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Pragmatic factors in making and understanding promises

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Abstract

Tested J. Searle's (1965, 1969) suggestion that certain conditions must hold true for a promise to be successfully made. Intuitions regarding these pragmatic conditions were examined in 4 experiments by looking at how 120 undergraduates made and understood promises. The results show that the conditions of speaker's obligation to perform and addressee's desire for performance were extremely important to maintain if a promise was to be made or understood. It appears that people can make promises about actions that would be performed in the normal course of events. It is argued that promises do not by themselves obligate a speaker, but are used to reaffirm previously existing, and often unstated, obligations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

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... The emphasis is therefore placed on the functional aspects of language (Bates, 1976; Becker, 1990; Bruner, 1983; Golinkoff, 1983; Ninio & Snow, 1988, 1996 Street & Cappella, 1989). It has been shown in this perspective that interaction formats or routines (prototypical exemplars of social relations) are very important for young children (Bernicot, 1994; Garvey, 1984; Marcos & Bernicot, 1994; Shatz & Watson O'Reilly, 1990). Research on promises is scarce. ...
... Research on promises is scarce. The few existing studies on the subject concern native speakers of English and are part of research on the philosophy of language (Astington, 1988bAstington, , 1990 Gibbs, & Delaney, 1987). These studies have demonstrated the psychological validity of Searle's (1969, 1979 ) model, for both the preparatory condition and the propositional content condition. ...
... To what extent do promises promote the comprehension of future tense markers? Given the importance of interaction formats (Bernicot, 1994; Bruner, 1983; Garvey, 1984; Marcos & Bernicot, 1994; Shatz & Watson O'Reilly, 1990) and the results already obtained on the impact of context on request comprehension in young children (Bernicot, 1991; Bernicot & Legros, 1987 ), it was predicted here that fulfillment of the preparatory condition would facilitate the comprehension of future tense markers by the youngest children, and that future tense markers would promote the comprehension of promises in the oldest children. ...
Article
The purpose of this study was to gain insight into one of the textual characteristics of promises: the future tense as a temporal marker of utterances. More specifically, our aim was to determine the role of the future tense in the comprehension of promises by native French-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 9. In line with speech act theory, a promise is defined here as a commitment on the part of a speaker to perform a future act. Promise comprehension is assumed to be dependent upon textual characteristics (the linguistic form of the utterance, temporal markers in the utterance, etc.) as well as contextual characteristics (listener's desire, social implications of the promise, etc.). Children performed a story-completion task from two-character stories presented in comic strip form. The stories varied in two ways: the verb tense (immediate future, simple future, or past) and the utterance production context (specific or neutral). The main results can be summarized as follows: (1) The 3- and 6-year-olds based their interpretation of the promises primarily on the contextual characteristics of the communication situation; (2) after the age of 6, the children began to rely on temporal markers in the utterances whenever the immediate future tense was used and promise-specific contextual information was lacking; and (3) the 9-year-olds always based their interpretation of the promises on temporal cues in the utterance. The results are discussed in the framework of interactionist theories of development and models of language functioning.
... A promise is defined by nine fulfilment conditions, grouped into four main categories (as per Bernicot & Laval, 1996): (1) a propositional content condition (a statement is made about a future action to be accomplished by the speaker); (2) a preparatory condition ([a] the listener would rather have the speaker accomplish that future action than not and the speaker thinks this is the case and [b] neither the speaker nor listener knows whether the speaker will actually accomplish the action); (3) a sincerity condition (the speaker intends to accomplish the action); and (4) an essential condition (it becomes the speaker's obligation to accomplish the future action). Astington (1990: 228) states that empirical work in the speech act field has demonstrated that adults' conceptions of promising do align with Searle's (1969) analysis and that adults 'have both the ability to produce speech acts of promising and the metapragmatic ability to judge speech acts as cases of promising or not' (see Gibbs & Delaney, 1987). ...
Article
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The psychological contract is used to examine the dynamics of the employee–employer exchange relationship. The dominant contract conceptualisation is that it is constituted by beliefs about ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ promises; however, there is a dearth of conceptual investigation regarding how other research fields understand promising and reconciling this with how the notion has come to be used in psychological contract theory. In particular, the notion of implicit promising remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped, despite forming a key plank of the contemporary account of the contract. This paper explores these issues by presenting a cross-disciplinary review of promising and applying this to how the notion is used in the contract literature. A conceptual model is also developed to provide avenues to investigate how promise beliefs form in a contract context and their outcomes. Finally, research directions are outlined regarding the roles that beliefs other than promises can play in contract theory.
