Abstract

This paper is mainly concerned with investigating the pragmatic perspective of gossip, away from sociological, psychological or any other non-linguistic tackling. Hence, its major appeal is to find out the different pragmatic stages through which gossip passes. This is done by analyzing various situations taken from Sheridan’s comedy, on the basis of a model of analysis developed by the study itself to serve this very purpose. The analysis of the data has yielded that the existential presupposition represented by the proper noun is the only kind employed to engender gossip. Moreover, it has been found out that knowledge, which is to be pejoratively evaluated, is the most common function of gossip.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.