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Relevance: Communication and Cognition
... Therefore, this study aimed to prove that the language elements used in news reports can be analysed to show the slant of a newspaper towards an issue. For this purpose, this study utilises the relevance theory envisaged by Sperber & Wilson (1995) to describe the manner in which each linguistic input on a semantic level can be interpreted to explain the true meaning of what is being announced by Malay dailies. ...
... Oleh itu, kajian ini diketengahkan bagi membuktikan bahawa elemen bahasa yang digunakan dalam tajuk berita dapat dianalisis bagi memperlihatkan kecenderungan akhbar terhadap isu yang dilaporkan tersebut. Untuk tujuan ini, kajian ini memanfaatkan Teori Relevans yang digagaskan oleh Sperber & Wilson (1995), khususnya idea makna prosedur bagi menghuraikan cara mana setiap input linguistik pada peringkat semantik dapat diinterpretasikan bagi menjelaskan maksud sebenar yang mahu disampaikan oleh laporan akhbar tersebut. ...
... Ertinya, setiap tingkah laku komunikasi yang jelas dan nyata menjamin pendengar mencapai "relevans yang optimum". Dengan kata lain, input atau rangsangan yang ostensif (jelas dan menonjol) yang disampaikan dengan semudah mungkin oleh penutur membolehkan pendengar memahaminya dan mencapai kesan kognitif yang tinggi dengan usaha memproses yang sedikit (Sperber & Wilson, 1995 ...
Newspapers are one of the main channels that feature a variety of news and information to the public. For the longest time, newspapers have played a significant role in conveying information to readers and can change public perception and views on particular issues and news. In the context of newspapers in Malaysia, mainstream newspapers not only report local and foreign news but also the voice of the government when conveying messages and policies to the people. However, in the process of reporting current news, especially those involving politics and national leadership issues, each newspaper's reporting style can be analysed based on the language elements used. This factor may not be obvious to the general reader, but if examined through linguistics, especially the field of pragmatics, such tendencies can be proven appropriately. Therefore, this study aimed to prove that the language elements used in news reports can be analysed to show the slant of a newspaper towards an issue. For this purpose, this study utilises the relevance theory envisaged by Sperber & Wilson (1995) to describe the manner in which each linguistic input on a semantic level can be interpreted to explain the true meaning of what is being announced by Malay dailies.
... This work provides the foundations on which a cognitive theory of communication and expression can be built, and since Grice an extensive literature has developed this approach in various ways, including from evolutionary and developmental perspectives (e.g. Bach & Harnish, 1979;Sperber & Wilson, 1986Clark, 1996;Levinson, 2000;Tomasello, 2008;Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Wilson & Sperber, 2012;Scott-Phillips, 2015;Moore, 2017;inter alia Specific approaches differ from one another in some of the detail, but all agree that the expression, recognition and epistemic evaluation of intentions together play a foundational role. In what follows we adopt and enrich the post-Gricean approach commonly known as Relevance Theory, which specifies key notions for communication (‗communicative intention', ‗informative intention', ‗ostension', inter alia) in computational terms (Sperber & Wilson, 1986Carston, 2002;Wilson & Sperber, 2012;Clark, 2013;Padilla Cruz, 2016; see also the Relevance Theory Online Bibliographic Service). ...
... Bach & Harnish, 1979;Sperber & Wilson, 1986Clark, 1996;Levinson, 2000;Tomasello, 2008;Csibra & Gergely, 2009;Wilson & Sperber, 2012;Scott-Phillips, 2015;Moore, 2017;inter alia Specific approaches differ from one another in some of the detail, but all agree that the expression, recognition and epistemic evaluation of intentions together play a foundational role. In what follows we adopt and enrich the post-Gricean approach commonly known as Relevance Theory, which specifies key notions for communication (‗communicative intention', ‗informative intention', ‗ostension', inter alia) in computational terms (Sperber & Wilson, 1986Carston, 2002;Wilson & Sperber, 2012;Clark, 2013;Padilla Cruz, 2016; see also the Relevance Theory Online Bibliographic Service). Our analysis could potentially be adapted to fit with more classically Gricean or neo-Gricean approaches (for focused comparisons see e.g. ...