... For example, a mother's failure to appear at a class play she promised to attend does not negate the previously made promise. The claim that individuals view a promise as valid irrespective of outcome has been confirmed in several studies using adult subjects (Astington, 1988(Astington, , 1990Gibbs & Delaney, 1987). ...
Article
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Current conceptions regarding children’s understanding of promises (and promise breaking) rely upon absolute distinction: namely, a promise versus a non-promise. The current study expands the understanding of children’s judgments of broken promises to include more nuanced, refined descriptions. Utilizing a four-point rating scale-ranging from "OK" to "very bad"-forty children aged 6 to 10 judged story cards depicting characters breaking commitments not to engage in specific behaviors across three different domains (moral, social-conventional, and personal). Analyses indicated that children judge broken promises in the moral domain more severely than those in the social-conventional domain and broken promises in the social-conventional domain more severely than those in the personal domain. Therefore, children appear to judge broken commitments on a sliding scale in much the same way they judge actions from the moral, social-conventional and personal domains. Results from the current study also suggest an inverse pattern of judgment with regards to broken commitments. Specifically, it appears that the more severely an initial action is judged, the less severely its concurrent commitment condition is judged; and vice versa. These findings help refine our understanding of childhood interpretations of broken promises and engender several unique ideas for future research in this field.
... Les recherches déjà réalisées sur la promesse sont peu nombreuses : un premier groupe, situé dans le courant théorique de la philosophie du langage et concernant des locuteurs de langue maternelle anglo-saxonne (Astington, 1988(Astington, , 1990Gibbs et Delaney, 1987), permet de confirmer la validité psychologique du modèle de Searle (1969Searle ( , 1979, du point de vue de la condition préparatoire et de la condition de contenu propositionnel. Outre la validité psychologique du modèle de Searle (1969Searle ( , 1979, un deuxième groupe de recherche (Bernicot et Laval, 1996a;Bernicot et Laval, 19966;Laval, 1996;Laval et Bernicot, 1996) a abordé l'étude de la promesse sous l'angle de la situation de communication. ...
Article
Searle (1969) defines a promise as a commitment on the part of a speaker to accomplish a future action. A promise is a communication situation with textuals characteristics (for example, the linguistic form of the statement) and contextuels characteristics (for example, preparatory condition or social stakes). The present study focuses on a contextual sight : the social stakes. One experiment was designed to deter- mine how children 's comprehension of promises and their corresponding metapragmatic knowledge is affected by the social stakes (strong vs weak), and by the linguistic form of the statement (promise vs. no promise). Children between the ages of 3 and 9 were asked to complete comic strip stories and justify their responses. The main results showed the following : 1 / The social stakes is used by children to comprehend promises ; 2 / Between the age of 3 and 6, the linguistic form has little effect ; the chidren used contextual characteristic to comprehend promises ; 3 / At the age of 9, the chidren used textual characteristic to comprehend promise ; 4 /The metapragmatic knowledge children express about promises depends on the characteristics of the communication situation and changes with age. The results are interpreted in the light of the functionalist and inter actionist theories of development.
... These sections are followed by a summary and conclusion. Amrhein (1992), in citing Gibbs and Delaney (1987), has noted that while there have been studies investigating how indirect speech acts convey speaker intentions, he argues that little has been reported with regard to how verbs used in direct, performative speech acts convey speaker intentions. Therefore, in the section that follows, I first discuss how studies have addressed the semantic verb type in psychotherapeutic discourse. ...
Article
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This article presents an exploration of several linguistic and discursive variables as they relate to behavior change obtained from psychotherapeutic motivational interviews. These interviews were conducted with native Spanish speakers, a relatively under investigated language minority group in the US with regard to this type of discourse. Using a linguistic framework, the study examines the tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) of Spanish verbs, the semantic verb type, such as desire, ability, readiness, reasons, need and commitment (DARN-C), and the context in which the verbs were produced in [+/-conflict] in narratives. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study shows how shifts in verb tenses, the production of DARN-C semantic verb types, and speakers' utterances implicitly involve an expression of change. Based on Grimshaw's (1990) and Labov and Fanshel's (1977) tenets regarding conflict talk in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and Brenneis (1996) who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the "narrator, audience, purposes and expectations" (p. 42), the study shows how the presence of conflict-related narratives decreases between interviews. Namely, participants decrease the use of utterances that recount past events and events containing conflict and move in the direction of speaking about future events and less conflict as their sessions progressed.
