The roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical… read more
Linguists and other social scientists have employed many transcription conventions to exhibit the temporal interleaving of multi-speaker talk. The existence of many different systems, which are mutually incompatible, is evidence that representing spoken discourse remains problematic. This study… read more
Metonymy has been studied for at least two thousand years by rhetoricians, for two hundred years by historical semanticists, and for about ten years by cognitive linguists. However, they all have neglected one peculiar aspect of metonymy: its serial nature. Metonymic chains are either synchronic… read more
40 years ago Stephen Ullmann wrote that polysemy was the pivot of semantics. He was referring then to traditional synchronic and diachronic semantics. Nowadays, some 40 years later, polysemy has again become a central topic in cognitive semantics. This article traces the history of this important… read more
