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Article published In: Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska and Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics 33:3] 2023
► pp. 343–367

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Paralanguage and ad hoc concepts

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de Sevilla
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 31 October 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21059.pad
Abstract
Ad hoc concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel adjustment. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered by various linguistic elements. These include evaluative morphemes, lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words, and stylistic resources like repetition or rewording. This paper argues that paralanguage may fulfil a similar enacting function and finetune the conceptual representations arising from content words on the grounds of idiosyncratic, context-dependent features or shades, as well as propositional and non-propositional information about the speaker’s psychological states. However, the paper restricts this function to expressive interjections, prosodic inputs like pitch, contrastive stress and pace or tempo, and gestural inputs such as language-like gestures, pantomimes and emblems. Conative interjections, intonation and proper gesticulation would be excluded from contributing to lexical pragmatic processes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Paralanguage: A brief overview
    • 2.1Interjections
    • 2.2Prosody
    • 2.3Kinesics
  • 3.Paralanguage in relevance-theoretic pragmatics
  • 4.Concepts and ad hoc concepts
  • 5.Paralinguistic markers of ad hoc concepts
    • 5.1Interjections
    • 5.2Prosodic/suprasegmental markers
    • 5.3Gestural markers
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (99)
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