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A quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and pragmatic meaning: Evidence from inter-annotator agreement
Abstract
This study deals with three key notions in the relevance-theoretic framework: conceptual and procedural linguistically encoded meaning on the one hand, and pragmatic meaning on the other hand. I argue that having objective and quantitative measures for distinguishing among these types of meaning is necessary. Concretely, a quantitative measure is proposed based on offline annotation experiments made by untrained native speakers. This is inter-annotator agreement measured with chance-corrected agreement coefficients, such as Cohen's kappa coefficient. In order to reliably use the three layered scale for interpreting the values of the kappa coefficient, a series of requirements regarding the building and the running of the experiment, as well as the analysis of results, must be adhered to. In this paper, the measure is applied to verbal tenses in order to identify and investigate their contextual usages. It is shown that when speakers are asked to consciously evaluate the contribution of verbal tenses to the interpretative process, three patterns emerge systematically. The first is the easiness of the task and the high rate of inter-annotator agreement when they deal with the distinction past/non-past. The second is a greater difficulty of the task and lower rates when they deal with temporal ordering eventualities. The third is the impossibility to have inter-annotator agreement beyond chance level when they have to consciously identify a subjective or non-subjective point of perspective. It is argued that this observed difference may be explained in terms of the different contents that the addressee deals with: conceptual, procedural, and respectively, purely pragmatic.
... Studies on discursive phenomena (Spooren & Degand 2010;Grisot 2017) pointed out that in the case of pragmatic and discursive annotations, inter-annotator agreement rates measured with chance-corrected coefficients such as the Қ coefficient (Cohen 1960;Carletta 1996;Artstein & Poesio 2008), are frequently low. One of the methods used to increase the reliability of the data is double coding, which consists of a discussion of disagreements (cf. ...
... In this case, individual annotation strategies become cooperative strategies since double coding requires making explicit the reasoning on which the interpretation is based and convincing the other annotator of the quality of the reasoning. By means of case studies with annotation tasks, Grisot (2017) shows that data, for which low inter-annotator agreement rates were found, may be considered as reliable (defined as above). She proposes that inter-annotator agreement rates are strongly dependent on the type of linguistic information dealt with in the annotation task: purely pragmatic information, which is highly context-dependent, will result into low inter-annotator agreement rates while semantic (encoded) types of information will result into higher agreement rates. ...
... The inter-annotator agreement rate was 53%, which is close to the chance level and the Қ was not computed. This type of inter-annotator agreement is in line with Grisot's (2017) suggestion that for highly context-dependent types of interpretation, low interannotator rates are expected (cf. also Spooren & Degand 2010). ...
In French, the difference between the causal connectives parce que and car is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim is that car conveys more subjective relations and is also used in higher register language, whereas parce que is equally well-suited to both types of relations. In line with recent studies, this contribution questions the clear-cut distinction between the two connectives on the basis of a comparative corpus investigation with annotation tasks (journalistic and text messaging registers). Our results do not corroborate the traditional hypotheses that car is used to express more subjective relations and it is restricted to higher register language. On the contrary, we find that car has a strong tendency to be perceived by addressees as providing the information in a more objective way. Our empirical investigation has allowed us to put forth a modified notion of subjectivity which is associated with car and parce que: we distinguish between the more classic approach-the type of subjectivity related to causal relations, and a novel approach-the evaluative type of subjectivity related to the expressive use of language. We rely on the relevance-theoretic framework to spell out our theoretical proposal.
... using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of interannotator agreement. Following my proposal in Grisot (2017a), I interpret interannotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, I advance a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders' behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. ...
... Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to define and characterize conceptual vs. procedural information, including qualitative features. In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
... In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
This chapter consists of two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it addresses the description of four types of verbal tense (the simple past, the imperfect, the compound past and the present) in English, French, Italian and Romanian, as presented by grammar books and pragmatic studies focusing on individual verbal tenses. Second, it reviews the semantics of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, which are the constituent categories of the generic notion verbal tense, as they are discussed in general linguistics.
... using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of interannotator agreement. Following my proposal in Grisot (2017a), I interpret interannotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, I advance a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders' behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. ...
... Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to define and characterize conceptual vs. procedural information, including qualitative features. In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
... In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
This chapter contains two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it reviews the literature on Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation which has investigated temporal information. Second, it describes the automatic implementation of [±narrativity] and [±boundedness], and show that these are effective at improving the results of statistical machine translation systems, in terms of lexical choices of verbs and of verbal tenses in automatically translated texts.KeywordsNatural language processingMachine translationAutomatic classificationHuman annotationPragmatic featuresMaximum entropy classifierChineseEnglishFrench
... using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of interannotator agreement. Following my proposal in Grisot (2017a), I interpret interannotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, I advance a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders' behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. ...
... Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to define and characterize conceptual vs. procedural information, including qualitative features. In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
... In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
This chapter contains three main sections and ends with a summary. First, I consider the contribution of verbal tenses to discourse interpretation and the calculation of temporal relations in several formal sematic-discursive theories. Second, I discuss Grice’s treatment
of temporal relations as conversational implicatures
. Third, having briefly introduced the basic tenets of Relevance Theory
and the conceptual/procedural distinction, I pay particular attention to the relevance-theoretic account of temporal relations as “pragmatically determined aspects of what is said”, and to the ongoing debate on the purely procedural vs. mixed nature of the meaning encoded by verbal tenses.KeywordsDiscourse relationsFormal semanticsGriceRelevance TheoryConceptual meaningProcedural meaningExplicatureConversational implicature
... using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of interannotator agreement. Following my proposal in Grisot (2017a), I interpret interannotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, I advance a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders' behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. ...
... Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to define and characterize conceptual vs. procedural information, including qualitative features. In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
... In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
Experimental study using annotation experiments, includes four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it discusses several issues linked to using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of inter-annotator agreement. Following the proposal made in Grisot (J Pragmat 117:245–263, 2017a), inter-annotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, are interpreted as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought, and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, it advances a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders’ behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. Third, it describes the annotation experiments and discuss their results. Fourth, in order to assess the role of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect in predicting the verbal tense used in a target language, the results of a generalized mixed model suited to the data are discussed.
... using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of interannotator agreement. Following my proposal in Grisot (2017a), I interpret interannotator agreement rates, measured with the Қ coefficient, as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, I advance a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders' behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. ...
... Numerous attempts have been made in the literature to define and characterize conceptual vs. procedural information, including qualitative features. In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
... In Grisot (2017a), I divide them into two types: those that are cognitive (appealing to cognitive processes taking place when the speaker processes expressions encoding conceptual or procedural types of information); and those that are linguistic (referring to the linguistic system itself). The two types of criteria summarized in Table 2.1 are challenged in Grisot (2017a), where I put forward a quantitative approach to conceptual, procedural and purely pragmatic meaning. ...
This chapter comprises four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it puts forward the HD model, which is an innovative model of temporal reference distinguishing between the temporal information from Tense, Aktionsart, Aspect, Mood, temporal adverbials, temporal connectives, aspectual markers and markedness, among others. Second, it develops a mixed conceptual-procedural account of Tense, by specifying that the notion of context, referred to as ConText, is understood as a cognitive construct consisting of a set of assumptions selected during the interpretation process, rather than determined in advance and expanded during the interpretation process when the expectation of relevance is satisfied or abandoned. In the ConText, the comprehender inferentially constructs the conceptual content of Tense and Aktionsart, and makes use of the procedural information encoded by Tense and Aspect in order to manipulate the conceptual representations built. Third, it revisits the verbal tenses investigated in this book according to the HD model.
... The inter-annotator agreement is used in corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, discourse studies, empirical pragmatics, etc. for evaluating the agreement between two or more annotators in relation to various types of annotations of linguistic information [40], [41], [42]. The purpose of measuring inter-annotator agreement is to evaluate the reliability of an annotation process. ...
During COVID-19, the logistics industry plays a crucial
role in managing the outbreak and maintaining basic social
consumption needs. To minimize the risk of infection, unmanned
intelligent sorting systems are suggested to be implemented. This
paper covers the developing process of an automatic stacking
system based on ABB IRB 120 robot with two auxiliary functions:
synchronous data processing and digital twin simulation. Detailed
logic and method will be introduced, and relevant figures will be
presented. The project will be evaluated and improvement will be
suggested at the conclusion of this paper.
... In any case, a lower k is to be expected when one deals with pragmatics. It can even be considered unavoidable, as shown by current research on discourse annotations and other pragmatic phenomena (Spooren and Degand, 2010;Grisot, 2017), due to the underdeterminacy of language. 12 Since pragmatic reasoning depends largely on contextual information, different annotators may show different interpretations of the same linguistic content and thus diverging coding preferences and strategies. ...
Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics.
... Two annotators are assigned to label the chat history dataset into two aspects, i.e.: positive and negative polarity; and also, the epistemic categories: project management, attitudes, and technology affinity. The Kappa Cohen interannotator agreement during tagging is measured, with the value 0.63, which can be interpreted as substantial-moderate [16]. Snapshot examples of the annotation results of three students' chats can be seen in Table II. ...
... 7 The conception of procedural meaning used in this paper is limited to non-propositional procedural meaning, what equals it with discourse markedness (Briz and Pons Bordería 2010). For a more comprehensive account of procedural meaning, see Wilson (2011) and Grisot (2017). analyzing spoken language, where some "deviant" language uses ("unachieved" syntactic structures, multifunctional discourse markers or unusual word ordering, just to mention a few) are not the exception, but the rule (Sornicola 1981, Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987, Narbona 1986, 1992, 2012, Briz 1998. ...
As databases make Corpus Linguistics a common tool for most linguists, corpus annotation becomes an increasingly important process. Corpus users do not need only raw data, but also annotated data, submitted to tagging or parsing processes through annotation protocols. One problem with corpus annotation lies in its reliability, that is, in the probability that its results can be replicable by independent researchers. Inter-annotation agreement (IAA) is the process which evaluates the probability that, applying the same protocol, different annotators reach similar results. To measure agreement, different statistical metrics are used. This study applies IAA for the first time to the Valencia Español Coloquial (Val.Es.Co.) discourse segmentation model, designed for segmenting and labelling spoken language into discourse units. Whereas most IAA studies merely label a set of in advance pre-defined units, this study applies IAA to the Val.Es.Co. protocol, which involves a more complex twofold process: first, the speech continuum needs to be divided into units; second, the units have to be labelled. Kripendorff's u α-family statistical metrics (Krippendorff et al. 2016) allow measuring IAA in both segmentation and labelling tasks. Three expert annotators segmented a spontaneous conversation into subacts, the minimal discursive unit of the Val.Es.Co. model, and labelled the resulting units according to a set of 10 subact categories. Kripendorff's u α coefficients were applied in several rounds to elucidate whether the inclusion of a bigger number of categories and their distinction had an impact on the agreement results. The conclusions show high levels of IAA, especially in the annotation of procedural subact categories, where results reach coefficients over 0.8. This study validates the Val.Es.Co. model as an optimal method to fully analyze a conversation into pragmatically-based discourse units.
