Some aspects of pragmatics

Part of current pragmatics research aims at opening up new avenues of inquiry by revisiting and revising some of its central topics and keywords, such as implicature, explicature, truth, varieties of meaning, meaning inference, relevance, politeness, and face. This review article attempts to contribute to this endeavor by making some comments on and beyond Kecskes and Horn’s (2007) Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects. With reference to certain Chinese linguistic and interactional actualities, this paper argues, among other things, that a speaker who conveys some truth to a hearer does not necessarily mean that the speaker is committed to that truth, that people with little social power may also manipulate the power of words in actual interaction, and that when it comes to making politeness evaluations, what one does may turn out to be more important and decisive than what one says.