Search results for "Utterance"
showing 10 items of 65 documents
The influence of body discourses on adolescents’ (non)participation in physical activity
2016
ABSTRACTDrawing on semi-structured interviews with older adolescents, this article examines how healthism, ideal body discourses and performative body discourses influence their (non)participation in physical activity (PA) and their identity construction concerning exercise, sport and physical education. We illustrate that body transformation through PA, and related slim body desire and the fear of masculinised female bodies, affect adolescents’ decisions to engage in or drop out of sport. Also, a non-hegemonic body shape combined with a display of low physical competence triggers classmate and teachers’ rejection and marginalisation, affecting adolescents’ construction of embodied identiti…
Mitigation and boosting as face-protection functions
2020
Abstract Mitigation is undeniably and necessarily linked with the social aspect of communication. No speaker mitigates an utterance without a goal in mind, which makes mitigation a means to an end and not an end in itself. Even though the various definitions of mitigation do not assign the same aims to this phenomenon, the social impact it has on the participants in the communication is generally agreed upon throughout the literature (Fraser, 1980; Meyer-Hermann, 1988; Bazzanella et al., 1991; Briz, 1998, 2003; Caffi, 1999; Thaler, 2012; Briz and Albelda, 2013; Schneider, 2013; Albelda et al., 2014; Albelda, 2016, 2018). In this paper, the mitigating and boosting strategies in relationship …
ABDUCTIVE INFERENCES IN PRAGMATIC PROCESSES
2018
Abstract In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco (1981) allows to account for a signi cant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, …
The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia
2020
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This special issue assembles eight papers which provide insights into the working lives of early career to more senior academics, from several different countries. The first common theme which emerges is around the predominance of ‘targets’, enacting aspects of quantification and the ideal of perfect control and fabrication. The second theme is about the ensuing precarious evocation of ‘terror’ impacting on mental well-being, albeit enacted in diverse ways. Furthermore, several papers highlight a particular type of response, beyond complicity to…
Imperativos, normas y verdad | Imperatives, norms and truth.
2019
Resumen: Antes de emprender el análisis lógico de las normas jurídicas constitucionales, o de las normas en general, es preciso intentar resolver una cuestión previa que afecta a la posibilidad de existencia de una lógica de las normas: el dilema de Jørgensen. Nuestra propuesta de solución de este dilema es la siguiente: las normas son expresiones performativas. Al mismo tiempo, las expresiones performativas son enunciados que tienen valor de verdad. Además, las normas jurídicas son enunciados del tipo “A dice p”, lo que explica que puedan existir normas verdaderas y, al mismo tiempo, contradictorias entre sí.
 Abstract: Before embarking on the logical analysis of constitutional legal…
How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm
2014
The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process. It needs to be situated in a context to be disambiguated. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that embodied simulation occurring during linguistic processing is contextually modulated to the extent that the same sentence, depending on the context of utterance, leads to the activation of different effector-specific brain motor areas. In order to test this hypothesis, we asked subjects to give a moto…
Topicality matters: Position-specific demands on Chinese discourse processing
2011
We report an event-related potential study designed to explore the nature of context-induced topicality in Chinese discourse processing. Topic is what an utterance is about and represents the most prominent discourse element, which occurs sentence-initially in Chinese. We tested question-answer pairs consisting of topic and non-topic questions followed by different continuations (Topic-Continuity, Topic-Shift, Novel-Topic). ERPs were measured at distinct sentential positions and revealed that sentence-initially information processing is guided by topicality, which affects N400 and Late Positivity effects alike. In non-initial positions, the given-new distinction is the dominant principle, a…
Evidence for gesture-speech mismatch detection impairments in schizophrenia.
2019
Patients with schizophrenia suffer from impairments in the perception and production of gestures. The extent to which patients can access the semantic association between speech and co-verbal gestures in concrete or abstract/metaphorical meaning contexts is unknown. We investigated 1) how patients differ from controls in gesture matching performance, 2) how performance differs in the context of abstract versus concrete meaning, and 3) whether formal thought disorder (FTD) symptom severity predicts task impairment. Forty-five patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (two subgroups, mild and severe) took part in this study. Participants were presented with video clips, each showing an a…
Algebre, Gettoni, Enunciati
2021
The paper aims at describing some differences between the formal languages of Mathematics and the features of Natural Language
GIFs in online interaction: embodied cues and beyond
2019
International audience; Recent research has characterized GIFs as a means for speakers to reproduce nonlinguistic cues such as bodily actions and facial expressions in online written interaction, which is first and foremost text-based. They make it possible to translate in digital interaction what those nonlinguistic cues enable to do in face-to-face conversation: express emotion and affect, and elaborate on what is being said. This article explores further the role and functions of GIFs as embodied cues and goes beyond, where GIF use diverges from body language in face-to-face conversation.