... In several studies, Gibbs and Delaney (1987) found that competent adult promisers emphasize some of these conditions over others. Specifically, Gibbs and Delaney found that utterances are considered promises only if the first preparatory condition (2.a) and the essential condition (4) are both met. ...
Article
In the past several decades, psychologists and linguists have begun experimentally investigating linguistic pragmatic phenomena. They share the assumption that the best way to study the use of language in context incorporates an experimental methodology, here understood to comprise controlled studies and careful field observations. This article surveys some key projects in experimental pragmatics and relates these projects to ongoing philosophical discussions.
... This type of "goodness" rating has been used in previous research investigating the psychological validity of such felicity conditions. Gibbs and Delaney (1987) investigated the felicity conditions of promises by manipulating whether they were violated and asking participants to indicate whether a promise had been made. Kreuz and Graesser (1993) performed a similar analysis on the "goodness" of information-seeking questions. ...
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Ostensible speech acts (OSAs) have been defined as possessing pretense, mutual recognition, collusion, ambivalence, and an off-record purpose. These researchers also noted that several features occur more often in ostensible than sincere speech (e.g., speaker hedges, violates preparatory conditions). The authors examined the role of these defining and characteristic features in the comprehension of OSAs. Participants read conversations containing sincere, ambiguous, or ostensible speech acts, and provided ratings of “goodness,” pretense, or mutual recognition, predicted the next speech act, judged the attitude of the speaker, or indicated the reason for the speech act. Participants differentiated between ostensible, ambiguous, and sincere speech in their “goodness” ratings, they perceived the defining features in OSAs, but not in sincere speech, and the characteristic features served as cues that an utterance was ostensible. These results support Isaacs and Clark’s description of OSAs.
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Persian-English subtitling of Iranian films deals with the challenges of understanding and transferring ostensible speech acts (OSAs). Both linguis- tic and cultural variations of these elements in Persian and English are expected to create serious difficulties for subtitlers. Although few studies with pragmatics approach have been conducted to interpret the meaning of Persian OSAs, they have been practically ignored in the fields of translation and subtitling. To fill this gap, this study aims to descriptively investigate the transference of the meaning of 80 Persian OSAs from selected Iranian films. It also analyses perceptions of 106 target text audiences of subtitled OSAs by examining their level of comprehension of 14 subtitled OSAs and the effec- tive factors on their understandings. Finally based on the findings emerged from the descriptive and survey analyses, this study proposes a guideline for Persian-English on assisting the transfer of the intended meaning of OSAs.
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o El presente estudio se propone analizar la relación entre la atenuación y un acto de habla específico, partiendo del ejemplo de la promesa en el discurso político, más concretamente en los debates parlamentarios españoles. Al enunciar una promesa, el hablante se impone a sí mismo una obligación, por lo que un incumplimiento podría amenazar su propia imagen, sobre todo cuando se trata de un político bajo la observación pública. Esta situación comunicativa podría favorecer el empleo de atenuadores orientados a la autoprotección del hablante, lo que el análisis de corpus (diario de sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados 1982–2014 ) confirma. Además, se muestra que la tendencia a atenuar la promesa varía en función del destinatario, del contenido y del estilo personal del hablante. Los procedimientos de atenuación más utilizados son las impersonalizaciones y las estructuras condicionales.
Article
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Résumé La recherche antérieure portant sur les stimulations conditionnelles a démontré que les lecteurs sont sensibles aux différences de portée pragmatique entre les promesses et les menaces après avoir été exposés à de tels éléments conditionnels en condition de lecture. Plus particulièrement, les menaces peuvent être qualifiées de promesses, alors que les promesses ne peuvent être qualifiées de menaces. Essentiellement, les travaux réalisés précédemment n’ont pas permis de constater si de tels effets apparaissent au moment de traiter l’élément conditionnel lui-même. Dans l’expérience rapportée aux présentes, les mouvements des yeux des participants ont été enregistrés pendant qu’ils lisaient des vignettes comportant des promesses et des menaces conditionnelles. Nous avons observé une pénalisation en temps sur l’élément conditionnel lui-même lorsque les participants lisaient une promesse conditionnelle décrite comme une « menace » (p. ex. Liam a menacé Perry comme ceci : « Si tu le dis à papa, je prendrais une part égale de responsabilité »). Une telle pénalisation n’apparaissait pas lorsque le mot « promesse » était ajouté avant une menace conditionnelle. Ces résultats donnent à penser que les lecteurs sont sensibles, durant la lecture de l’élément conditionnel lui-même, des différences de portée pragmatique entre les « menaces » et les « promesses ».
