Description: Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.
Brief description: Mikhail Kissine is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His most recent book Imperatives, co-authored with Mark Jary, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.
Review Quotes: Advance Praise: "Mikhail Kissine provides a most comprehensive and compelling case for the study of literal and nonliteral speech acts within a rigorously naturalistic approach. His data and arguments, which challenge theoretical confusions and prevalent assumptions, make up a major breakthrough. From Utterances to Speech Acts is an engaging read, novel and eye-opening - a lucid, evidence-based model of the study of direct and indirect language use among typically and atypically developing individuals." --Professor Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv University