Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgmenttasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task andcontextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both aproduction and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context.The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicativesetting, when the quantifier occurs in unembedded positions as well as embedded positions.Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterancescan be inferred. It incorporates a game–theoretic design, including a precise modelto predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embeddedand unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitiveprinciples which describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a productionstrategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success andshorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions.Keywords: scalar implicature, embedded implicature, experimental pragmatics, game–theoreticpragmatics.

Distinct neural correlates for pragmatic and semantic meaning processing: An event-related potential investigation of scalar implicature processing using picture-sentence verification

To assess scientific progress from global to author levels, a large body of bibliometric studies could be found in many fields but relatively scarcer in the realm of language and linguistic studies, especially at a journal level. Motivated by the commitment and competence shown by the Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, this study presents its bibliometric portrait as captured by two pieces of software, Publish or Perish and VoSviewer.  from the Microsoft Academic, one of the global abstract and citation databases. The descriptive and network analyses of the journal’s bibliometric data revealed the patterns of publication, citation, authorship, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling from 2005 to 2019. The first 15 publication years have seen 482 articles by 552 authors from 142 organizations of which Turkish ones were in the majority contributing to 1,291 total citations along with regional and global indexations including in Scopus, one of the largest bibliographic databases. Evolving around the unity of psychology, linguistics, and education/ pedagogy viewed from different perspectives, the journal has been a scholarly outlet for not only local but also global issues in the realm of language and linguistics. The next 15-publication years will see the journal’s growth in “internationality” in terms of authorship due to the combination of increased annual publication and recent international indexation. Â

This article firstly discusses the origin, content and main theories of pragmatics, namely, speech act theory and conversational implicature theory and relevance theory and then puts forward that the pragmatic knowledge should be stressed in college English teaching in order to deepen the students’ pragmatic awareness and avoid the occurrence of pragmatic errors, thus improving the students’ pragmatic competence. After the analysis of the three pragmatic theories on basis of teaching cases, it is found that pragmatics theory has a guiding significance to college English teaching practice and introducing the relevant theories of pragmatics in college English teaching can improve the learning efficiency and significantly enhance the students’ discourse understanding and communication skills. Keywords—Pragmatics; Speech act theory; Conversational implicature theory; Relevance theory

