouns to express mass genericity.

In order to understand the presence of the Portuguese language in Timor-Leste, three referenced historical moments must be considered: (1) originally, a colonization and cultural subjugation language—from early XVI century until 1974; (2) then, a resistance and national unity language—after Indonesian forces occupied the country (1975-1999); and (3) currently, being an official language in the areas of administration and education—the independent República Democrática de Timor-Leste would formally emerge in 2002 with two official languages (Tetum and Portuguese). Focusing on the present-day postcolonial context, this paper intends to explore its variation and change from two angles. On the one hand, we argue that present day Portuguese language carries different variations which can be classified on a continuum from Standard Portuguese to creole-like structures. On the other hand, a different set of changes on language use and education is discussed: the presence of students’ mother tongues in the educational system used to share space with the other co-official language, and to handle the linguistic pressure of the two working languages—English and Indonesian. Therefore, the goal is to present an overview, simultaneously linguistic and extra-linguistic, of Portuguese language variation and change in postcolonial Timor-Leste.

The web is argued to be a vast, but disorganized resource for language teaching and learning. This paper will address this claim by investigating whether and how a commercial search engine such as Google and the Leeds web concordancer can be valid language sources in ESL classes. In particular, it will explore if second language (L2) learners' mistakes and challenging constructs can be tackled via the web as corpus. In this way, L2 students may become independent learners, dispel linguistic doubts and improve collocational knowledge. After highlighting research techniques and explaining the basic search syntax, this paper will present a pilot lesson with a secondary school language teacher, aimed at introducing the web as a language resource. The findings of the paper will highlight that the web as corpus can be integrated in ESL classes, provided that teachers acquire basic corpus analysis knowledge.

Even some of the biggest names in pragmatics and politeness oftentimes confuse social etiquette with linguistic politeness. I was recently invited to examine a PhD thesis at a famous university in New Zealand, and it came to me as a shock to realize that neither the PhD candidate nor her thesis supervisors had noticed the difference between these two concepts. Since a clear understanding of rudimentary concepts is fundamental to any research in any field of science, and pragmatics and politeness are not exceptions, this paper aims at putting linguistic politeness in its right frame. I will first review the historical development of modern pragmatics from an Archimedean point; then, I will set politeness theory in its right place inside pragmatics. Finally, I will draw a line between social etiquette and linguistic politeness and argue that junior (and some senior) researchers working on politeness need to be very careful not to confuse the two, or their claims are doomed to be invalid.

Review of the book Idiomatic mastery in a first and second language, by Monica Karlsson

Review of the book Idiomatic mastery in a first and second language, by Monica Karlsson