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The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and implications
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela Downing
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 247] 2014
► pp. 209–222

‘Pragmatic punting’ and prosody

Evidence from corpora

ORCID logo | Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain

The aim of this chapter is to present the notion of “pragmatic punting” as the cognitive process that confirms that communication in interaction has achieved its goal. The theoretical tenets of this mechanism are based on the principles of communicative context and on the Dynamic Model of Meaning. The study compares the prosodic patterns of pragmatic markers in the London-Lund Corpus and in the LINDSEI Corpus (the Spanish section) in order to describe the prototypical realization of pragmatic punting in native and non-native English conversation respectively. The results show the disparity in the use of pragmatic punting between both groups of speakers. The conclusions indicate that the improvement of the non-natives’ awareness of the intonation patterns and distribution of pragmatic markers would contribute to the improvement of their communicative competence.

Published online: 16 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.247.11rom
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The corpora

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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Deng, Delin, Fenqi Wang & Ratree Wayland
2023. The pitch contour of the French discourse markerdonc: A corpus-based study using generalized additive mixed modeling. Journal of French Language Studies 33:3 ► pp. 324 ff. DOI logo
Romero-Trillo, Jesús
2015. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’…, you know?. Pragmatics and Society 6:1 ► pp. 117 ff. DOI logo

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