Full Description
The selected papers of this volume cover five main topics, namely 'Certainty: The conceptual differential'; '(Un)Certainty as attitudinality'; 'Dialogical exchange and speech acts'; 'Onomasiology'; and 'Applications in exegesis and religious discourse'. By examining the general theme of the communication of certainty and uncertainty from different scientific fields, theoretical approaches and perspectives, this compendium of state-of-the-art research papers provides both an interdisciplinary comparison of the latest investigations, methods and findings, and new advances and theoretical insights with a common focus on human communication.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. Introduction; 3. Certainty: the conceptual differential; 4. Certainty: its conceptual differential in Accessible World Semantics (by Abraham, Werner); 5. Modes of modality in an Un-Cartesian framework (by Leiss, Elisabeth); 6. (Un)Certainty as attitudinality; 7. Counter-argumentation and modality (by Lo Cascio, Vincenzo); 8. Explanation as a certainty marker in persuasive dialogue (by Dufour, Michel); 9. How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty (by De Conti, Manuele); 10. The role of subjective certainty in the epistemology of testimony: a contextualist perspective (by Croce, Michel); 11. Uncertainty in polar questions and certainty in answers? (by Kleiber, Judit); 12. Lying as a scalar phenomenon: insincerity along the certainty-uncertainty continuum (by Marsili, Neri); 13. Persuasion pragmatic strategies in L1/L2 Italian argument-ative speech (by Salvati, Luisa); 14. Dialogical exchange and speech acts; 15. What do I know as yet? (by Hundsnurscher, Franz); 16. On polar questions, negation, and the syntactic encoding of epistemicity (by Cantarini, Sibilla); 17. Epistemic uncertainty and the syntax of speech acts (by Judge, Kate E.); 18. Discursive functions of evidentials and epistemic modals (by Oishi, Etsuko); 19. Onomasiology; 20. Vagueness, unspecificity, and approximation. Cognitive and lexical aspects in English, Swedish, and Italian (by Allwood, Jens); 21. Latin commitment-markers: scilicet and videlicet (by Schrickx, Josine); 22. Italian come se "as if": evidential and epistemic aspects (by Zuczkowski, Andrzej); 23. Applications in exegesis and religious discourse; 24. The communication of certainty/uncertainty within a Gospel passage (John 9:1-41) (by Salvato, Lucia); 25. Rhetorics of (un)certainty in religious discourse (by Scardigno, Rosa); 26. Subject index
