Marina Terkourafi
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 146537 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Marina Terkourafi |
| NOMBRES | Marina |
| APELLIDO | Terkourafi |
| FIRMA | TERKOURAFI M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4400-9336 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 285 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The meanings of social meaning
In its most inclusive, "social meaning" is an umbrella term for inferences about the speaker, irrespective of how these inferences arise, are represented, or change over time/place. However, once these differences are heeded, what various authors have called "social meaning" turns out to share little beyond this general definition. An important difference stems from the observation that, while for Labov truth-conditional equivalence provided the …
Hearer’s Meaning 2.0
In a recent Journal of Pragmatics paper, Li and Xie (2025) present a critique of Hansen and Terkourafi’s (2023) model of Hearer’s Meaning. The present paper replies to their critique. Unlike Li & Xie, who defend speaker intentions as ultimately determining meaning, we do not see such intentions as playing an independent role in utterance comprehension. Rather, considering intentions to be private mental states, we view hearer assumptions about th…
How to ask (im)politely
Approaching requests in historical
Contrasting the Pragmatics of Spanishes
This special issue explores contrastive pragmatics with a focus on Spanish in comparison with other languages and varieties. The collection assembles studies comparing Spanish with Chinese, Greek, English, French, and Italian, as well as investigations of pragmatic variation across different varieties of Spanish. The contributions examine a diverse range of pragmatic phenomena, including humour, impoliteness, aggression, mitigation, requests, com…
L2 Pragmatics Instruction in the Greek EFL Classroom
While Greek EFL learners’ pragmatic competence has been frequently investigated, few studies have focused on Greek EFL teachers’ pragmatic knowledge. Complementing these earlier studies based on semi-structured interviews, we employed an extended online questionnaire and discourse completion tasks (DCTs) to explore the pragmatic competence of 72 Greek EFL teachers. Pragmatic comprehension was evaluated using scenarios that required participants t…
An ethics for linguistics? What, why, and how
Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics
Reconfiguring the strategic/non-strategic binary in im/politeness research
In this article, I explore the potential of the strategic/non-strategic distinction to link im/politeness with recent developments in pragmatics more generally. My point of departure is the claim that the binary between strategic/non-strategic politeness, as drawn in previous research starting with the distinction between discernment and volition, leaves a blind-spot when it comes to established ways of achieving politeness that do not rely on re…
We need to talk about Hearer's Meaning
Language Use in Past and Present
Frames for politeness
In this paper,r I shall present the results of apilot-study investigating the use of non-literal diminution as a conmunicative strategy in Mainland Greece and in Cyprus. Previous research2 has shown the extensive use of diminutives in Standard Modern Greek to convey politeness. In these cases, rather than literal 'smallness', diminutives serve to encode the attitude of the speaker toward the referent and/or the addressee. V/ithin the framework of…
Καλημέρα, kalimera or kalhmera
Although language attitudes are frequently investigated, how these attitudes change over time is studied less frequently, despite providing an interesting window into the link between attitudes and ideologies. Conducted some twenty years since the first studies on this topic, the current study provides an updated perspective into language attitudes toward the use of Roman-alphabeted Greek (henceforth, Greeklish) in emails and SMS messages exchang…
Special issue
Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field
This short article takes up the question: How do we derive meaning from others' utterances? Within linguistic pragmatics, a first reply to this question was provided by Grice's account of non-natural meaning and his theory of conversational implicature. However, the question Grice was addressing was slightly different, namely: How do speakers mean? To account for how we derive meaning from others' utterances, we need to look beyond non-natural me…
What if…? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice
Coming to Grips With Variation in Sociocultural Interpretations
Empirically capturing sociocultural interpretations—situated interpretations of linguistic expressions shared among members of a group—can be difficult for two reasons: First, the interpretations themselves cannot be directly observed and, second, the contexts that enable these interpretations cannot be defined independently of them. Yet, the reality of such interpretations attested in piece after piece of empirical research calls for an explanat…
Uncivil Twitter
Using four tweets by Steven Salaita about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that resulted in the retraction of his academic job offer in September 2014 as our case study, we investigate the role of Twitter in the shaping and reception of the controversial messages. Our analysis combines Gricean pragmatics with im/politeness and hate-speech research to reveal a complex layering of potential meanings stemming from what is linguistically encoded in e…
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness brings together the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologies…
Interdisciplinary perspectives on im/politeness
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness' brings together the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologie…
