Pragmatics of Semantically-Restricted Domains, the second volume of
Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, edited by Iwona
Witczak-Plisiecka, gathers papers which partly complement and develop
the first volume, Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Most of the texts collected in
this book, representative of advanced independent research and that of
an informed exercise in the application of a pragmatic framework, result
from the Fourth Symposium on New Developments in Linguistic Pragmatics,
organized at the University of Lodz, Poland, in May 2008. Accepting the
inevitable failure of any attempt to pose a strict and clear-cut
division between the research area of semantics and that of pragmatics,
the volume focuses on pragmatics-oriented analyses of data which are
best described as semantically limited. While Volume One concentrated on
speech as a type of action, the present volume, without denying the
inherently actional nature of language use, concentrates on limited
contexts. Pragmatic phenomena in semantically-restricted domains are
addressed from a variety of both theoretical and applied perspectives.
The book is divided in three parts. Part One, Pragmatics, Politics and
Ideology, gathers seven papers centered on issues pertaining to
political linguistics. In Part Two, The Pragmatics of Humour, Power and
the Media, there are eight papers which explore issues of politeness and
modesty, pragmatic aspects of mediated and gendered discourse, or
dynamicity of power relation in interaction. Part Three, Focus on
Textual Properties, concentrates on text, excluding political discourse.
It integrates discussions of equivalence and specialized translation,
intertextual properties and pragmatically-motivated lexical choices in
business communication, in law, and in science.
