The pragmatics of repetition, emphasis and intensification
type: CreativeWork
description: It may be tempting to think that humans generally say or do things once in communication. However, repetition for the communication of a particular stylistic effect is a commonplace and everyday occurance. Think of texts with repeated kisses and emoji, lively conversations with friends who excitedly produce the same utterance again, and adverts and branding campaigns that feature repeated utterances and forms. Within Relevance Theory pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics generally, and in some areas of linguistics proper, stylistic repetition is understudied and under-understood. The term is applied to a rag-tag muddle of phenomena that have little in common from the point of view of form, interpretation or effects. Utterances repeated due to illness, repeated forms mandated by the grammar (reduplication), forms necessarily repeated due to limits on linguistic resources (e.g., re-use of the common conjunction ‘and’), and the repetitions in poetry or rhetoric, or the repetitions produced by emphatic speakers are often lumped together, without consideration of speaker intentions, the nature of communication, or the division of labour between linguistic en-/decoding and pragmatic inference. Yet, these are all qualitatively distinct. This thesis (re)assesses a set of phenomena which have been called repetition, for example, reduplication, epizeuxis, and ‘long distance’ repetition, as well as repetition phenomena which have not yet been given detailed treatments within cognitive pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics or linguistics, such as repeated gradable adjectives, repeated intensifiers, repeated yes/no particles, and repeated face emoji. Study is restricted to the deliberate and ostensive repetition of such items for communicating vague and non-propositional effects. It is noted that many repetitions, particularly epizeuxis, are often called emphatic, or intensifying, or both. A key aim of this work is to combat the conflation surrounding the effects of stylistic repetitions,…
abstract: It may be tempting to think that humans generally say or do things once in communication. However, repetition for the communication of a particular stylistic effect is a commonplace and everyday occurance. Think of texts with repeated kisses and emoji, lively conversations with friends who excitedly produce the same utterance again, and adverts and branding campaigns that feature repeated utterances and forms. Within Relevance Theory pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics generally, and in some areas of linguistics proper, stylistic repetition is understudied and under-understood. The term is applied to a rag-tag muddle of phenomena that have little in common from the point of view of form, interpretation or effects. Utterances repeated due to illness, repeated forms mandated by the grammar (reduplication), forms necessarily repeated due to limits on linguistic resources (e.g., re-use of the common conjunction ‘and’), and the repetitions in poetry or rhetoric, or the repetitions produced by emphatic speakers are often lumped together, without consideration of speaker intentions, the nature of communication, or the division of labour between linguistic en-/decoding and pragmatic inference. Yet, these are all qualitatively distinct. This thesis (re)assesses a set of phenomena which have been called repetition, for example, reduplication, epizeuxis, and ‘long distance’ repetition, as well as repetition phenomena which have not yet been given detailed treatments within cognitive pragmatics, pragmatic stylistics or linguistics, such as repeated gradable adjectives, repeated intensifiers, repeated yes/no particles, and repeated face emoji. Study is restricted to the deliberate and ostensive repetition of such items for communicating vague and non-propositional effects. It is noted that many repetitions, particularly epizeuxis, are often called emphatic, or intensifying, or both. A key aim of this work is to combat the conflation surrounding the effects of stylistic repetitions,…
author: Jackson, RC
language: en
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:26:41Z
provider: U. of Salford
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: U. of Salford