... 7 Regarding ‗ostension', the word is used in slightly more broad or more narrow ways in different literatures. Within pragmatics the word was first used narrowly, for the actions described in §3.3 i.e. making an informative intention manifest (Sperber & Wilson, 1986. Since then sizable literatures have developed studying ostension from many perspectives including development, evolution and comparative cognition, and here the term is sometimes used more broadly, corresponding roughly to the actions described in §3.2 (see e.g. ...
Human expression is open-ended, versatile and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how they are unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species’ social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use but novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society and culture.
... Loose language broadens the denotation of decoded meanings during meaning construction to include senses beyond the narrow lexical entry (Wilson & Sperber, 2002); for example, when we hear 'Holland is flat' we do not expect 'flat' to strictly and literally mean the flatness of a table but to include trees and houses. Sperber and Wilson's (1986) RT follow Grice (1975) in his footsteps when proposing that human communication is inferential in nature: intended meanings are established not merely based on information content (cf. Broadbent, 1958), but on the assumption that communicative partners strive to change our thoughts. ...
... The way we accomplish comprehension is by striving to maximize relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) by maximizing cognitive effects and minimizing cognitive efforts. A cognitive effect is a change in our representations, for example, a true conclusion based on an inference using new information, either by reinforcing or confirming a previous assumption, or by refuting a present assumption (Wilson & Sperber, 2004). ...
... According the RT (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) and the lexical pragmatist approach (Wilson & Carston, 2007) meaning is always construed on-line by means of narrowing and broadening decoded meanings. When someone says, 'I have a temperature' or 'I'm not drinking' we narrow meaning to include only fewer and alcohol, respectively; and when we hear 'it's boiling hot outside' we broaden 'boiling' to include temperatures well below 100 °C. ...
Figures of speech have been suggested to play important pragmatic roles in language. Yet the nature of these pragmatic functions has not been specified in detail, and it is not clear what particular social-communicative purposes metaphors fulfill. I propose that metaphors are utilized in two distinct ways in communication. First, similarly to indirect speech, they enable social bargains: by expressing intentions, beliefs and desires in a veiled manner, they put the burden of interpretation on the hearer, which makes them revocable and thus a great tool for negotiations. Secondly, metaphors can be used to transform the meaning of words so that they describe phenomena and refer to concepts that do not have a lexical entry, by transferring an abstract sense figuratively to a new domain. The latter use is not only a tool of verbal creativity but a means of linguistic change as it adds novel senses to words. Metaphor does not seem to be a mere example of loose language use but a sophisticated communicational tool, either to deliberately create ambiguity in a deniable manner or to extend word meaning beyond the public lexicon, which puts the fundamental mechanisms of abstract thought to figurative use.
... (For relevant discussion, seeBar-On 1995. 6 SeeSperber & Wilson (1986 andSperber & Wilson (2015); see alsoMoore (2017). ...
... (For relevant discussion, seeBar-On 1995. 6 SeeSperber & Wilson (1986 andSperber & Wilson (2015); see alsoMoore (2017). ...
... They produce utterances with 'overt' (i.e., ostensive) 'communicative intent'; and their receivers are said to attribute intentions to producers and to make inferences about their mental states. It is just that Moore thinks this becomes less cognitively demanding once we abandon Grice's 'thirdclause' on speaker meaning, with its fourth-order meta-representations (2018: 8f.) (something that had already been advocated by Neale 1992; and see also, e.g.,Sperber & Wilson 2015). By contrast, the intermediary conception I propose below would allow us to divorce the origins of meaningful communication from the presence of even 'minimally Gricean' speaker meaning.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances” (Wheeler and Fischer, Evol Anthropol 21:195–205, 2012: 203). After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on (one Carnapian, the other Gricean), I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of human linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’ (Tomasello, Origins of human communication, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2008). I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan (Millikan, Language, thought, and other biological categories: New foundations for realism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1984, Millikan, Tomberlin (ed), Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R (2006) Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press (paperback edition), Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication.
