Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside...

An accessible guide to the linguistic semantics of adjectives, adverbs, gradability, vagueness, comparatives, and modification more generally.

The book is an investigation of the semantics of counting and measuring, and its connection to the mass/count distinction from a theoretical and crosslinguistic perspective.

An accessible introduction to the pragmatics of irony that presents the main theoretical approaches and central discussions of the analysis of ironic communication.

Explains the phenomena, theoretical debates, experiments and historical development of experimental pragmatics, which investigates how utterances communicate a speaker's intended meaning.

The book is an investigation of the semantics of numericals, counting and measuring, and its connection to the mass/count distinction from a theoretical and crosslinguistic perspective. It reviews some recent major linguistic results in these topics, and presents the author's new research including in-depth case studies of a number of typologically unrelated languages.

Ideal for advanced students and individual researchers in semantics and pragmatics, as well as related fields such as philosophy. It provides a non-specialized audience with the understanding of what irony is and its numerous manifestations. To specialized readers, its analysis of irony offers a deeper understanding and clarification of this form of human communication.