... Put differently, both narrativity and subjectivity are pragmatically inferred from one specific verbal tense. In terms of subjectivity, this claim has been challenged in Grisot (2018b), which does not support the tense-as-trigger assumption, instead concluding that subjectivity is a more global effect which is neither conceptual nor procedural, but purely pragmatic (that is, inferential), unlike the past-/non-past and temporal/non-temporal order distinctions. This important finding shows that the subjectivity layer must be fed by several types of information. ...
This book is about the pragmatic meaning of the functional lexicon, restricted to tenses, causal connectives, logical connectives and negation. The main claim is that meaning is distributed between conceptual and procedural information, whatever the type of functional unit. The issue of the type of meaning encoded in the functional lexicon raises the question of their contribution to semantic and pragmatic meanings, as entailment, presupposition, explicature and implicature.
... Cependant, dans Grisot (2017b), nous proposons que la méthodologie de l'annotation puisse également être utilisée pour tester les intuitions des locuteurs natifs au sujet d'un phénomène linguistique ou pragmatique, sans devoir atteindre un taux élevé de l'accord inter-annotateur comme cela est nécessaire pour produire des ressources textuelles. Par conséquent, les taux d'accord désignent les stratégies d'annotation développées par les annotateurs. ...
Dans cet article nous présentons une étude empirique avec des données de corpus des domaines linguistiques de la subjectivité du locuteur, comprise d’une manière large comme se référant à l’expression explicite ou implicite de la perspective, des émotions et des attitudes du locuteur. Afin d’explorer les domaines linguistiques de la subjectivité du locuteur, un corpus littéraire et un corpus journalistique ont été construits et annotés par plusieurs annotateurs. Dans nos analyses, nous avons pris en compte trois variables : le genre du texte, la source de la subjectivité et les types d’indices linguistiques. Nous avons formulé des prédictions au sujet de la présence des énoncés subjectifs et de leurs marqueurs linguistiques. Les résultats de notre étude montrent que (i) le genre du texte (littéraire vs journalistique) n’influence pas l’expression de la subjectivité (ii) les domaines linguistiques principaux de la subjectivité du locuteur sont le lexique affectif-évaluatif et les structures syntaxiques, avec une plus grande hétérogénéité des marqueurs subjectifs dans le corpus littéraire que dans le corpus journalistique, (iii) la subjectivité dite affective-évaluative et la subjectivité dite déictique (cf. Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1999) sont de nature différente – elles présentent des schémas différents quant à leur expression linguistique et à leur indentification consciente par les locuteurs. C’est pourquoi, à la suite de Kerbrat-Orecchioni, qui propose de considérer la subjectivité déictique comme non-subjective, nous suggérons de limiter le domaine linguistique de la subjectivité du locuteur à la subjectivité affective-évaluative.
... More specifically, the scope of cognitive pragmatics opens up new insights into the processes of the mental construction of the writer's message and its reconstruction by readers, "which separates this analysis from earlier studies using a cognitive approach in linguistics and literature" (Bystrov, 2014, p.1). The problematic field and methodological component of cognitive pragmatics "dealing with the reciprocal relationship between pragmatics and cognition" (Schmid, 2012, p.3) were investigated by Bara (2000;, Gallese (2005), Grisot (2017), Lakoff (2005;, Schmid (2012), Tirassa (2000) and others. Cognitive pragmatics deals with an embodied theory of concepts ( Gallese and Lakoff, 2005), neural theory of metaphor ( Gallese and Lakoff, 2005;Lakoff, 2009), and manipulative communication studies (Saussure, 2005). ...
This paper presents an inquiry into the cognitive-pragmatic specifics of To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing. Its major goal is to investigate the cognitive means that enable the fulfilment of the writer’s pragmatic aims in the process of literary communication. The research reveals the writer’s aims of raising the problem of women in a patriarchal society and of intensifying manipulative influence upon the reader, which were achieved via the implicit concept of NEUROSIS and the CONTAINER concept used to metaphorically interpret the described events. The investigation proved that the concept of NEUROSIS intensifies psychological manipulation of the reader, ensuring the reader’s engagement in message creation, preserving the reader’s trust regardless of the transference of inaccurate information, etc. It participates in the reader’s neural simulation through nomination of somatisms, retrieval of memories from previous painful experiences, the activation of the “mirroring” phenomenon, etc. Metaphoric modelling provides a psychological manipulation of the reader’s perception through shading and highlighting of the appropriate facets, creating proper associations and establishing specific images. It implements activation of the neural activity, creating imaginative simulation of the reader’s body in action and involving personal cognitive experiences.
... As the recovery of implicatures could be said to be highly perceiver-dependent, I have employed statistical tools that calculate inter-examiner agreement to back up results from a first qualitative analysis carried out by the researcher, in order to contribute to the rigour of the analysis and avoid possible criticism on the grounds that the research presented here is based on theoretical models that have not been empirically tested (cf. Grisot, 2017). In order to test the validity of the most predominant themes about the men represented in the ads that I initially recovered, a group of 10 male informants expressed their level of agreement (via 5-point Likert-type scale) on a list of implied meanings for each of the ads analysed. ...
This article aims to unveil how male identities are constructed in a corpus of male toiletry TV ads through a pragmatic and multimodal analysis of a set of implicit assumptions conveyed about the male participants in the ads. The validity of these assumptions is first empirically tested with a group of 10 male informants and then those implied meanings are bundled into thematic cores for their qualitative and quantitative description. Findings reveal that these ads still rely on stereotypical constructs and traditional discourses of what it takes to be a man. For example, men are invited to consume grooming products but reminded to do it the men’s way. Men are also reminded of their sexual power to seduce and attract women with the aid of the product. Likewise, by portraying male ad personae in traditional manly activities while emphasizing their toughness and body strength, or their resourcefulness when faced with challenging situations, the ads portray a rather skewed view of contemporary men, which fails to take into account the myriad roles a modern man can play in contemporary societies.