... Enthymemes are not uncommon in conversation. They seem to play a role over and above the rhetorical device found in speeches, and enthymeme-like inferences are at the heart of theories of implicature-not least Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995;Wilson and Sperber, 2004). Despite this, very little work has been done on enthymemes as such in dialogue. ...
... Examples of such features are sensemaking and coherence in language use. These questions are at the heart of pragmatics, and much of what we refer to here as "enthymematic reasoning" is discussed in theories of implicature, such as Gricean and neo-Gricean approaches (Horn, 1984;Levinson, 2000) and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995;Carston and Hall, 2012). Some of the processes described in this book are also accounted for in other theories. ...
... First, in Section 2.2 we will look at presupposition (Strawson, 1950;Stalnaker, 1974;Karttunen, 1974), moving on to Grice's account of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) in Section 2.3. In Sections 2.4 and 2.5 we are still concerned with inference, considering the approach to implicature taken in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), and the anti-inferentialist view of inference presented in Recanati (2004). In Section 2.6 we will consider sense-making of longer strands of discourse and how we assign rhetorical relations between sentences or utterances. ...
Available OA at
https://brill.com/view/title/58383
... Inferential communication in relevance theory is Ostensive-Inferential Communication which involves an extra layer of intention: informative intention (intention to inform an audience of something), and communicative intention, which is intention to inform an audience of one's informative intention (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). In order for communication to be truly overt, the communicative and informative intention must be mutually manifest to communicator and audience. ...
... Relevance theory is geared towards the maximization of relevance, and that communication comes with a guarantee of relevance. This is the 'Principle of relevance' according to Sperber and Wilson (1986). Humans pay attention to the most relevant phenomena available, construct the most relevant possible representation of these phenomena, and process them in a context that maximizes their relevance. ...
This study investigates the cognitive environment and some other related features of relevance theory (relevance of input, ostensive stimuli, and cognitive effects) in online relationship conversations. Virtual communication is a common phenomenon in our society today due to its numerous advantages, like flexibility for friends to communicate with one another, remote interactions, and many other reasons. Through various platforms, several issues pertaining to human lives, like relationships, politics, and contemporary events, are discussed. Studies have not extensively examined online relationship conversations in the purview of the cognitive environment. The (present) study aims to discuss the role of cognitive context in online relationship conversations. The objective of the study is achieved by selecting 12 posts and some of their responses/comments from some selected chat groups on Facebook: "Marriage Seminar", "Marriage Seminar Extra", "Relationship and Gist", and "Marriage Without Tears". Dan Sperber and Wilson Deidre's Relevance theory served as the theoretical framework for the study, with a focus on identifying common ground cognition in online conversations. The findings show that the cognitive environment has a vital role in online relationship conversations as it helps the participants in the chat groups process posts sent to them in the groups to infer not just the meaning the posters had in mind, but also the hidden ones. The study discovered that the participants paid little or no attention to grammatical rules and orthography.
... This section is composed of excerpts from the publication submitted at Acta Psychologica ). An important part of human psychological devices involved in joint action is communicative, serving different purposes -e.g., negotiating, guiding, questioning (Austin, 1962;Clark, 1992;Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and leading to mobilize different types of information. This flexibility allows us to provide information about the relevant objects involved in a task, but also about the emotional or cognitive states of the participants. ...
... The recognition of the other as a potential partner for joint action can be carried out by verbal and/or non-verbal communicative cues, which can be more or less explicit at different stages of the interaction. The inferential processes at play in such context have originally been explored in the frame of pragmatic theories, in particular through the notions of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) or Grice's maxims of conversation (Grice, 1989). ...
Robots will interact more and more with humans in the future and thus will need to be endowed with the pertinent abilities. We are still far from having autonomous robots among humans and able to smoothly collaborate with them but the work of this thesis is a contribution bringing the community a bit closer to this goal. When humans collaborate to achieve a task together, numerous cognitive mechanisms come into play, more than we would have thought at first glance. Some of these mechanisms are also triggered in humans’ minds when they interact with robots as they are essential to a successful collaboration. Therefore, it is important for roboticists designing robots that will closely interact with humans to be aware of and take into account the humans mental states and sensorimotor functions involved in controlling and smoothing collaborative task performance. However, this does not imply that robots have to be endowed with the same mechanisms since being able to collaborate with humans does not mean to imitate them. What is key to roboticists is to understand how humans work and to design robots that will adapt. Consequently, this thesis starts with an immersion in philosophy and social and cognitive psychology. Then, we explore BDI and cognitive robotic architectures which have inspired us to design our own architecture in which, JAHRVIS — the main contribution of this thesis — endows a robot with the abilities not only to control, but also to evaluate its joint action with a human. Joint Action-based Human-aware supeRVISor (JAHRVIS) is what we call a supervision system, i.e., it embeds the robot high-level decisions, controls its behavior and tries to react to contingencies, always considering the human it is interacting with. It is able to do so by taking into account shared plans, human mental states, its knowledge about the current state of the environment, and human actions. JAHRVIS is designed in such a way that it is generic enough to handle various kinds of tasks. Not only JAHRVIS controls the robot contribution to a collaborative task, it also tries to evaluate if the interaction is going well or not. It is possible thanks to a set of metrics we have built and a method to aggregate them. We claim that having a robot with this ability allows it to enhance and make more pertinent its decision-making processes. In future work, this granularity will allow the robot to know precisely on what level it needs to act when a low Quality of Interaction (QoI) is assessed. JAHRVIS has been integrated in a cognitive robotic architecture and effectively deployed to achieve several collaborative and service tasks. These tasks demonstrated the robot’s abilities related to perspective-taking, planning, knowledge representation with theory of mind, manipulation, and communication.
... More generally, there is a conceptual issue that makes a constraint-based approach to dialogue not totally adequate and that is related with the inferential nature of communication (Grice, 1957;Sperber and Wilson, 1987;Clark, 1996). It is not clear how these models could deal with meta-representations, such as speakers' beliefs about mutual knowledge and common ground. ...
... In any case, whether full mindreading or simulation, an inferential mechanism ought to be included in an account of referential communication in dialogue. Indeed, one of the major conceptual advances in the study of communication in psychology and human sciences is to consider it an inferential process in nature (Grice, 1957;Sperber and Wilson, 1987). ...
To reduce ambiguity across a conversation, interlocutors reach temporary conventions or referential precedents on how to refer to an entity. Despite their central role in communication, the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of precedents remain unclear, specifically the role and mechanisms by which information related to the speaker is integrated. We contrast predictions of one-stage, original two-stage, and extended two-stage models for the processing of speaker information and provide evidence favoring the latter: we show that both stages are sensitive to speaker-specific information. Using an experimental paradigm based on visual-world eye tracking in the context of a referential communication task, we look at the moment-by-moment interpretation of precedents and focus on the temporal profile of the influence of the speaker and linguistic information when facing ambiguity. We find two clearly identifiable moments where speaker-specific information has its effects on reference resolution. We conclude that these two stages reflect two distinct cognitive mechanisms, with different timings, and rely on different representational formats for encoding and accessing information about the speaker: a cue-driven memory retrieval process that mediates language processing and an inferential mechanism based on perspective-taking abilities.
