Article

Name: On Individual Uniqueness and Epistemic Warrants of Discourse: Linguistic Pragmatics in the Works of Yury S. Stepanov

Authors: Valery Z. Demyankov

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

In discourse, words acquire actual meanings, sometimes very far from the literal ones and radically different from the sum of the non-contextual meanings of isolated lexical items. Therefore, pragmatic research goes beyond standard semantics, lexicology, and grammar. The eminent Russian linguist Yury Sergeevich Stepanov (1930–2012) played a pivotal role in advancing linguistic pragmatics and stylistics as an academic field. His concepts concerning individual traits and the epistemological underpinnings of discourse were groundbreaking and have since gained significant traction in contemporary linguistics, philosophy of language, contrastive analysis, and research in “pragmatic engineering”.

Keywords: linguistic pragmatics, literal meaning, actual meaning, discourse, pragmatic engineering, epistemic warrant, style individuality

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