First-order politeness in rapprochement and distancing cultures
The close link between politeness and culture has often been highlighted, with some scholars having proposed taxonomies of cultures based on the diverse uses and conceptions of politeness. Generally, research (Hickey 2005; Ardila 2005) places Spanish-speaking cultures in the group of rapprochement cultures , which relate politeness to positively assessing the addressee and creating bonds of friendship and cooperation; and English-speaking culture…
Conventionalization
The Role of the Speaker's Emotional State in Im/politeness Assessments
Brown and Levinson proposed that three sociological variables-Distance, Power, and Ranking of the imposition-affect politeness assessments. Later scholarship, however, argued that these variables can be operationalized in several ways and are too abstract to capture the realities of im/polite discourse. We focus on one variable, Distance, whose operationalization has produced mixed results, and argue that introducing another variable (Relationshi…
Disentangling Politeness Theory and the Strategic Speaker approach
This paper presents a detailed, analytical review of two prominent accounts of off-record indirect speech – Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1978/1987) and Pinker and colleagues' Strategic Speaker approach (Pinker 2007; Pinker et al. 2008; Lee and Pinker 2010). We begin by outlining both accounts, aiming to disentangle the theories by exploring the key theoretical features of each account, highlighting the similarities and differences betw…
Re-Assessing the Speech Act Schema
Bach and Harnish’s (1979) Speech Act Schema (SAS) breaks down into a series of inferential steps the process involved in understanding an utterance as a particular kind of speech act. At the heart of the SAS lies the notion of illocutionary intention, a special kind of reflexive intention whose fulfilment consists in its recognition. This article re-assesses Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Schema in two ways. First, I discuss three types of indirec…
From Politeness1 to Politeness2
Increasing attention to the distinction between first- and second-order im/politeness has led to considerable soul-searching among theorists regarding which of the two should form the basis of a theory of im/politeness. In this article, I take an alternative path: I build on norms of Politeness1, as attested in influential texts laying out Politeness1 norms in different parts of the world from antiquity to this day, to extract from them the core …
The pragmatic variable
Labov defined the linguistic variable as “a class of variants which are ordered along a continuous dimension and whose position is determined by an independent linguistic or extralinguistic variable” (1966:15). A precondition for identifying surface forms as variants of a single variable is semantic, or truth-conditional, equivalence. This requirement proves hard to apply beyond (morpho)phonology, and was subsequently relaxed into one of function…
Thank you, Sorry and Please in Cypriot Greek
Beyond the micro-level in politeness research
Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the "traditional" view based on the dual premises of Grice's Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the "post-modern" view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants' own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the discursive struggle over politeness (Eelen 2001, Mill…
Conventionalization
Formulaic Language and the Lexicon
Politeness and formulaicity
In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the degree of indirectness of an utterance is presumed to be commensurate with the sum of the variables of Distance, Power and Ranking of an imposition. This claim was tested with reference to a corpus of spontaneous requests from Cypriot Greek. It emerged that, rather than motivating the choice of a ‘generic’ politeness strategy corresponding to a certain degree of indirectness, particular combinations …
Thank you, Sorry and Please in Cypriot Greek
We need to talk about Hearer's Meaning
Language Use in Past and Present
The puzzle of indirect speech
From Politeness1 to Politeness2
Increasing attention to the distinction between first- and second-order im/politeness has led to considerable soul-searching among theorists regarding which of the two should form the basis of a theory of im/politeness. In this article, I take an alternative path: I build on norms of Politeness1, as attested in influential texts laying out Politeness1 norms in different parts of the world from antiquity to this day, to extract from them the core …
The pragmatic variable
Labov defined the linguistic variable as “a class of variants which are ordered along a continuous dimension and whose position is determined by an independent linguistic or extralinguistic variable” (1966:15). A precondition for identifying surface forms as variants of a single variable is semantic, or truth-conditional, equivalence. This requirement proves hard to apply beyond (morpho)phonology, and was subsequently relaxed into one of function…
Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field
This short article takes up the question: How do we derive meaning from others' utterances? Within linguistic pragmatics, a first reply to this question was provided by Grice's account of non-natural meaning and his theory of conversational implicature. However, the question Grice was addressing was slightly different, namely: How do speakers mean? To account for how we derive meaning from others' utterances, we need to look beyond non-natural me…
Identity and semantic change
