Call for Papers

Issue 23
The Experimental Turn in Philosophical Pragmatics
Editors: Francesca Ervas (University of Cagliari), Elisabetta Gola (University of Cagliari)

Modern pragmatics has been defined as “philosophical”, not only because its main representative authors, such as Grice and Austin, were philosophers of ordinary language, but also because it has used linguistic and philosophical analysis as a method to give an explanation of communicative features of language. However, in the last years, plenty of studies have brought classical pragmatic theories in front of the tribunal of experience, to test their power of explanation and prediction. The result has been the growth of a flourishing interdiscipline, called “Experimental Pragmatics”, which claims thatunderstanding an utterance requires the access to the speaker’s intention in specific contexts and uses experimental techniques coming from psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences and psychology to bring to light the comprehension mechanisms of non-literal and figurative language. The objective of this issue is to discuss the main empirical results of Experimental Pragmatics and to explore its theoretical influence on “philosophical” pragmatics in its most important research subjects, such as figures of speech, implicatures, etc. How and to what extent do experimental method and conceptual analysis interact in pragmatics? Which consequences does this experimental turn have for theorizing in pragmatics?

This issue of Humana.Mente welcomes contributions addressing these and related themes, including:

Presuppositions vs. Implications
Lexical Disambiguation and Reference Resolution
The Pragmatics of Discourse
Evidence of the Explicit/Implicit
Distinction Processing of Implicatures
Metaphor Understanding
How Metonymy works
Production and Perception of Jokes and Humor
Irony Comprehension

Papers should be submitted in blind review format. Please omit any self-identifying information within the abstract and body of the paper. Furthermore, we invite to submit reviews of recent books (published after 2009), and commentaries of articles and books (also published before 2009) that could be particularly interesting for the topics analysed in this Issue.

Paper and review submissions should adhere to the following guidelines:
(1) Submissions should be sent via email to francesca.ervas@gmail.com and egola@unica.it
(2) Languages: English

Deadline for submissions: May 2nd, 2012.
Notification of acceptance: August 1st, 2012
Final version due: October 1, 2012