This chapter surveys and discusses research methods and research designs commonly and saliently adhered to within the field of intercultural pragmatics. A particular focus will be on data collection methods and qualitative analytical approaches to empirical data, with the guiding question of this chapter being: What are the most saliently trending research methods employed in current and recent research in intercultural pragmatics? As such, this chapter represents a hub among the contributions assembled in this handbook in that it intertwines with or at least closes contingent spaces between topics and issues discussed across the five strands covered. Thus, this chapter not only falls back on what has been established concerning the underlying theoretical foundations of the field and its methodologies as a whole, but also sets reference points to key issues in “doing” research in intercultural pragmatics. Sections included offer an extensive review of the massive body of literature on conventional and relevant terminology as well as salient aspects of data collection and data analysis in (intercultural) pragmatics overall. The core sections present research designs ranging from introspective, observational, and extracted data to (non- )experimental data elicitation techniques and tasks.
The question of the roles of grammatical aspect and of lexical aspect for the inference of temporal relations has richly been investigated from a theoretical point of view in various fields of languages sciences. Nevertheless, previous studies do not formulate similar conclusions, and thus they trigger different predictions for experimental testing. In contrast, the role of coreference patterns did not receive as much attention as grammatical and lexical aspect have received. As such, in this study we experimentally assess the roles of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective), lexical aspect (activities vs. accomplishments) and coreference patterns (same vs. different agents) in English. By means of an annotation study, we establish that fewer chronological relations emerge in passages with the imperfective aspect and coreference of agents (i.e. the actions are performed by the same agent). Then, by means of a temporal evaluation task, we show that synchronous relations are favoured in narrative passages that describe activities and lack of coreference of agents (i.e. the actions are performed by different agents). To interpret the results, we suggest that the comprehenders’ inference of temporal relations is influenced on the one hand by linguistic biases and on the other hand by their expectations of coherence. We discuss the findings from a cross-linguistic perspective.
The main thrust of this paper is to unveil the female identities embodied in a corpus of TV toiletries ads through a pragmatic and multimodal description of the most recurrent thematic cores touched upon in the ads. These thematic cores have been arrived at through an analysis of the implied meanings conveyed about women and the product/brand advertised, together with their classification into topical emerging categories. In order to test the validity of such topical themes, a group of 8 female informants expressed their level of agreement (5-point Likert scale) with a list of implied meanings for each of the ads analysed. Findings reveal that the TV ads construct female identities around two main recurrent thematic cores: (i) women's sexual and beauty empowerment and (ii) women's ability to overcome inner emotional struggles about ageing or confidence loss. Both thematic cores tap into stereotypical views that urge women to be and stay beautiful through the consumption of the products. Female participants are also reminded of their self-worth as women and urged to redefine beauty standards as ways of empowering them to feel good about their looks and of regaining self-esteem. Although verbal stimuli are key for the recovery of implied assumptions, visual and, to a lesser extent, auditory stimuli have been found to reinforce what is verbally implied and to aid in the transmission of weak implicatures about the female participants depicted in the ads under analysis in this piece of research.
[[[ONLINE PUBLICATION: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linge/syntaxe/journal/volume_dix_2017.html]]]
This book collects thirteen peer reviewed articles authored by past, current and future doctoral students in linguistics at the University of Geneva. It is a collection of papers which seeks to reflect the wealth of the ongoing research carried out by the junior scholars of the department of linguistics. The selection of papers presented above results from a single blind peer review process, one or two rounds, preceded by a preliminary screening carried out by fellow PhD and postdoc students. The double effort of the contributors serving as both authors and reviewers was invaluable.
This paper revisits the definition of metalinguistic negation (MLN) illustrated by e.g. They don’t have kids, they have children. A new definition is proposed that rests on two properties. The first is that MLN is a corrective speech-act. The second is that the sentence used to perform the speech-act has a paradoxical Information Structure: it is discourse-old material, along with the corrected a segment that is however treated as discourse-new by virtue of being focused and contrasted to the correcting segment. These properties are used to explain established features of MLN. MLN’s speech-act status accounts for the distinctive behaviour of relevant connectives. The paradoxical Information Structure distinguishes MLN from other uses of negation, relates it to other corrective constructions and metalinguistic phenomena (e.g. in conditionals and questions) and accounts for the alleged marked status of metalinguistic configurations. How MLN can be mapped by a cartographic approach is speculated upon.
In this paper, I investigate experimentally the question of subjectivity and its supposed triggering by the categories of tense and grammatical aspect. The study is carried out in the relevance theoretic pragmatic framework, which assumes that certain linguistic expressions encode procedural information constraining the determination of the explicit content of an utterance (that is, the explicature), and of the implicatures (that is, implicit premises and implicit conclusions). In the current state of the art, the notion of subjectivity, which roughly means the expression of a point of view or perspective, has been correlated to a series of linguistic expressions, such as deictic elements (personal, spatial, temporal), grammatical aspect and connectives. Here, I examine the relation between subjectivity and two parameters of temporal reference: verbal tenses and grammatical aspect. Annotation experiments were carried out on corpus data in English, French and Serbian in order to test whether native speakers are able to consciously identify and evaluate information about subjectivity in corpus data. Based on the results of these experiments and using the notion of (specific) procedural versus general (pragmatic) inference, I discuss the status of subjectivity as semantic (encoded procedural information) or pragmatic (general inferential) information, and give evidence in favour of the latter.
