Spoken language exhibits not only grammatical constructions but also prosodic constructions. While the latter are also form–function mappings, there are differences: Prosodic constructions involve temporal configurations of diverse prosodic features, their functions are primarily pragmatics-related and interactional, they can be present to greater or lesser degrees, and they are frequently superimposed and aligned in complex ways with other prosodic constructions and with grammatical constructions. This chapter illustrates these properties with examples from American English.

After a long tradition of studying languages as isolated systems, researchers are increasingly aware of the fact that speakers of most of the world’s languages are multilingual. The coexistence of multiple languages within the brain can be a significant force shaping each. The recognition of constructions and their arrays of constructional properties provides a useful tool for understanding contact phenomena: much of what is transferred in contact situations are constructions or constructional features. Conversely, examination of what is replicated can enhance our understanding of the nature of linguistic knowledge. Here replicated constructions of varying sizes and degrees of schematicity are first described, from words through discourse structures, then the transfer of individual constructional features, including prosody, special connotations, various pragmatic effects, linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of use, and frequency are discussed, as well as the social situations under which they occur. The kinds of constructions and constructional properties replicated provide additional evidence that constructions are more than simple combinations of basic form and meaning.

This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

Gestures of the face have a relatively limited presence in scholarly gesture discourses. The use of facial movements as intentional communication has been historically undermined in facial behavior research. The face has been primarily studied as expressions of emotion, traditionally theorized as involuntary signs of internal affective states. Emotion expressions are differentiated from facial movements that serve conversational functions in face-to-face dialogue. The facial gestures presented in this chapter illustrate the flexibility and diversity of meanings conveyed by facial communicative actions. Gestures can refer to affective events not present in the immediate here and now, communicate understanding of another individual’s affective experience, and convey information about a target referent. Other facial gestures have counterparts in hand gestures with similar pragmatic and semantic functions. The study of facial gestural components of linguistic communicative events is important to the construction of a comprehensive model of language.

This concluding chapter naturally considers the long-term impact of the image of Keynes that has been suggested in the substantive chapters. It thus confirms the view that ‘Pragmatic Keynesianism’ had obvious traction in situations where practical expedients are sought in face of economic problems. But it also suggests that ‘Dogmatic Keynesianism’ has insights that can be applied (in a more theoretical sense) in understanding the workings of the economy, with reference to the rival theories of especially Schumpeter, Hayek and Friedman. The abiding concern that Keynes showed with the concepts of probability and uncertainty is highlighted; but also, in a methodological frame, the conclusion identifies intractable reasons why individual economic rationality cannot be relied upon to rescue us. Above all, this is a book that appeals to the historical record in offering us insights on the unique career path of a figure who was rather more than today’s conception of a professional economist.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

In Chapter 6, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) are analysed in a pragmatic light. Although many have studied the age-old author–reader relationship in these two novels, rarely have the different pragmatic acts the author/narrator is performing in their address to the reader been highlighted. Studied within Warhol’s broader narratological distinctions between ‘distancing’ and ‘engaging’ narrators (1986, 1989, 1995), these addresses are re-placed within the theoretical model developed in Chapter 1 to enhance the difference between the two texts and show that other references of ‘you’ are present in a way never emphasised in studies of these novels (Brontë’s in particular).

This introductory chapter aims at giving an overview of the pervasiveness of the second-person pronoun across genres, from advertising and political slogans to Twitter via ‘you narratives’ as literature too has taken its ‘you’-turn. Starting from a linguistic template based on face-to-face interactions and adapting it to make it fit written narratives, the chapter offers a theoretical modelling of the possible references of ‘you’, given the degree of congruence between form and function, that could apply to both fictional and non-fictional texts. The pragma-rhetorical approach adopted here foregrounding the author–reader channel allows to transcend the divide between ‘you narratives’ and other genres using the pronoun that the literature has tended to keep separate. It highlights the ethicality of the second-person pronoun as readers are brought to negotiate their relation to the pragmatic effects of ‘you’ in the wide variety of texts investigated in the following chapters. The model that is designed in this chapter gives pride of place to the flesh and blood reader and her potential self-ascription as addressee even in cases where there is only an ‘effect of address’.

If the scientific epistemology parallels Hebraic epistemology in any significant way, then the conceptual paradigms of truth and the mechanics of justification could – or, perhaps, should – follow suit. The Hebraic model of "truth" that emerges differs at key points from some, but not all, of our folk notions of truth today. Specifically, the true/false binary that funds current and popular models of justification appears to be too rigid a model for the Hebraic style. I examine a Hebraic notion of truth and justification in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Although I will put both truth and the logic of justification in conversation with contemporary ideas, I do so only to show both the kinship we share with biblical notions, and the critique offered from the biblical texts.