Jan-Ola Östman: "Implicity as Responsibility"

Jan-Ola Östman, Helsinki University: "Implicity as Responsibility: A (linguistic) pragmatic approach"

Abstract
As a linguist specializing in pragmatics (in the sense of Morris 1938), finding out what makes discourse coherent is at the top of my agenda. I focus on what takes place implicitly in communication, i.e., between the lines of what is explicitly expressed. Issues of ideology have for long been central, but I have found ideology to be quite a static concept, so I have moved in the direction of developing a (linguistically) rigid understanding of the concept of responsibility (partly inspired by Popper 1987). I primarily work in Construction Discourse (cf. Östman 2025).

References
Morris, Charles William. 1938. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Östman, Jan-Ola. 2025. “Construction Discourse.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. by Mirjam Fried & Kiki Nikiforidou, 519–539. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Popper, Karl. 1987. “Toleration and Intellectual Responsibility.” In On Toleration, ed. by Susan Mendus & David Edwards, 17–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.