Introduction to Pragmatics guides students through traditional and new approaches in the field, focusing particularly on phenomena at the elusive semantics/pragmatics boundary to explore the role of context in linguistic communication.

Alignment in Communication is a novel direction in communication research, which focuses on interactive adaptation processes assumed to be more or less automatic in humans. It offers an alternative to established theories of human communication and also has important implications for human-machine interaction.

First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting (issue 10:1, 2011) and complemented with two articles published in Interpreting issue 16:1, 2014, this volume provides a comprehensive view of the challenge of identifying and measuring aptitude for interpreting. Following a broad review of the existing literature, the array of eight empirical papers captures the multiple dimensions of aptitude, from personality traits and soft skills such as motivation, anxiety and learning styles to aspects of cognitive performance.

The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics.

This monograph is part of a growing research agenda in which semantics and pragmatics not only complement the grammar, but replace it. The analysis is based on the assumption that human language is not primarily about form, but about form-meaning pairings. This runs counter to the autonomous-syntax postulate underlying Landau (2013)’s Control in Generative Grammar that form must be hived off from meaning and studied separately. Duffley shows control to depend on meaning in combination with inferences based on the nature of the events expressed by the matrix and complement, the matrix subject, the semantic relation between matrix and complement, and a number of other factors.