Chapter
Promises are central to human exchanges, especially in adult-child interactions. They consist of a commitment on the part of the speaker to perform a future act, as in ‘je promets de ranger ma chambre’ (‘I promise to clean my room’). For the past ten years, we have been investigating promise comprehension among children from the point of view that language is a communication system and that language competence is the acquisition and use of that system. The emphasis is therefore placed on the functional aspects of language (Bates, 1976; Bruner, 1983; Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan, 1977; Halliday, 1985 ; Ninio and Snow, 1996; Tomasello, 2000). It has been shown in this perspective that interaction formats or routines (prototypical exemplars of social relations) are very important for young children (Bernicot, 1994; Marcos and Bernicot, 1994, 1997).
Chapter
The field of psychology has always had a curious relationship with the study of linguistic-pragmatics. Linguists, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists have over the past 40 years offered important analytic insights into the ways people employ pragmatic knowledge in using and understanding language. Some psychologists, most notably psycholinguists and social psychologists, have exploited the findings from scholars working in linguistic-pragmatics to conduct psychological experiments. Social psychologists, for instance, examine the ways language helps structure social interactions. Cognitive psychologists, on the other hand, focus on the underlying mental processes involved when people acquire, produce and comprehend language in real-life social settings. In both cases, ideas from linguistic-pragmatics are critical sources of hypotheses for various experimental investigations.
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Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.
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This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one's future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational intentions, as combined with the pragmatics of felicitous predictions and with parameters linked to the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behaviour. Some supporting evidence from language development studies is briefly presented.
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The present study focuses on children's comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge of promises. Searle (1969) defines a promise as a commitment on the part of a speaker to accomplish a future action. Two conditions govern the fulfillment of a promise: the preparatory condition (the listener wants the promised action to be accomplished) and a sincerity condition (the speaker intends to accomplish the action). Two experiments were conducted. The first was designed to determine how children's comprehension of promises and their corresponding metapragmatic knowledge is affected by whether or not the preparatory condition is satisfied, and by the linguistic form of the statement (contains vs. does not contain the verb promise). The second experiment was designed to determine the effects of the linguistic form of the promise statement and of whether or not the sincerity condition is satisfied. Children between the ages of 3 and 10 were asked to complete comic strip stories and justify their responses. The main results showed the following: (1) By the age of 3, both the preparatory condition and the sincerity condition are used by children to comprehend promises, the sincerity condition being mastered earlier than the preparatory condition: (2) The metapragmatic knowledge children express about promises depends on the characteristics of the communication situation (whether or not the preparatory and sincerity conditions are met); (3) Children's metapragmatic knowledge changes with age: references to execution of the promised action appear between the ages of 3 and 6, whereas remarks concerning the speaker's intentions are not observed until age 10; (4) The linguistic form of the statement has little effect on promise comprehension and thus deserves further investigation. The results are interpreted in the light of the functionalist and interactionist theories of development.
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Quasi-performative verbs collectively satisfy certain constraints for performative speech act syntactic form but differ from one another in the extent of match between the speaker intentions and beliefs conveyed by their use and those specified for a “felicitous” or ideal speech act of a given type. Tested in two experiments was a componential model representing affirmative and negative forms of two speaker intentions—Desire and assuredness of Ability to perform some task—conveyed by four quasi-performative verbs (i.e., promise, agree, hope, and guess) when used in verbal commitments embedded in a dialog script. In Experiment 1, latencies for verifying questions probing the speaker intentions conveyed by the verbs supported the model: (a) Affirmative components were processed faster than negative components and (b) YES responses were faster than NO responses for affirmative components, while (c) YES responses were slower than NO responses for negative components. In Experiment 2, verbal commitment reading latency was shorter when speaker intentions—explicitly presented in the dialog script—were polarity consistent than when they were polarity inconsistent with the corresponding verb components. Further, verification latencies of Experiment 1 and posttrial judgments of “speaker committedness” from Experiment 2 indicated component-independent processing in comprehending these verbs. These findings argue strongly for a propositional representation of the pragmatic meaning of quasi-performative verbs. It is proposed that the particular salience of speaker intentions in speech act comprehension predisposes this aspect of quasi-performative verb meaning to be decomposed into corresponding components.