Le traitement en ligne des discours temporels : le Passé Composé et le connecteur pragmatique ensuite Résumé Cet article examine la manière dont les locuteurs traitent en ligne ('online') les discours temporels qui sont exprimés par des temps verbaux et des connecteurs pragmatiques. Nous présentons les résultats d'une expérience pilote dans laquelle le temps de lecture des phrases contenant le Passé Composé et le connecteur 'ensuite' a été mesuré. Cette étude cherche à tester l'hypothèse théorique selon laquelle l'adverbe 'ensuite' est un connecteur pragmatique du type temporel. Si tel était le cas, le traitement au niveau cognitif d'un discours temporel contenant ce connecteur devrait être plus rapide que le traitement d'un discours dans lequel la relation temporelle est exprimée uniquement par les temps verbaux. Les résultats de l'expérience en ligne, avec tâche de lecture à son propre rythme ('self-paced reading task') ne soutiennent pas cette hypothèse et remettent donc en question l'idée que le connecteur 'ensuite' est un connecteur temporel qui impose l'interprétation de succession temporelle. Mots clés: expérimentation, tâche de lecture à son propre rythme, relations temporelles, information procédural, connecteurs temporels, temps verbaux
This chapter discusses the necessary linguistic and pragmatic support for improving statistical machine translation systems with respect to verbal tenses. The English Simple Past can be translated into French through a series of tenses because of its conceptual, procedural and pragmatic meanings. By testing and validating its usages in offline experiments with a linguistic judgment task, a general predictive model for the cross-linguistic variation of a verbal tense is proposed. The implementation of the procedure encoded by the Simple Past for a statistical machine translation system improved its results in terms of coherence and lexical choices. Thus, this chapter shows that such approach to automatic translation of verbal tenses seems promising and worth pursuing.
Discourse connectives are procedural markers of textual cohesion that have long been an object of study in the Geneva school of pragmatics. In this chapter, we argue that Jacques Moeschler’s descriptions of causal connectives have contributed to provide theoretical insights on the nature of their procedural meaning, which have been recently shown to be compatible with models of human cognition from processing and acquisition studies across several languages. We review these studies in Sects. 2 and 3 respectively. In many of his contributions, Jacques Moeschler has also strived to find precise and testable features of connectives, with a potential for empirical validations in computer applications. In Sect. 4, we describe recent attempts to label automatically some of the meanings of connectives, using parallel corpora as training data, and show that this procedure improves their translation by automatic systems.
Over the last decennia, annotating discourse coherence relations has gained increasing interest of the linguistics research community. Because of the complexity of coherence relations, there is no agreement on an annotation standard. Current annotation methods often lack a systematic order of coherence relations. In this article, we investigate the usability of the cognitive approach to coherence relations, developed by Sanders et al. (1992, 1993), for discourse annotation. The theory proposes a taxonomy of coherence relations in terms of four cognitive primitives. In this paper, we first develop a systematic, step-wise annotation process. The reliability of this annotation scheme is then tested in an annotation experiment with non-trained, non-expert annotators. An implicit and explicit version of the annotation instruction was created to determine whether the type of instruction influences the annotator agreement. The results show that two of the four primitives, polarity and order of the segments, can be applied reliably by non-trained annotators. The other two primitives, basic operation and source of coherence, are more problematic. Participants using the explicit instruction show higher agreement on the primitives than participants used the implicit instruction. These results are comparable to agreement statistics of other discourse corpora annotated by trained, expert annotators. Given that non-trained, non-expert annotators show similar amounts of agreement, these results indicate that the cognitive approach to coherence relations is a promising method for annotating discourse.
With a view to addressing the non-truth-conditional meaning of discourse connectives from a cognitive perspective, relevance theorists have for long pursued the argument that the relevant expressions do not carry conceptual (≈denotational) meaning, but rather encode procedures, i.e. instructions which guide pragmatic inference by creating cognitive ‘shortcuts’ that the hearer takes advantage of during utterance interpretation. At the same time, they assume that logical connectives are conceptual, rather than procedural encodings. In this paper, I explore the extent to which an analysis of logical connectives along procedural lines is viable, by offering a number of arguments which suggest that logical connectives can and should be studied on a par with discourse ones.
The contributions in this volume represent an inflection point in the delimitation and understanding of the notion of procedural meaning and open new paths for future research.
One major theoretical issue that has dominated the field of theoretical pragmatics for the last twenty years is the conceptual vs. procedural distinction and its application for verb tenses. In this chapter, we address this distinction from both theoretical and empirical perspectives following a multifaceted methodology: work on parallel corpora, contrastive analysis methodology and offline experimentation with natural language processing applications. We argue that the conceptual/procedural distinction should be investigated under the aegis of empirical pragmatics. In the case study, we bring evidence from offline experimentation for the procedural and conceptual contents of the English Simple Past and we use this information for improving the results of a machine translation system.
The main goal of this article is to make a proposal about where procedural meaning is located. Procedural meaning is defined as guiding the processing of conceptual information, whereas conceptual meaning includes information about the representation of entities, for instance objects or events. Conceptual information for connectives is described at the level of entailment, explicature and implicature, and may indicate possible causal relations among the events described, whereas procedural information for causal connectives is restricted to indicating the direction of the causal relation (forward or backward). Conceptual information for tenses specifies temporal coordinates, while procedural meaning specifies directional and subjective properties of events, using features such as [±narrative] or [±subjective]. A second goal is to answer a central question for pragmatics: what is the contribution of connectives, that is, what is the difference between discourses with and without connectives? The pragmatic framework adopted, which is based on Relevance Theory, gives the following answer: in a discourse without connectives, the accessibility of the intended interpretation depends solely on the context, whereas the use of connectives allows a simpler route, reducing the number of inferential steps and helping to determine semantic and pragmatic contents such as entailments, explicatures and implicatures.
