This is a collection of papers that resulted from the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Shanghai International Studies University in September 2005. Their common focus lies in aspects of the contrastive semantics and pragmatics in a wide variety of languages. These aspects include several themes that arise from Gricean and neo-Gricean considerations of contrastive pragmatics; from cognitive semantics and pragmatics, including metaphor and issues that relate to the logical structure of quantification, modality and demonstration; and from contrastive lexical, constructional and discourse semantics. The languages discussed include Afrikaans, Amele, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Gokana, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Yakut and Zulu.

Contents:

Dingfang Shu/Ken Turner: Introduction - Michiel Leezenberg: Gricean and Confucian Pragmatics: A Contrastive Analysis - Chungmin Lee: Information Structure in PA/SN or Descriptive/Metalinguistic Negation: With Reference to Scalar Implicatures - Yan Huang: Switch-reference in Amele and Logophoric Verbal Suffix in Gokana: A Generalized Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Analysis - Saeko Fukushima: Hearer's Aspect in Politeness: The Case of Requests - Jiaxuan Shen: Valency and Cognitive Frames for Three Constructions in Mandarin - Ren Zhang: Specialized Grounding in English and Chinese Existentials - Lei Zhu: Existentials, Possessives and their Grammaticalization into Perfectives: With Special Reference to Chinese you and English be and have - Chauncey C. Chu: A Contrastive Approach to Discourse Particles: A Case Study of the Mandarin UFP Ne - Dorota Klimek-Jankowska: Quantified Eventualities in Russian, Czech and Polish: An OT Analysis - Katsuhiko Yabushita: On the Cross-linguistic Correlation between the Usages of YES/NO Particles and the Presence/Absence of Negative Quantifiers - Renzhi Li: A Contrastive Study of the Semantic Functions and Pragmatic Uses of Modal Verbs in English and Chinese - Marc Duval: Modality and Polysemy: Toward an Implicational Map - Yili Shi: On Chinese Numeral Yi and Demonstrative Determiner Na versus English a and the: A Contrastive Analysis in a Discourse-Pragmatics Perspective - Erkki Ahlström: Reference and Complex Demonstratives in English and in Finnish - Johan van der Auwera: Prohibition: Constructions and Markers - Valentina Apresjan: The Pragmatics of Destiny in Russian and English (Towards a Description of Fundamental Cultural Concepts) - Jenny Yi-chun Kuo/Jiun-shiung Wu: Countability in English and Mandarin - Marie-Claude Paris: Mandarin gen and French et / avec: Another Look at Distributivity and Collectivity - Bergljot Behrens/Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen: The Relation Accompanying Circumstance Across Languages: Conflict between Linguistic Expression and Discourse Subordination? - Yulong Xu: Topic Introduction and Referent Accessibility in Chinese and English Narrative Discourse - Barbara Abbott: Conditionals in English and FOPL.

The Editors:

Dingfang Shu is Professor of Linguistics and Director of Research at Shanghai International Studies University. He is President of the Chinese Cognitive Linguistics Association and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Foreign Languages.

Ken Turner teaches linguistics and the philosophy of language at the University of Brighton. He is series co-editor of Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface and serves on the editorial boards of the Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique, Lódz Papers in Pragmatics, the International Review of Pragmatics and the Journal of Foreign Languages.