Language is a tool for instruction and expressing perspectives (Turetsky et al, 2021). This study aimed to explore the ideologies navigated through translanguaging in Pakistani institutions where English Language instruction is provided as an extra language (EAL). Following an exploratory sequential mixed method design, a survey of 31 items was administered to the language teachers n=100 after conducting non-participant observations of 480 minutes. For this study, the Ideological Model of Literacy (Curiel and Ponzio, 2021) was chosen as the conceptual framework. Observations revealed the involuntary navigation of primarily seven ideologies in the Pakistani classrooms. Quantitative data were analysed through SPSS 20.0, revealing that political ideologies and world Englishes ideologies secured the lowest average score of 2.34. However, racio-linguistic and English-only ideologies were averaged as 3.34. The results indicated that, in contrast, both multilingual ideologies and imperialistic ideologies had a higher mean score of 4.5. This study highlighted learners’ awareness of how their EAL instructors can navigate language ideologies through Translanguaging. References Aghai, L., Sayer, P., & Vercellotti, M. L. (2020). Effects of teachers’ language ideologies on language learners’ translanguaging practices in an intensive English program. In Envisioning TESOL through a translanguaging lens: Global perspectives (pp. 345–362). Agwu Udu, D., Nmadu, J., Uwaleke, C. C., Anudu, A. P., Chukwunonso Okechineke, B., Attamah, P. C., ... & Ogonna, O. C. (2022). Innovative pedagogy and improvement of students’ knowledge retention in science education: Learning activity package instructional approach. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 30(3). Ali, I., Azim, M. U., & Rehman, A. U. (2024). Translanguaging as a tool to decolonise English language teaching in Pakistan: Opportunities and challenges. Pakistan Social Sciences Review, 8(1), 246–254. Al-Mutairi, M. A. (2020). Kachru’s three concentric circles model of English language: An overview of criticism & the place of Kuwait in it. English Language Teaching, 13(1), 85–88. Alsuwayhiri, M. M. (2024). The use of translation in English for specific academic purposes classes in Saudi Arabia (Doctoral dissertation, University of Glasgow). Atta, A. (2024). Prospective prognostication: An examination of translanguaging in Pakistan’s educational landscape through the lens of teachers’ and students’ perceptions. Language Teaching Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688241259640 Cárdenas Curiel, L., & Ponzio, C. M. (2021). Imagining multimodal and translanguaging possibilities for authentic cultural writing experiences. Journal of Multilingual Education Research, 11(1), 6. Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2021). Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge University Press. Charalambous, P., Charalambous, C., & Zembylas, M. (2016). Troubling Translanguaging: Language ideologies, superdiversity and interethnic conflict. Applied Linguistics Review, 7(3), 327–352. Cushing, I. (2023). “Miss, can you speak English?”: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language oppression in initial teacher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 44(5), 896–911. Fang, F., Jiang, L., & Yang, J. (2023). To impart knowledge or to adhere to policy: Unpacking language ideologies and practices in Chinese EMI courses through a translanguaging lens. Language Teaching Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688231183771 Farahani, M. F., & Maleki, M. (2014). A survey on tendency toward curriculum ideologies among academic board members in educational sciences faculties – Tehran 2010–11. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 116, 2392–2396. Galloway, N., & Ruegg, R. (2020). The provision of student support on English medium instruction programmes in Japan and China. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 45, 100846. Henry, J. (2023). “Say a sentence”: Drawing an interactional link between organisations, language ideologies, and coloniality. Signs and Society, 11(1), 93–114. Hopf, A. (2023). Urdu language ideologies and Pakistani identity. In Language ideologies and the vernacular in colonial and postcolonial South Asia (pp. 34–56). Routledge India. Iversen, J. Y. (2021). Negotiating language ideologies: Pre-service teachers’ perspectives on multilingual practices in mainstream education. International Journal of Multilingualism, 18(3), 421–434. Kachru, B. B. (1996, November). Opening borders with world Englishes: Theory in the classroom. In On JALT96: Crossing borders. The proceedings of the 23rd annual JALT international conference on language teaching/learning, Hiroshima, Japan (pp. 10–20). Khan, I. U., Rahman, G., & Hamid, A. (2021). Poststructuralist perspectives on language and identity: Implications for English language teaching research in Pakistan. SJESR, 4(1), 257–267. Koyama, J., & Kasper, J. (2022). Transworlding and translanguaging: Negotiating and resisting monoglossic language ideologies, policies, and pedagogies. Linguistics and Education, 70, 101010. Mazak, C. M., & Herbas-Donoso, C. (2014). Translanguaging practices and language ideologies in Puerto Rican university science education. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 11(1), 27–49. Nadarajan, K., Abdullah, A. H., Alhassora, N. S. A., Ibrahim, N. H., Surif, J., Ali, D. F., ... & Hamzah, M. H. (2022). The effectiveness of a technology-based isometrical transformation flipped classroom learning strategy in improving students’ higher order thinking skills. IEEE Access, 11, 4155–4172. Naheed, M., Azim, M. U., Islam, M., & Imdad, K. (2024). Investigating the necessity of translanguaging in EFL classroom at university level: Perspective of teachers and students. Harf-o-Sukhan, 8(1), 474–487. Paulsrud, B., & Rosén, J. (2020). Translanguaging and language ideologies in education: Northern and Southern perspectives. In Handbook of the changing world language map (pp. 3533–3547). Sahan, K., Rose, H., Paulsrud, B., Tian, Z., & Toth, J. (2021). Problematising the E in EMI: Translanguaging as a pedagogic alternative to English-only hegemony in university contexts. In English-medium instruction and translanguaging (pp. 1–14). Sahar, Y., & Shahbaz, M. (2023). Scope of e-portfolio-based assessment tool: Perceptions and practices of ELT practitioners in Pakistan. International Journal of Innovation in Teaching and Learning (IJITL), 9(1), 75–90. Sahar, Y., Ali, M., & Hussain, M. S. (2024). Emergent bilingual learners’ target language development: A comparison between government policies and school practices. International Journal of Innovation in Teaching and Learning (IJITL), 10(1), 83–98. Strijker, D., Bosworth, G., & Bouter, G. (2020). Research methods in rural studies: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Journal of Rural Studies, 78, 262–270. Syed, H. (2022). “I make my students’ assignments bleed with red circles”: An autoethnography of translanguaging in higher education in Pakistan. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42, 119–126. Syed, H. (2024). Unravelling the deficit ideologies in English language education in Pakistan: A decolonial perspective. TESOL Journal, e828. Turetsky, K. M., Sinclair, S., Starck, J. G., & Shelton, J. N. (2021). Beyond students: How teacher psychology shapes educational inequality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(8), 697–709. Uysal, H., & Sah, P. K. (2024). Language ideologies and language teaching in the global world: An introduction to the special issue. International Journal of Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069241240964 Wei, L., & García, O. (2022). Not a first language but one repertoire: Translanguaging as a decolonising project. RELC Journal, 53(2), 313–324.