A prevalent, but to date untested, assumption about lexicalized scalar implicatures such as those from some to not all, is that they fall into the class of GCIs and as such, constitute a homogeneous class of highly regularized and context-independent implicatures. This paper reports a test of this assumption in which linguistically untrained participants’ implicature strength judgments were collected for naturally occurring utterances containing the word some in a large-scale corpus-based web study. The results indicate that implicature strength is highly variable and systematically dependent on features of the linguistic context such as the partitive, determiner strength, and discourse accessibility. These results call into question the GCI status of scalar implicatures from some to not all and demonstrate the usefulness of corpora and web-based methods for challenging received wisdom, enriching the empirical landscape, and informing theory in pragmatics.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.11
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Starting from the common observation that there is no recognized closed class of Discourse Markers (DMs) and that their definition may vary from one theoretical framework to another, the aim of the MDMA project (“Model for Discourse Marker Annotation”) is to establish an empirical method for the identification and annotation of DMs in spoken French. Central to our proposal is that DMs may be described as clusters of features that, in specific patterns of combination, make it possible to distinguish between more or less prototypical uses of DMs in context. We proceeded in three steps: (i) manual identification of all so-called “potential” DMs in a balanced corpus of spoken French (5,000 words; Belgium and France); (ii) automatic extraction from the corpus of every token corresponding to the candidate DMs previously identified (1,181 tokens) ; and (iii) parameter analysis of a random sample of 200 potential DMs (syntactic, formal and semantic-pragmatic variables). The hypothesis is that the statistical analysis – based on the distributional constraints of the potential DMs at stake – should uncover a certain hierarchy between the different features under scrutiny, regarding their relevance, reliability, and generalizability (or even specificity). In the present paper, we first present the annotation procedure, then we discuss several aspects of inter-rater agreement, and finally discuss the results from the in-depth corpus-based and statistical analyses.
Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this paper, we compare advanced learners’ sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the influence of L1 transfer by comparing learners’ comprehension of two non native-like semantic uses of connectives in English, often produced by learners due to transfer from French and Dutch. Our results indicate that in an off-line task, transfer is an important factor accounting for French- and Dutch-speaking learners’ non native-like comprehension of connectives. During on-line processing however, learners are as sensitive as native speakers to the meaning conveyed by connectives. These results raise intriguing questions regarding explicit vs. implicit knowledge in language learners.
This paper tackles the issue of the validity and reliability of coding discourse phenomena in corpus-based analyses. On the basis of a sample analysis of coherence relation annotation that resulted in a poor kappa score, we describe the problem and put it into the context of recent literature from the field of computational linguistics on required intercoder agreement. We describe our view on the consequences of the current state of the art and suggest three routes to follow in the coding of coherence relations: double coding (including discussion of disagreements and explicitation of the coding decisions), single coding (including the risk of coder bias, and a lack of generalizability), and enriched kappa statistics (including observed and specific agreement, and a discussion of the (possible reasons for) disagreement). We end with a plea for complimentary techniques for testing the robustness of our data with the help of automatic (text mining) techniques.
This article is a survey of methods for measuring agreement among corpus annotators. It exposes the mathematics and underlying assumptions of agreement coefficients, covering Krippendorff's alpha as well as Scott's pi and Cohen's kappa; discusses the use of coefficients in several annotation tasks; and argues that weighted, alpha-like coefficients, traditionally less used than kappa-like measures in computational linguistics, may be more appropriate for many corpus annotation tasks -- but that their use makes the interpretation of the value of the coefficient even harder.
This paper discusses the empirical validation of annotation schemes proposed for discourse relations, when signaled explicitly by discourse connectives, through their application to texts in several languages. Considering a monolingual annotation scheme as a starting point, the paper explains the reasons for either specifying or generalizing some labels, illustrating them with a review of experiments in translation spotting of connectives. Then, an experiment with the PDTB scheme applied to five languages (EN, FR, DE, NL, and IT) shows how specification and generalization are put to work in order to build a scheme which has an improved empirical validity for several languages.
Trustworthy corpora are necessary for train-ing and meaningful evaluation of algorithms which use annotations. These standard collections are called Gold Standard Corpora (GSC). However the construction of GSC is a laborious and time-consuming process and size, quality and most of all availability of task-specific GSC directly influence the development of machine learning based nat-ural language processing algorithms. This paper provides an introduction to gold standard corpus construction in the context of natural language processing and gives an overview of alternative approaches.
The search for translation universals has been an important topic in translation studies over the past decades. In this paper, we focus on the notion of explicitation through a multifaceted study of causal connectives, integrating four different variables: the role of the source and the target languages, the influence of specific connectives and the role of the discourse relation they convey. Our results indicate that while source and target languages do not globally influence explicitation, specific connectives have a significant impact on this phenomenon. We also show that in English and French, the most frequently used connectives for explicitation share a similar semantic profile. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitation also varies across different discourse relations, even when they are conveyed by a single connective.
Europarl is a large multilingual corpus containing the minutes of the debates at the European Parliament. This article presents a method to extract different corpora from Europarl: monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora, as well as parallel corpora. Using state-of-the-art measures of homogeneity, we show that these corpora are very similar. In addition, we argue that they present many advantages for research in various fields of linguistics and translation studies, and we also discuss some of their limitations. We conclude by reviewing a number of previous studies that made use of these corpora, emphasizing in each case the possibilities offered by Europarl.
The Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) is a new resource built on top of the Penn Wall Street Journal corpus, in which discourse connectives are annotated along with their arguments. Its use of standoff annotation allows integration with a stand-off version of the Penn TreeBank (syntactic structure) and PropBank (verbs and their arguments), which adds value for both linguistic discovery and discourse modeling. Here we describe the PDTB and some experiments in linguistic discovery based on the PDTB alone, as well as on the linked PTB and PDTB corpora.
The aim of this contribution is to investigate, by means of a diachronic multi-genre corpus-based approach (Academic, Narrative, and Present-day Spoken French), whether the historical functional shift from the propositional domain to the causal/pragmatic domain of linguistic expressions correlates with their semantic shift from primarily conceptual to primarily procedural content. Our analysis concentrates on two discourse markers derived from the French verb voir (‘to see’), namely vu que (‘since’), and on a/nous avons vu que (‘we have seen that’). Our initial hypothesis was that both markers result from an (ongoing) “proceduralisation” process which found its source in the polysemous conceptual meaning of the verb voir, viz. perceptive and cognitive meaning. Our results show that this hypothesis needs a more qualified perspective on linguistic change leading us to approach the “proceduralisation” process in terms of gradualness rather than polarity, and to broaden the field of grammaticalisation to non-linguistic criteria such as the “stylistic” parameter.
An eye-tracking experiment investigated whether incremental interpretation applies to interclausal relationships. According to Millis and Just's (1994) delayed-integration hypothesis, interclausal relationships are not computed until the end of the second clause, because the processor needs to have two full propositions before integration can occur. We investigated the processing of causal and diagnostic sentences (Sweetser, 1990; Tversky & Kahneman, 1982) that contained the connective because . Previous research (Traxler, Sanford, Aked, & Moxey, 1997) has demonstrated that readers have greater difficulty processing diagnostic sentences than causal sentences. Our results indicated that difficulty processing diagnostic sentences occurred well before the end of the second clause. Thus comprehenders appear to compute interclausal relationships incrementally.
The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.
I argue that the communication of given information is part of the procedural instructions conveyed by some connectives like the French puisque. I submit in addition that the encoding of givenness has cognitive implications that are visible during online processing. I assess this hypothesis empirically by comparing the way the clauses introduced by two French causal connectives, puisque and parce que, are processed during online reading when the following segment is ‘given’ or ‘new’. I complement these results by an acceptability judgment task using the same sentences. These experiments confirm that introducing a clause conveying given information is a core feature characterizing puisque, as the segment following it is read faster when it contains given rather than new information, and puisque is rated as more acceptable than parce que in such contexts. I discuss the implications of these results for future research on the description of the meaning of connectives.
Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.
Discourse connectives are often said to be language specific, and therefore not easily paired with a translation equivalent in a target language. However, few studies have assessed the magnitude and the causes of these divergences. In this paper, we provide an overview of the similarities and discrepancies between causal connectives in two typologically related languages: English and French. We first discuss two criteria used in the literature to account for these differenc- es: the notion of domains of use and the information status of the cause segment. We then test the validity of these criteria through an empirical contrastive study of causal connectives in English and French, performed on a bidirectional cor- pus. Our results indicate that French and English connectives have only partially overlapping profiles and that translation equivalents are adequately predicted by these two criteria.
The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language. This series will give readers insight into how pragmatics can be used to explain real corpus data and, also, how corpora can illustrate pragmatic intuitions.
The present volume, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms, proposes innovative research models in the liaison between pragmatics and corpus linguistics to explain language in current cultural and social contexts.
This article aims at determining the type of ambiguity manifested by modal verbs, focusing on French. Modal verbs are often described as polysemous since they seem to encode a fixed number of possible meanings. Options of offer are the following: (i) that modal verbs are indeed polysemous according to a technical notion of polysemy, i.e. they encode a limited set of clear-cut modal meanings; (ii) that they are a mixture of polysemy and underspecification, that is, each meaning selected in the lexicon may undergo further adjustment; (iii) that modal verbs are not conceptual but rather procedural, i.e., they encode instructions based on their grammatical dimension (they take scope over propositions which they modify); (iv) they have a vague meaning; or (v) they are simply conceptual as any other full verb is and, as most conceptual expressions, they are underspecified and get a precise meaning in context through pragmatic enrichment. Our assumption is the latter, however with a nuance regarding epistemic necessity with devoir (must) following experimental results by Barbet (2013). We take the opportunity of this issue to go at large on conceptual and procedural meanings in the first part of the paper.
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The distinction in relevance theory between two kinds of encoded meaning, conceptual and procedural, has evolved so that more and more components of encoded meaning, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are now taken to be procedural (non-conceptual). I trace these developments and assess the extent to which these diverse elements share properties that distinguish them from concept-expressing words. While the notion of procedural encoding has lost some of its original distinctiveness, it may make sense to think of all encoded meaning as procedural (including the meaning of concept-expressing words), but this necessitates the drawing of new clarifying distinctions among kinds of procedural meaning.
