This chapter introduces use theories of meaning, originating in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and further developed by numerous authors over the following decades. According to use theories, the meaning or meaningfulness of an expression consists in or is constituted by its use. The chapter argues that philosophical attention shifted too quickly towards other kinds of meaning theories, overlooking the potential of use-based approaches.A particularly fruitful version, inferentialism, was developed by Wilfrid Sellars. After outlining the basic intuition behind use theories, the chapter focuses on Sellars’s functional theory of meaning. This theory is explained through five central premises: (i) meaning is not a simple (worldly) relation between an expression and an object; (ii) meaning is use; (iii) meaning is a functional role; (iv) abstract notions are distributive singular terms; and (v) the rules governing use are semantically constitutive.

The chapter demonstrates the significance of Natural Linguistics from its origins to the latest achievements in the field of first language acquisition. NL is a functionalist framework which validates its claims via sources of external evidence. Language development in a child lies in the heart of the theory. The chapter offers an insight into phonological, morphological, syntactic, discourse, and pragmatic development. First, the strong and weak versions of the acquisition hypothesis are presented. Further, studies of phonological acquisition are reported: the crosslinguistic pre- and proto-morphology/phonology project, case studies of early phonological development, as well as phonotactic development from a crosslinguistic perspective. This is followed by a review of representative research in the morphological domain: the development of grammatical morphology, the role of morphological richness, productivity, and frequency, socio-economic status, the acquisition of extragrammatical morphology, marginal morphology, and morphonotactics. We briefly report on the development of syntax, text, and discourse as well as pragmatics, and end with conclusions and an outlook for future studies.

Chapter 4 addresses the data to be analyzed and "lines of vision" connecting it to relevant contexts. It investigates the ideological relevancies of the appeals' social, political, historical, linguistic and geographical contexts. While the geographical context of the discourses is the world, the appeals are directed at only 18 countries, two US States, and a corporation, seeking redress for human rights violations such as the denial of life-saving abortion, suppression of freedom of expression, torture and the death penalty, rights based on international declarations and laws. The analysis requires that Verschueren's broad guidelines be complemented and implemented by a range of discourse analytic apparatuses: speech act theory; Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics; contextualization cues to spatial and temporal ordering; utterers’ and interpreters’ participant roles; positioning theory; theories of argumentation, justification, and epistemic vigilance; rhetorical move and step analysis; organizational discourse studies; intertextuality indicators; and detailed discussion of linguistic devices, notably problems in identifying deictic referents, especially of personal pronouns.

Previous discussions of pointing have largely evaded a central question: How is an act of pointing recognized as communicative in the first place? Here it is argued – building on classic and recent work in pragmatics – that pointing is designed to deviate minimally from mere attending. This basic design is found throughout the diverse universe of human pointing, from the most familiar, conventional forms to the most exotic and ad hoc, and may even extend to cases of pointing in nonhuman animals. Further, the chapter shows that this framework lights up promising avenues for further research on the interpretation of pointing, as well as on the emergence of pointing on developmental, cultural, and evolutionary timescales.

This chapter addresses the nature of the semantic component and its role in the second language (L2) acquisition of meaning, considering a range of properties: quantification, polarity items, articles, clefted interrogatives and referential dependency relations. It discusses guidance by preexisting conceptual components including conceptual representations and inferential processes, such as scalar inferences, in various form-meaning mappings such as lexical selection and structural interpretation. It connects L2 semantic development with first language (L1) transfer, Universal Grammar-guidance overcoming poverty of the stimulus, as well as feature reassembly in developing new lexico-grammatical representations for the L2. It highlights the role of activation thresholds for developing neurofunctional subsystems mapping syntax-semantic features to forms in L2 input processing. An L2 neurofunctional subsystem overlapping with the L1 system accounts for micro-level L1 effects together with guided L2 semantic development. The chapter thus overviews the findings of L2 semantic research suggestive of guidance by an implicit neurofunctional system for the L2. It addresses both robustness and vulnerability in aspects of L2 interpretation and highlights the vital role played by the conceptual structure component and aspects of memory in many aspects of L2 interpretive behavior.

An introduction to pragmatics, covering deixis, direct and indirect speech, speech acts, performative verbs, Gricean principles of conversation, and presupposition.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

In Chapter 1, we set the scene by examining the dynamics of online offensive language. We examine offensive language across a spectrum, ranging from non-polite expressions to grossly offensive (potentially illegal) speech. We also explore the conceptual links between offensive language and related notions such as impoliteness, hate speech and language aggression. Importantly, this chapter focuses on why understanding offensive language is, above all, a concern best addressed by linguists. To achieve this, we discuss the similarities and differences between grossly offensive and (im)polite language. We specifically focus on pragmatic concepts such as locution, illocution and perlocution to explain how they operate at both ends of the spectrum. Finally, we address the challenges of detecting offensive language in computational approaches to combating online hate, emphasising the vital role of linguistic contributions.

This chapter summarises the key findings of the book on offensive language online, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of those targeted. It outlines the book’s multi-layered approach, which integrates corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The chapter also explores future directions for research, including platform-specific variations, sociolinguistic changes and the value of interdisciplinary methodologies for understanding and addressing offensive language in digital spaces.

Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

This second chapter continues laying the groundwork for the empirical study of linguistic meaning. Two interlocking classifications of linguistic expressions in terms of their semantic properties are employed. The first of these is the semiotic classification introduced in Section 1.2, which is extended and elaborated in the present chapter. Utterances and their constituents are highly complex in semiotic terms, and their makeup can vary enormously. The second classification is the division of the total meaning of utterances into pragmatic, compositional, and lexical components, which was also already introduced in Chapter 1. This architecture of levels or layers of meaning is itself strongly grounded in semiotic properties. Section 2.2 discusses the relation between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, and Section 2.3 focuses on the relation between lexical meaning and sentence meaning. At the end of this chapter, the reader should have a mental map of the “topography” of the study of linguistic meaning. That is, they should have a working understanding of the different kinds of expressions involved and how and why they differ in terms of the methods required for their study.

Chapter 2 provides a thorough definition of “language” and a broad overview of the field of linguistics and its primary subfields.

This chapter is intended for readers who have not had any experience of linguistics and provides the necessary background for studying the history of English. It introduces the nature and structure of language in general, but with an emphasis on English. There are sections on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics, and pragmatics. The terminology required for the study of language is defined and explained throughout. To illustrate historical change in English, the chapter concludes with the comparison and discussion of extracts from translations of the Bible going back from the twentieth to the eleventh centuries.