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The aim of the present study is to explore the interplay between intertextuality and humor in contemporary political jokes. The intertextual allusions included in such texts involve (con)texts projected as ‘shared’ knowledge by joke tellers. However, they may render joke comprehension a demanding task, thus excluding potential joke recipients from the ingroup joke tellers attempt to construct. At the same time, the intertextual presuppositions of political jokes may foster the ideological alignment between joke tellers and joke recipients, as they are based on specific evaluations of sociopolitical affairs, which need to be accepted by recipients wishing to establish coherence. The data examined here comes from a large corpus of the Greek jokes on the current financial crisis.

The sustained and intense interaction of massive groups of English and Spanish speakers in the U.S. has the potential to deepen our understanding of continuity and innovation in linguistic systems under heavy contact. The current study focuses on Spanish as it is spoken in the largest urban center of the United States: New York City. It examines a range of variable phenomena in the most extensive collection of Spanish in New York to date: the Otheguy Zentella Corpus of Spanish in NYC (OZC). The data represent original research by the first author as well as the efforts of several other scholars who have examined aspects of the OZC in detail. When synthesized, results reveal two broad patterns in the Spanish of long-time NYC residents: diminished regional differentiation and structural convergence with English. These trends emerge across numerous levels of linguistic structure, manifesting in patterns of syntactic, morphological, and phonological variation. The coherence of these phenomena is consistent with the view that contact-induced change is tightly constrained, both socially and structurally, and that it is unlikely to manifest as haphazard bricolage. This is because, while the intensity of linguistic innovations and the time required for their onset and implementation may vary from feature to feature, such changes derive ultimately from a single source; namely, the set of linguistic and social factors that characterize the contact situation. As such, we can expect contact-induced changes to be restricted and of a kind, imbued with the character of the whole to which they belong.

In this paper, we propose that the coherence of standard language varieties is as much, if not more, a matter of language perception and evaluation as of language production. We will show, first, that the co-occurrence of standard and non-standard variants in present-day Belgian Standard Dutch is to a large extent determined by the prestige of these variants, be that overt prestige (related to status and dominance) which motivates the use of standard forms, or covert prestige (related to dynamism and media cool) which increasingly motivates the use of non-standard forms. But prestige (whether overt and conservative, or covert and modern) is not the only force that shapes and maintains coherence in Europe's standard languages. We will argue, second, that the increasing occurrence of zero prestige variants in standard language contexts suggests the existence of a “perceptual harmony” criterion, i.e. a tacit agreement between speaker and hearer on how much socially meaningful variability a specific context may implicate or allow.

Coherence relations differ in their tendency to be explicitly marked. How such relations are recognized and what determines their tendency to be marked is a matter of debate. The connective so represents a special case: it can be used to signal RESULT coherence relations and the more specific cause-effect relation of PURPOSE, but overt marking has been claimed to be required for PURPOSE and optional for RESULT. We present written corpus and experimental results on the use of so that show that RESULT and PURPOSE with this connective can be reliably distinguished from each other, and that the modal auxiliaries can/could and will/would are strongly associated with PURPOSE. In the corpus study, PURPOSE always occurs with explicit so, while RESULT is often left unmarked. These results are in line with recent claims based on annotated corpus data that implicit (unmarked) and explicit (marked) coherence relations can be qualitatively different (e.g. Sporleder and Lascarides, 2008; Webber, 2009). However, in our experiments using strongly purposive event pairs, 35-40% of examples were identified as PURPOSE without a connective or a modal verb cue. We argue that the difference between the corpus results and the experimental results can be explained as a difference between the tasks of speakers and hearers, and we outline an explanation for how marking can be obligatory for PURPOSE relations and yet optional for RESULT. We also propose that nonveridicality seems to play a key role in a marking requirement for PURPOSE, and explain why the unusual marking pattern found makes it difficult to give a pragmatic account similar to more well-known language asymmetries. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This special issue brings together two major approaches to implicated, non-literal meaning of an utterance: the Gricean theory of conversational implicature and theories of discourse macro-structure. The main questions addressed by the authors of contributed papers are whether and how implicatures of individual utterances depend on discourse context and vice versa. The purpose of this introduction is to provide the reader with necessary background on Gricean implicature, discourse structure, and the interaction between them.

This paper presents and discusses criteria for distinguishing between lexical and functional heads in the clausal domain, with special focus on restructuring configurations (a.k.a. reanalysis, clause union, coherence). Using these criteria, I show that even under the narrowest understanding of the term restructuring, German has both functional and lexical restructuring verbs. This proposal contrasts with the view recently advanced by Cinque on the basis of Italian under which all restructuring verbs are functional (as opposed to lexical) heads residing within a highly articulated IP. The two approaches are compared, and it is shown that a universalist interpretation of Cinque's position is untenable.

Linguistic change is envisaged as a natural consequence of the use of language for communication, where the need for coherence brings about synchronic skewings in frequency distribution. These skewings allow, in turn, a qualitative reinterpretation of the value of the relevant forms. The evolution of English and Spanish third-person pronouns is discussed, on the basis of quantitative data.