Scott Saft

List of John Benjamins publications in which Scott Saft is involved.

Title

Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”

Edited by Yoko Fujii, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno

Emancipatory Pragmatics represents a unique contribution to the field of pragmatics. Most research in the field has focused on English and other Western languages, but the study of Japanese and other non-Western languages, as is done in this volume, has led to a broader understanding of language… read more

[Culture and Language Use, 24] 2025. xiv, 384 pp. | open access

Articles (5) | Order by:

Saft, Scott 2025 Emancipatory Pragmatics and the application of the concept of ba to an indigenous language and culture: The case of Hawaiian Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”, Fujii, Yoko, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno (eds.), pp. 325–346 | Chapter

This chapter applies ba and ba theory to the Hawaiian language to demonstrate that ba theory, unlike western approaches to context, has the potential to appreciate the deeply intimate relationship between people and land in a Hawaiian cultural perspective. By examining Hawaiian data from two… read more

Saft, Scott and William F. Hanks 2025 Introduction Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”, Fujii, Yoko, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno (eds.), pp. 1–33 | Chapter

This Introduction is divided into two parts. The first part by Scott Saft explicates Emancipatory Pragmatics and provides a brief summary of all of the contributions within this volume. The second, by William F. Hanks, offers a detailed introduction to and discussion of the conceptualization of… read more

Saft, Scott 2021 Review of Berman (2019): Talking like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands Pragmatics and Society 12:1, pp. 146–150 | Review

Saft, Scott, Gabriel Tebow and Ronald Santos 2018 Hawaiʻi Creole in the public domain: Humor, emphasis, and heteroglossic language practice in university commencement speeches Pragmatics 28:3, pp. 417–438 | Article

In light of a belief that Hawaiʻi Creole (HC) is mostly inappropriate in public domains of society, this study examines how it was employed in two university commencement speeches by a local politician in Hawaiʻi. The analysis adopts the perspective of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981) in order to… read more

Saft, Scott 2001 Displays of concession in university faculty meetings: Culture and interaction in Japanese Pragmatics 11:3, pp. 223–262 | Article

In light of the tendency in studies of Japanese discourse and communication to account for patterns of social interaction in terms of cultural concepts such as wa (“harmony”), omoiyari (“empathy”), and enryo (“restraint”), this report sets out to demonstrate how much of an endogenously produced,… read more