The quantitative and qualitative analysis of spontaneous conversational data reveals that T/V usage in Cypriot Greek (CG) is realised sometimes as a code-switch into Standard Modern Greek (SMG), and sometimes as an integral part of the Cypriot code. Moreover, a consideration of the interactional motivations underlying particular types of exchanges supports an analysis in terms of form-function reanalysis, in which the ongoing grammaticalisation o…
The Role of the Speaker's Emotional State in Im/politeness Assessments
Brown and Levinson proposed that three sociological variables-Distance, Power, and Ranking of the imposition-affect politeness assessments. Later scholarship, however, argued that these variables can be operationalized in several ways and are too abstract to capture the realities of im/polite discourse. We focus on one variable, Distance, whose operationalization has produced mixed results, and argue that introducing another variable (Relationshi…
Why direct speech is not a natural default
Perceptions of difference in the Greek sphereThe case of Cyprus
Cypriot Greek has been cited as “the last surviving Modern Greek dialect” (Contossopoulos 1969:92, 2000:21), and differences between it and Standard Modern Greek are often seen as seriously disruptive of communication by Mainland and Cypriot Greeks alike. This paper attempts an anatomy of the linguistic ‘difference’ of the Cypriot variety of Greek. By placing this in the wider context of the history of Cypriot Greek, the study and current state o…
Disentangling Politeness Theory and the Strategic Speaker approach
This paper presents a detailed, analytical review of two prominent accounts of off-record indirect speech – Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1978/1987) and Pinker and colleagues' Strategic Speaker approach (Pinker 2007; Pinker et al. 2008; Lee and Pinker 2010). We begin by outlining both accounts, aiming to disentangle the theories by exploring the key theoretical features of each account, highlighting the similarities and differences betw…
Καλημέρα, kalimera or kalhmera
Although language attitudes are frequently investigated, how these attitudes change over time is studied less frequently, despite providing an interesting window into the link between attitudes and ideologies. Conducted some twenty years since the first studies on this topic, the current study provides an updated perspective into language attitudes toward the use of Roman-alphabeted Greek (henceforth, Greeklish) in emails and SMS messages exchang…
Coming to Grips With Variation in Sociocultural Interpretations
Empirically capturing sociocultural interpretations—situated interpretations of linguistic expressions shared among members of a group—can be difficult for two reasons: First, the interpretations themselves cannot be directly observed and, second, the contexts that enable these interpretations cannot be defined independently of them. Yet, the reality of such interpretations attested in piece after piece of empirical research calls for an explanat…
Introducing Greek Conversation Analysis
Although conversation analysis (CA) has been widely employed in different languages, its application to Greek talk-in-interaction is still quite limited. For this reason, in our introduction we summarise briefly the foundations of CA and present international and Greek CA bibliography on different areas of analysis in a manner that will be accessible to conversation analysts of various interests but also to researchers who are new to the field. W…
What-is-Said From Different Points of View
What-is-said' was introduced as a technical term by Paul Grice in his William James lectures of 1967 as a way of drawing the line between what we know upon hearing an utterance based on our knowledge of the language, and 'what is implicated', i.e. what we can infer from the fact that an utterance has been made in context. Sometimes identified with the truth-conditional or propositional content of an utterance, 'what-is-said' is nowadays hotly con…
The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View
Politeness and formulaicity
In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the degree of indirectness of an utterance is presumed to be commensurate with the sum of the variables of Distance, Power and Ranking of an imposition. This claim was tested with reference to a corpus of spontaneous requests from Cypriot Greek. It emerged that, rather than motivating the choice of a ‘generic’ politeness strategy corresponding to a certain degree of indirectness, particular combinations …
Formulaic Language and the Lexicon
The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View
Testing Brown and Levinsons theory in a corpus of spontaneous conversational data from Cypriot Greek
Article Testing Brown and Levinsons theory in a corpus of spontaneous conversational data from Cypriot Greek was published on June 21, 2004 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 2004, issue 168)
Understanding the present through the past
Studies of Greek as spoken today in Cyprus draw attention to a generalised variety of Cypriot Greek, free from local variation within the island, yet diverging in several ways from the standard spoken on the mainland. In this article, I attempt first to classify this variety, examining whether it exhibits structural and sociohistorical characteristics of koinés. Having established today's generalised Cypriot variety as a koiné, I then trace its e…
Identity and semantic change
The quantitative and qualitative analysis of spontaneous conversational data reveals that T/V usage in Cypriot Greek (CG) is realised sometimes as a code-switch into Standard Modern Greek (SMG), and sometimes as an integral part of the Cypriot code. Moreover, a consideration of the interactional motivations underlying particular types of exchanges supports an analysis in terms of form-function reanalysis, in which the ongoing grammaticalisation o…
Politeness
Beyond the micro-level in politeness research
Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the "traditional" view based on the dual premises of Grice's Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the "post-modern" view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants' own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the discursive struggle over politeness (Eelen 2001, Mill…
Perceptions of difference in the Greek sphereThe case of Cyprus
Cypriot Greek has been cited as “the last surviving Modern Greek dialect” (Contossopoulos 1969:92, 2000:21), and differences between it and Standard Modern Greek are often seen as seriously disruptive of communication by Mainland and Cypriot Greeks alike. This paper attempts an anatomy of the linguistic ‘difference’ of the Cypriot variety of Greek. By placing this in the wider context of the history of Cypriot Greek, the study and current state o…
Chapter 3. Toward a unified theory of politeness, impoliteness, and rudeness
Constructions of Intersubjectivity
Don’t go V-ing in Cypriot Greek
This article deals with the expression oi na+V realizing mild prohibitions in Cypriot Greek. Drawing on spoken corpus and experimental results, I propose that oi na+V simultaneously expresses two speech acts: (1) a prohibition against some act; (2) the assumption that this act is likely. In this way, the speaker appears to be adopting the hearer’s perspective, advising him accordingly. The resulting account of oi na+V as a neg-raising constructio…
Introducing Greek Conversation Analysis
Although conversation analysis (CA) has been widely employed in different languages, its application to Greek talk-in-interaction is still quite limited. For this reason, in our introduction we summarise briefly the foundations of CA and present international and Greek CA bibliography on different areas of analysis in a manner that will be accessible to conversation analysts of various interests but also to researchers who are new to the field. W…
What-is-Said From Different Points of View
What-is-said' was introduced as a technical term by Paul Grice in his William James lectures of 1967 as a way of drawing the line between what we know upon hearing an utterance based on our knowledge of the language, and 'what is implicated', i.e. what we can infer from the fact that an utterance has been made in context. Sometimes identified with the truth-conditional or propositional content of an utterance, 'what-is-said' is nowadays hotly con…
From Politeness1 to Politeness2
Increasing attention to the distinction between first- and second-order im/politeness has led to considerable soul-searching among theorists regarding which of the two should form the basis of a theory of im/politeness. In this article, I take an alternative path: I build on norms of Politeness1, as attested in influential texts laying out Politeness1 norms in different parts of the world from antiquity to this day, to extract from them the core …
The pragmatic variable
Labov defined the linguistic variable as “a class of variants which are ordered along a continuous dimension and whose position is determined by an independent linguistic or extralinguistic variable” (1966:15). A precondition for identifying surface forms as variants of a single variable is semantic, or truth-conditional, equivalence. This requirement proves hard to apply beyond (morpho)phonology, and was subsequently relaxed into one of function…
Thank you, Sorry and Please in Cypriot Greek
Why direct speech is not a natural default
The puzzle of indirect speech
Re-Assessing the Speech Act Schema
Bach and Harnish’s (1979) Speech Act Schema (SAS) breaks down into a series of inferential steps the process involved in understanding an utterance as a particular kind of speech act. At the heart of the SAS lies the notion of illocutionary intention, a special kind of reflexive intention whose fulfilment consists in its recognition. This article re-assesses Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Schema in two ways. First, I discuss three types of indirec…
Disentangling Politeness Theory and the Strategic Speaker approach
This paper presents a detailed, analytical review of two prominent accounts of off-record indirect speech – Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1978/1987) and Pinker and colleagues' Strategic Speaker approach (Pinker 2007; Pinker et al. 2008; Lee and Pinker 2010). We begin by outlining both accounts, aiming to disentangle the theories by exploring the key theoretical features of each account, highlighting the similarities and differences betw…
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness brings together the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologies…
Interdisciplinary perspectives on im/politeness
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness' brings together the work of linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and second language experts in order to provide readers with a snapshot of the possibilities for studying im/politeness in the 21st century. The volume is organized along methodological lines in three parts each preceded by a brief introduction outlining the evolution and advantages and disadvantages of the relevant methodologie…
First-order politeness in rapprochement and distancing cultures
The close link between politeness and culture has often been highlighted, with some scholars having proposed taxonomies of cultures based on the diverse uses and conceptions of politeness. Generally, research (Hickey 2005; Ardila 2005) places Spanish-speaking cultures in the group of rapprochement cultures , which relate politeness to positively assessing the addressee and creating bonds of friendship and cooperation; and English-speaking culture…
Conventionalization
Linguistics (35 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (33 obras) · Philosophy (29 obras) · Psychology (26 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Politeness (17 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (16 obras) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (14 obras)