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According to speech act theory (Searle, 1969), utterances have both a propositional content and an illocutionary force (the speech act performed with the utterance). Four experiments were conducted to examine whether utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. Participants in all experiments first read remarks that could be characterized by a particular speech act (e.g., beg). A recognition probe reaction time procedure was used in Experiments 1 and 2; participants indicated whether a probe word had literally appeared in the last remark that they had read. Participants were significantly slower at making this judgment (and made significantly more errors) when the probe represented the speech act performed with the prior remark than when it did not. A lexical decision task was used in Experiments 3 and 4, and participants were significantly faster at verifying target words representing the speech act performed with a remark, relative to control words. Overall, the results suggest that speech act recognition may be an important component of the comprehension of conversational remarks.
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Astington (1988) found that seven- to nine-year-olds often fail to distinguish between promises and predictions when judging the utterances of characters in simple stories. Instead, these children attend only to the outcome of the story (i.e. whether the promised event occurred) when deciding whether a promise has been made and, to a lesser extent, when deciding whether the speaker is responsible for the outcome. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether seven- to nine-year-olds (a) vary their judgements of responsibility according to the reason that the promised action was not completed, and (b) recognize that an unfulfilled promise is a promise regardless of whether the speaker's failure is unavoidable or intentional. Seven-year-olds, nine-year-olds, and adults were asked to make promise and responsibility judgements for two story types: stories in which the promiser intentionally failed to fulfill his or her promise and stories in which an unforeseen event prevented the promiser from fulfilling the promise. Participants at all ages assigned responsibility correctly across both story types. In making promise judgements, however, the seven-year-olds' decisions about promises reflected a misguided attention to the outcome of a promise or the obstacle to its fulfillment. The nine-year-olds recognized that an unfulfilled promise is a promise but only when there was a clear reason for the speaker's failure to fulfill his or her obligation. We suggest that children consider only sincere promises to be instances of promising and make inferences about speaker sincerity by looking to external factors in the communicative context.
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It is often said that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. This thesis, which comes from a famous passage in Hume’s Treatise, while not as clear as it might be, is at least clear in broad outline: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.
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Part I. A Theory of Speech Acts: 1. Methods and scope 2. Expressions, meaning and speech acts 3. The structure of illocutionary acts 4. Reference as a speech act 5. Predication Part II. Some Applications of the Theory: 6. Three fallacies in contemporary philosophy 7. Problems of reference 8. Deriving 'ought' from 'is' Index.
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Subjects were presented with sentences like “Must you open the window?” either embedded within a story context or as an isolated sentence. Within the story context, the sentence could have its literal meaning, “Is it necessary that you open the window?” or its indirect or conveyed meaning, “Do not open the window.” Subjects gave comprehension responses and paraphrase judgments for the sentences. In a story context subjects take longer to understand literal sentences than conveyed ones. Without context the conveyed requests take longer than the literal sentences. A second experiment found that in a story context subjects take as long to understand a direct request, “Do not open the window,” as to verify an indirect request, “Must you open the window.” The data from these experiments suggest that a person understanding an indirect request in context need not construct the literal interpretation before deriving the conveyed request.
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Three experiments examined the roles of convention and context in understanding indirect requests. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that people use a variety of different convention of means in making requests and that these utterances differ in their conventionality depending on the context in which they are said. Experiment 3 indicated that people take less time to comprehend and make paraphrase judgments for conventional indirect requests in a conversational context than they do for nonconventional ones. Similarly, this experiment also showed an interaction between a sentence's conventionally and the context in which it is produced. Indirect requests from a particular category that were rated as being conventional given one context, took less time to process than similar requests, that had been rated as being nonconventional in a different situational context. These data highlight the importance of convention in linguistic processing and suggest that an indirect request is conventional only given a specific linguistic and situational context.
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This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.
Psycholinguistic aspects of pragmatics and semantics
  • G Miller
  • S Glucksberg
Miller, G., & Glucksberg, S. (in press). Psycholinguistic aspects of pragmatics and semantics. In R.
Promises, morals, and law How to do things with words Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics
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  • J Gibbs And Delaney Austin
Atiyah, P. (1981). Promises, morals, and law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. GIBBS AND DELANEY Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. New York: Oxford University Press. Bates, E. (1976). Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic.