Ruytenbeek NicolasKU Leuven | ku leuven
Ruytenbeek Nicolas
PhD
About
41
Publications
9,727
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175
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I research the utterance interpretation in context by applying experimental techniques, weaving together the study of linguistic meaning in all its dimensions (attitudinal, performative, emotive) with fields such as philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and business communication.
Additional affiliations
September 2018 - present
June 2018 - August 2018
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Full-time postdoctoral researcher in Linguistics – Contract awarded in the context of the internal LUCL call Language Diversity in the World
October 2013 - October 2017
Education
October 2013 - September 2017
Publications
Publications (41)
This paper addresses how the realizations of different constitutive components of Twitter complaints shape the perception of these complaints by other customers. We present three experiments on French language in which we test how customer complaint perception is impacted by the realization of the complainable (Exp. 1), of the entity responsible fo...
This study examines how non-target-like formulaic expressions used by advanced second language (L2) speakers of German are perceived by first language (L1) German business professionals in an intercultural workplace setting. By using an experimental design, we explore how L1 business professionals (N = 84) perceive the appropriateness and acceptabi...
Some utterances are pragmatically ambiguous. For instance, Tu peux fermer la fenêtre ? (“Can you close the window?”) can be a request for information or an “indirect request” (IR) to close the window. A possible way for speakers to make it clear whether they intend these expressions as a direct or indirect speech act is to use cues such as gestures...
To date, there has been little attention for the factors that influence the perception of online complaints. We present two experiments in which we test the impact of the degree of linguistic (in)directness and the formal realization of complaint components on complaint perception. Our experimental stimuli are designed on the basis of French-langua...
In the current era of digitalization, most hotels are present on the Internet and most booking decisions are made online. Several online public review platforms exist, and it is crucial to know how their specific affordances influence the formulation of online negative reviews, as differences in the make-up of online reviews are likely to affect ho...
Rijd je soms met de trein en meldde jij ook al eens een klacht aan de NMBS op Twitter? I doe daar onderzoek naar en vertel hierover in een korte en krachtige Pecha Kucha (20 slides van elk 20 seconden)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43JQwOjaNR4
Emotional contagion between online customers makes it crucial for companies to handle customer complaints in a way that is satisfactory for both the customer and the company. Against this background, we expect other customers’ perception of complaints to be affected by the linguistic realizations of these complaints. In this study, we use psychophy...
Some utterances are pragmatically ambiguous. For instance, Can you close the window? can be meant as a yes/no question about the hearer’s ability to close the window or as an “indirect request” (IR) to do so. Pragmatic ambiguity is prevalent, so how do language users manage to communicate with success? One possibility is that distinct pragmatic int...
While (im)politeness in online communication has received quite some scholarly attention in recent years,1, how people perceive and evaluate speech acts online remains largely unexplored. This paper attempts to remedy this shortcoming by addressing the issue of how different realizations of complaints shape face-threat perceptions.
A complaint sit...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
Dans ce cours de 20 minutes (destinés à des apprenants FLE), je vous présente les actes de langage du type "requêtes" en français, avec des exercices qui font appel à votre imagination. J'illustre également la théorie sur ce sujet avec un extrait du film Le Grand Restaurant. Cette leçon, pré-enregistrée dans le cadre d'une audition pour un poste de...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
In this chapter, I discuss the main experimental issues bearing on the comprehension of ISAs. A first question concerns differences in processing between direct and indirect SAs, and a second question relates to the differences between the indirect uses and the literal/direct uses of ISA constructions. Another issue is whether the understanding of...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
To achieve successful communication, it is crucial to say clearly what we mean, but, at the same time, we need to pay attention to the form of our utterances, to avoid misunderstandings and the risk of offending our interlocutors. To avoid these pitfalls, we use a special category of utterances called 'indirect speech acts' (ISAs) that enable an op...
In this paper we describe and apply a method probing into linguistic (in)directness in complaint tweets. The sample analyzed consists of French-language Twitter complaint interactions, half of which are between the SNCF (the French National Railway company) and its customers and half between the SNCB (the Belgian National Railway company) and its c...
In Ruytenbeek et al.’s (2017) Exp. 1, adjective polarity was determined on the basis of the results of two polarity tasks, consisting in linguistic acceptability judgments about "X is not very ADJ" and "It’s surprising how X is not ADJ". Like the "X is not ADJ" construction, these two constructions included a negation, and it is known that negative...
A widely held view in contemporary semantics and philosophy of language is that
sentence structure encodes an illocutionary force component. According to this view,
morphosyntactic sentence-types, such as the imperative, are associated directly at the
semantic level with an illocutionary force, such as a directive. This literalist view stands
in st...
This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP? ) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent...
A general issue in pragmatics concerns the definitions of speech act (SA) types. Cognitive linguists agree that the notion of a directive SA is best defined in terms of a speaker a force towards her addressee's (A) performance of some action, and the subtypes of directives have been approached in terms of image-schemas corresponding to different ty...
In the relevance-theoretic framework, maximal relevance is achieved when processing effort is minimized and cognitive effects are maximized. In line with the presumption of optimal relevance, the addressee (A) of an utterance not only assumes that the speaker (S)'s utterance is relevant enough for it to be worth processing: he expects S to choose a...
In the relevance-theoretic framework, maximal relevance is achieved when processing effort is minimized and cognitive effects are maximized. In line with the presumption of optimal relevance, the addressee (A) of an utterance not only assumes that the speaker (S)'s utterance is relevant enough for it to be worth processing: he expects S to choose a...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the perfor...
In this paper, we investigate the interpretation of negated antonyms. A sentence such as Peter is not tall can be understood as meaning either that Peter is not tall tout court or that Peter is rather short (inference towards the antonym; ITA). We present the results of two experiments, in which we test two theoretical predictions. First, according...
According to the literalist view of speech acts, morpho-syntactic sentence types are associated directly at the semantic level with an illocutionary force. By contrast, according to contextualist theories illocutionary force emerges from contexts of use. To date, however, there is little experimental evidence relevant to this debate. We propose two...
This chapter offers a critical survey of experimental work on the comprehension of indirect requests (IRs). A first issue concerns the processing times of IRs. A crucial finding is that processing times are not systematically longer for IRs relative to the same sentences used to perform direct speech acts, which suggests that the direct meaning of...
This dissertation investigates the comprehension of indirect requests (IRs). Focusing on English and French, it proposes that IRs such as Can you + verbal phrase (for short, Can you VP?) achieve an optimal communicative efficiency because, while they entail extra processing costs, they avoid undesirable effects to the speaker. The approach taken co...
Many recent accounts of the meaning of imperatives posit an illocutionary force component encoded at the sentence-type level (1-6). In an attempt to define—independently of illocutionary force considerations—the meaning encoded by imperatives (see also 7, 8), I make the assumption that force dynamics (cf. 9) can be used as a semantic notion and as...
This paper examines the debate between literalist and contextualist approaches to the derivation of illocutionary forces, and addresses the extent to which pragmatic information is necessary to access the illocutionary force of utterances. From the classic Speech Act theoretic perspective, illocutionary forces are determined by sentence-types; impe...
This paper focuses on the variety of ways to communicate a directive illocutionary act in modern French. I argue that every type of directive speech act can be regarded as stemming from a convention, be it a linguistic one, for on-record speech acts, or a discursive one, for off-record speech acts. The various acceptations of the “conventionality”...
Projects
Projects (3)
The aim of this research is to understand how social variables such as social status and gender influence recipients’ reactions to online im/politeness and their subsequent behavior. In view of the current state of knowledge in the field, focusing on individuals’ moment-by-moment processing of e-mails will provide new insights on this topic. This project proposes a unique contribution to the disciplines of linguistic pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, and sociolinguistics by using corpus-based stimuli and applying, in a series of experimental studies, a combination of cutting-edge experimental techniques (psychophysiology and virtual reality) to address a complex issue in im/politeness research.
This project concerns the comprehension of indirect requests (IRs), with a special focus on English and French. It involves a series of experimental studies that tap into the cognitive processing of direct. vs. indirect request forms, using methodologies such as eye-tracking (Ruytenbeek et al. 2017), and virtual reality (ongoing). I am also interesting in how prosodic features can help understand pragmatically ambiguous utterances.
When one says that John is not tall, we can understand it as a denial that John is tall, but we can also interpret this utterance as a statement that John is short. This type of inference is called an “inference towards the antonym” (for short, ITA). To date, the nature and the extent to which the linguistic properties of adjectives determine the strength of ITAs remain unclear. This project explores, on the basis of linguistic acceptability judgments, the role of adjective polarity, morphology, evaluativity on ITA effects, as well the impact of different linguistic tests including a negation.