© The Author(s) 2020. Interactional adjustment refers to people’s tendency to adjust, or adapt, their communication behavior in social interactions. In recent years, three distinctive approaches to this topic that have featured prominently in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology are communication accommodation theory (CAT), language style matching (LSM), and discursive psychology using conversation analysis (DPCA). In this article, we provide a review of these three approaches, highlighting what defines and distinguishes them, as well as what insights into interactional adjustment each offers. We draw out the connections and points of tensions between these approaches; in so doing, we identify future directions for research on interactional adjustment as a fundamental aspect of human communication, and in the study of language and social psychology.

Pragmatics – the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say – is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

Pragmatics – the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say – is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

Pragmatics – the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say – is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

Pragmatics – the study of language in context, and of how we understand what other people say – is a core subject in English language, linguistics, and communication studies. This textbook introduces the key topics in this fast-moving field, including metaphor, irony, politeness, disambiguation, and reference assignment. It walks the reader through the essential theories in pragmatics, including Grice, relevance theory, speech act theory, and politeness theory. Each chapter includes a range of illustrative examples, guiding readers from the basic principles to a thorough understanding of the topics. A dedicated chapter examines how research is conducted in pragmatics, providing students with resources and ideas for developing their own projects. Featuring exercises, a comprehensive glossary, and suggestions for further reading, this book is accessible to beginner undergraduates, including those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. It is an essential resource for courses in English language, English studies, and linguistics.

Perhaps more than most areas of cognitive psychology, the study of human judgment and decision-making relies heavily on experimental tasks communicated through written descriptions that convey numeric quantifiers as primary sources of information. Subjects in such studies usually are required to use such information to make choices, indicate preferences, or offer judgments. These responses are compared to normative benchmarks, resulting in the researchers drawing conclusions about the quality, coherence, or rationality of human judgment and decision-making (Arrow, 1982; Tversky and Kahneman, 1986; Stanovich and West, 2000). Most of this body of research has paid little attention (a) to how subjects interpret numeric information conveyed in writing and (b) to how those interpretations are influenced by context (Mandel and Vartanian, 2011; Teigen, in press). More often than not, researchers simply assume that subjects will interpret numeric quantities conveyed in experimental tasks as exact values, and also that subjects should interpret expressed numbers as precise quantities. Yet it is uncontroversial in linguistics that numeric quantifiers may be treated as exact or approximate values, and where their interpretations are approximate, they may be treated as one-sided (e.g., at least, which is lower bounded, or at most, which is upper bounded) or two-sided (e.g., roughly or about). Linguistic accounts of numeric quantifiers (e.g., Horn, 1989; Carston, 1998; Levinson, 2000; Geurts, 2006; Breheny, 2008) do not support the normative claim (or assumption) that a precise “bilateral” reading of such quantifiers consistent with exactly is the proper reading. Although linguistic accounts differ in what they posit as possible semantic defaults, even those proposing a bilateral semantics, such as Breheny (2008), specify pathways for pragmatically derived unilateral interpretations, such as interpreting a numeric quantifier, x, as at least x or at most x. More generally, the degree to which decision researchers seem confident in defining the meaning of linguistic terms for others runs counter to a fundamental idea in the philosophy of language, which holds that the meanings of words are definable only through their actual use in language (e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953; Austin, 1979). It also runs counter to psycholinguistic evidence indicating that even 5-year olds understand that numeric quantifiers should be interpreted as “at least” in some contexts (Musolino, 2004). And it runs counter to work in experimental pragmatics indicating that people develop context-sensitive scalar implicatures as they develop. For instance, they come to understand that although some logically entails all, it usually pragmatically excludes all because it would be infelicitous to use some if one meant all (Moxey and Sanford, 2000; Noveck, 2001; Noveck and Reboul, 2008).