The verbal systems of Spanish and French share a compound and a simple past form (CP and SP), but their uses differ crosslinguistically. In French, the CP is often used as a narrative tense, whereas the Spanish CP has very limited narrative properties; conversely, the French SP only appears in very specific discourse functions, whereas its Spanish counterpart is used in all types of discourse. Tenses are procedural devices with a rigid and unique meaning, while eventualities have a more adaptable conceptual meaning. However, procedural instructions are general enough to enter different processes of pragmatic enrichment, giving way to diverse results according to specific contextual needs and following the principle of relevance. Tenses determine the way in which an eventuality is represented, and they contribute decisively to temporal reference. Despite their varied contextual effects, the linguistically underdetermined procedural meaning of CP and SP is (respectively) one and the same in Spanish and French. The differences between both languages correspond to dissimilar ways of materializing the procedural instruction of each tense; those differences can be described as an interaction of pragmatically enriched procedural and conceptual meanings taking tendencially divergent inferential paths in each language. Conventionalization of frequent interpretive paths (understood as privileged access to specific ways of carrying out a procedural instruction) comes as an effort-saving process. In the cases analysed here, such process is linguistically mandated: not internally (by the semantics of a single tense) but externally (by the structure and needs of the entire verbal paradigm).
The role of verb aspect in the construction of situation models was examined in this study. Participants read stories that contained a sentence that described an activity that either was completed (i.e., perfective aspect) or was in progress (i.e., imperfective aspect), and three subsequent sentences that could be interpreted as either subsequent to or concurrent with the target sentence activity. Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that in-progress activities had a higher likelihood of being perceived as ongoing in the subsequent context than did completed activities. Furthermore, verb aspect and world knowledge have an interactive impact in understanding the duration of narrative events. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that the activation of in-progress activities decayed at a slower rate than completed activities. The results of this study support the claim that grammatical markers provide processing instructions for situation model construction and the maintenance of information in working memory.
In a recent article in this journal, Lombard, Snyder-Duch, and Bracken (2002) surveyed 200 content analyses for their reporting of reliability tests, compared the virtues and drawbacks of five popular reliability measures, and proposed guidelines and standards for their use. Their discussion revealed that numerous misconceptions circulate in the content analysis literature regarding how these measures behave and can aid or deceive content analysts in their effort to ensure the reliability of their data. This article proposes three conditions for statistical measures to serve as indices of the reliability of data and examines the mathematical structure and the behavior of the five coefficients discussed by the authors, as well as two others. It compares common beliefs about these coefficients with what they actually do and concludes with alternative recommendations for testing reliability in content analysis and similar data-making efforts.
This chapter describes the ARCADE project, concerned with the evaluation of parallel text alignment systems. The project is composed of two tracks, devoted to the evaluation of alignment at sentence and word level respectively, and is planned for a four-year period. At the time of this report, twelve systems have participated in the sentence track, and five in the word track. Substantial progress has been made on the evaluation methodology, metrics and protocols, and a large reference corpus has been produced. The results show that sentence level alignment is quite satisfactory (over 98.5% accuracy on “normal” texts), although it degrades sharply for texts that do not match perfectly at the structural level (i.e., missing fragments, order differences, etc.). State-of-the-art word alignment systems can largely improve, since they reach only ca. 75% accuracy on the “translation spotting” task on which they were evaluated.
It is widely acknowledged that the pragmatic field of research is not homogeneous. In its broad sense, it covers a range of loosely related research programmes from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. The diversity of approaches certainly mirrors the complexity of the field. However, when we come to investigate the connections of pragmatic research to research on the brain, not all the directions turn out to be equally capable of immediately translating into questions for which sensible answers can be sought. Indeed, if one of the most important steps in scientific research is formulating the right questions in order to get relevant answers, then some decisions have to be made as to the questions we would like to ask in order to gather data that have scientific relevance. In this paper I will give for granted that the data gathered within cognitive approaches to pragmatics are most relevant to neuropragmatics, and will further explore the possibility that a complex systems theory lens may help us look at them in new ways. Complex adaptive systems provide inspiring suggestions as to how we might capture this dimension of analysis of pragmatic facts, which appear to observation as complex dynamic units whose profiles are shaped in ever-changing manners by the interplay of the numerous variables at stake in interaction while at the same time preserving integrity and recognizability as unique and unrepeatable pieces of communicative behaviour.
Causal connectives are often considered to provide crucial information about the discourse structure; they signal a causal relation between two text segments. However, in many languages of the world causal connectives specialise in either subjective or objective causal relations. We investigate whether this type of (discourse) information is used during the online processing of causal connectives by focusing on the Dutch connectives want and omdat, both translated by because. In three eye-tracking studies we demonstrate that the Dutch connective want, which is a prototypical marker of subjective CLAIM–ARGUMENT relations, leads to an immediate processing disadvantage compared to omdat, a prototypical marker of objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relations. This effect was observed at the words immediately following the connective, at which point readers cannot yet establish the causal relation on the basis of the content, which means that the effect is solely induced by the connectives. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that this effect is related to the representation of the first clause of a want relation as a mental state. In Experiment 3, we show that the use of omdat in relations that do not allow for a CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE interpretation leads to serious processing difficulties at the end of those relations. On the basis of these results, we argue that want triggers a subjective mental state interpretation of S1, whereas omdat triggers the construction of an objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relation. These results illustrate that causal connectives provide subtle information about semantic-pragmatic distinctions between types of causal relations, which immediately influences online processing.
Reliability has traditionally been taken for granted as a necessary but insufficient condition for validity in assessment use. My purpose in this article is to illuminate and challenge this presumption by exploring a dialectic between psychometric and hermeneutic approaches to drawing and warranting interpretations of human products or performances. Reliability, as it is typically defined and operationalized in the measurement literature (e.g., American Educational Research Association [AERA], American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education, 1985; Feldt & Brennan, 1989), privileges standardized forms of assessment. By considering hermeneutic alternatives for serving the important epistemological and ethical purposes that reliability serves, we expand the range of viable high-stakes assessment practices to include those that honor the purposes that students bring to their work and the contextualized judgments of teachers.