Search results for "Pragmatics"

Overt and hidden complexity – Two types of complexity and their implications

2014

AbstractLinguistic complexity is the result of the two motivations of explicitness and economy. Most approaches focus on the exlpicitness side of complexity (overt complexity) but there is also an explicitness-oriented side to complexity (hidden complexity). The aim of the paper is to introduce hidden complexity as the neglected side of complexity and to discuss the issues of trade-offs, global complexity and equal complexity from a more encompassing perspective that integrates overt and hidden complexity.

Notes on the Success of Speech Acts and Negotiating Commitments

1996

Technologies that support communication and models used in the development of communications need good underlying theories. One theory suggested as a base for design is speech act theory. Both communication support tools and modelling notations informed by speech act theory have been proposed. Speech act theory forms no unified, single theory, but actually houses several variants for dealing with semantics, pragmatics, and social context of communications. They all have one common feature: they assume that language is not merely a means of describing but also a means for doing things. In this paper we present an overview of speech act theories and their uses in information systems research.…

Cognitive Pragmatics. The Mental Processes of Communication

2012

Default Semantics and the architecture of the mind

2011

In this paper, I explore the relationship between Relevance Theory and Jaszczolt's Default Semantics, framing this debate within the picture of massive modularity tempered by the idea of brain plasticity (Perkins, 2007). While Relevance Theory focuses on processing (see cognitive efforts and contextual effects interplay), Default Semantics focuses on types of sources from which addressees draw information and types of processes that interact in providing it. In particular, I argue that Relevance Theory interacts with default semantics by standardizing inferences which are ultimately compressed (to use a term by Bach, 1998) into a default semantics. I briefly discuss potential obstacles to t…

What Can Modularity of Mind Tell Us about the Semantics/Pragmatics Debate?

2010

In this paper I make connections between two domains of information, research on the semantics/pragmatics debate and on modularity of mind, in the hope that establishing connections and parallel structure may be fruitful in deepening knowledge of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In particular I want to inquire if modularity of mind can help us move towards the resolution of important theoretical problems like Grice's circle, the cancellability of explicatures/implicatures, the analogy between perceptual enrichments and explicatures due to free enrichments, the routing problem for explicatures (do they strictly take input from implicatures?), and satisficing strategies in prag…

Procedural semantics, metarepresentation, and some particles in Behdini Kurdish

2012

Contemporary studies in the linguistic semantics of particles have been greatly influenced by two ideas: that these items trigger pragmatic processing procedures rather than provide purely conceptual content, and that the procedures that some of them trigger relate to the recovery of metarepresentations. Recent developments in the theory of procedural semantics have introduced some refinements, notably the claim that these procedures may not all relate primarily to comprehension per se but may also relate to the epistemic assessment of communicated claims. This paper discusses three particles in Behdini Kurdish in the light of these theoretical developments: the speech-act particle ka often…

Dalla parte dell'ascoltatore. Un approccio pragma-retorico alla comprensione

2019

L’intento principale del saggio è mostrare quanto possa essere vantaggioso guardare al fenomeno della comprensione linguistica utilizzando l’apparato concettuale della retorica classica, messo in fruttuoso dialogo con la pragmatica contemporanea. La legittimità di tale operazione si fonda sulla convinzione che sia proficuo estendere lo specifico punto di vista della retorica al discorso ordinario nel suo complesso. Tale estensione non implica in alcun modo negare la specificità del punto di vista retorico sul linguaggio ma mira anzi a sfruttarla, per fare emergere aspetti altrimenti poco valorizzati. È vero, infatti, che la retorica si occupa tradizionalmente di un tipo particolare di disco…

The pragmatics of political messages in twitter communication

2012

The aim of the current paper is to formulate a conception of pragmatic patterns characterizing the construction of individual and collective identities in virtual communities (in our case: the Twitter community). We have explored several theoretical approaches and frameworks and relevant empirical data to show that the agents building virtual communities are 'extended selves' grounded in a highly dynamic and compressed, linguistically mediated virtual network structure. Our empirical evidence consists of a study of discourse related to the Latvian parliamentary elections of 2010. We used a Twitter corpus (in Latvian) harvested and statistically evaluated using the Pointwise Mutual Informati…

Communicative guide for key conversational partners in the context of 'afasic conversation'

2005

Con este trabajo presentamos una Guía comunicativa diseñada para los interlocutores-clave (Whitworth, Perkins y Lesser 1997) que participan en conversaciones donde se incluye algún hablante con afasia. La necesidad de este tipo de guías surgió durante la elaboración del corpus PerLA ("PERcepción, Lenguaje y Afasia"), iniciado en 2000 en el área de Lingüística General de la UVEG. Presentamos algunos trabajos anteriores que abordan el tema de los interlocutores, como el Protocolo Pragmático diseñado por Carol Prutting y Diane Kirchner, el Entrenamiento conversacional de Audrey Holland, y la Terapia de Conversación Asistida de Aura Kagan. Los datos confirman que en estas situaciones ambos tipo…

Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

2021

How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some-infelicitous versus some-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged betwe…