In order to create a new teacher-student relationship and raise students' politeness awareness and pragmatic competence in cross-cultural communication, this paper investigated and analyzed students' face wants and English teachers' awareness of students' face want in their classroom feedback.The main data-gathering instruments are MP3-recording, non-participant observation, follow-up structured-interviews and closed-questionnaires.The results reveal that 60.6% of the teacher participants are frequently aware of their students' face wants, and 27.2% of them are sometimes, while the other teachers seldom or never consider the students' face want.Because of being influenced by the Chinese traditional culture in which teachers are superiors, not thoroughly understanding English Curriculum Standard which calls for human concern, and knowing a little about pragmatic theories, some Chinese English teachers ignore students' face want.Suggestions on how to save students' face want are put forward.

<p>As an introduction to the special issue, this paper presents an overview of previous corpus linguistic work in the field of language and sexuality and discusses the compatibility of corpus linguistic methodology with queer linguistics as a central theoretical approach in language and sexuality studies. The discussion is structured around five prototypical aspects of corpus linguistics that may be deemed problematic from a poststructuralist, queer linguistic perspective: quantification and associated notions of objectivity, reliance on linguistic forms and formal presence, concentration on highly frequent features, reliance on categories, and highlighting of differences. It is argued that none of these aspects rules out an application of corpus linguistic techniques within queer theoretically informed linguistic work per se and that it is rather the way these techniques are employed that can be seen as more or less compatible with queer linguistics. To complement the theoretical discussion, a collocation analysis of sexual descriptive adjectives in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is conducted in an attempt to address some of the issues raised. The concluding section makes suggestions for future research.<br>\nKeywords: corpus linguistics, language and sexuality, queer linguistics, sexual descriptive adjectives, methodology, collocation</p>

If a speaker tells us that “some guests were late to the party,” we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement (“some and possibly all”) is strengthened pragmatically (to “some and not all”), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for young children, but recent work suggests that this mismatch may stem from issues in understanding the relationship between lexical items such as “some” and “all” rather than broader pragmatic deficits. We tested children’s ability to make nonquantificational pragmatic inferences by constructing contextually derived “ad-hoc” implicatures, using sets of pictures with contrasting features. We found that 4-year-olds and some 3-year-olds were able to make implicatures successfully using these displays. Hence, apparent failures in scalar implicature are likely due to difficulties specific to the constructions and tasks used in previous work; these difficulties may have masked aspects of children’s underlying pragmatic competence.

This study reviews the development of pragmatic competence within digital communication platforms, aiming to synthesize evidence from recent literature and assess both opportunities and challenges. The review employs a systematic methodology, drawing from databases including JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Wiley Online Library, and applying inclusion criteria covering studies published between 2015 and 2024. The findings highlight five central themes: authenticity and context, intercultural diversity, personalization and adaptivity, technological barriers and access gaps, and the potential of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, gaming, and virtual reality. Evidence shows that authentic digital contexts and intercultural exchanges foster pragmatic awareness, while adaptive learning technologies enhance individualized instruction. However, significant barriers persist, including infrastructural inequalities, socio-economic disparities, and digital literacy gaps that constrain equitable access to pragmatic learning. Comparative studies suggest that learners in technologically advanced regions benefit more readily from these innovations than those in developing contexts. The discussion links these findings to pragmatic theory, emphasizing the role of systemic factors such as policy and infrastructure, and identifies the need for inclusive strategies to ensure equal opportunities. Recommendations include the development of longitudinal and cross-cultural research, as well as practical integration of advanced technologies into mainstream education. Overall, the study underscores the urgent need for combined strategies that integrate authenticity, intercultural awareness, personalization, and technological innovation to enhance pragmatic competence in digital communication.