... It is worth noting that this indirect path to a referent is not specific to the process of pronoun interpretation. Even with a full noun phrase, comprehenders will draw on its ingredients to enrich, modify, and sometimes bypass elements of its semantic meaning (e.g., Donnellan, 1966;Hobbs, 1987;Nash-Webber, 1978;Reimer, 1998;Roberts, 1993;Sperber & Wilson, 1986). For example, a child's description of some crayon scribbles as a cat is understood to mean "picture of a cat" (and, even so, the referent may lack any visual similarity to an actual cat). ...
Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., "Move the house on the left to area 12," where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun ("Now, move it…") should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation.
... affairs; while it is interpretively applied to signify another representation (for example, a probable or actual utterance or idea) that it is similar to the content, (Wilson, Deirdre;2006:9). ...
Allusion is a linguistic phenomenon that is usually considered as an implicit reference to a person, an event or to another work of literature, social, or political art. It is normally a sort of appeal to a hearer/reader to share knowledge with the speaker/ author and the hearer or reader should comprehend the speaker/author's intention, otherwise an allusion come to be merely a decorative device. Allusion is drawn to rhetoric of speeches of ancient well-known philosophers like Aristo and Plato. Successful politicians' language often occurs to be persuasive and for the purpose of persuasion, among other rhetorical strategies, they use extremely conventionalized allusion. In Arabic this term is widely used and highly associated with their literary work, and some of important names are Aziz Bagh and Zafar Is-haq Ansari. Lately, the phenomenon has been pointed to in new trends in linguistics as in pragmatics and conversational analysis. The present study is an attempt to highlight the similarities and differences between English and Arabic as far as the types and the functions of allusion is taken under consideration. Accordingly, it aims at classifying these kinds and the functions in these two different languages (English and Arabic) so as to find to which extent they are similar or different in employing this phenomenon. It is hypothesized that allusion is classified in similar way, and has similar functions in the two languages, but English is more explicit. As such, the study concluded with two significant facts; English is more explicit in this regard and the classification and the functions of allusion are different in the two languages.
... For groups organized in representative democracies, this part of the inquiry might coalesce into stable public opinion and influence voting and other political actions accordingly (cf. Habermas, 1989;Ferree et al., 2002;Siegel, 2021). 10 This might be one of the reasons why journalism is so prone to brand-loyalty: restricting oneself to a single news-source yields the more cognitively tractable task of keeping track of a more restricted public common ground. ...
... Communication requires certain methods and processes. Before communication, the department needs to sort out the con ict points, analyze the cause of the con ict, and come up with corresponding resolution strategies, rather than there is no result of communication (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). Regarding the results of the communication, the department also needs to audit the effectiveness of communication to avoid ineffective communication (Hogard & Ellis, 2006). ...
When the human resources department implements human resources policies and systems, there will be various obstacles from other departments. Because human and non-human departments are different in departmental goals and division of tasks, conflicts in human resource management are likely to occur, which affects the realization of organizational goals. This article constructs a conflict model between the two parties and studies the origin of the conflict between the HRM and non-HRM sectors, including personnel, policies, and systems. It also proposes ways to resolve conflicts, such as communication, role exchange, business process consensus, focus on organizational goals, and political skills. After the conflict between the two parties is resolved, it is beneficial to achieve a win-win result for employees, departments, and organizations.
... Contextualism (some scholars prefer to call it Linguistic Pragmatism, see Neale 2004, Devitt 2021) comprises a family of theories (Carston 2002;Recanati 2004Recanati , 2010Sperber & Wilson 1986) 8 that converge on semantic underdetermination, although they diverge with respect to many other important theoretical aspects and purposes. Semantic underdetermination says that the conventional meanings of many expressions (perhaps all, according to radical versions of contextualism, see Travis 2008, Unnsteinsson 2014) underdetermine their semantic contents. ...
One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis of the failure of minimalism with those cases. In Sect. 5 I strengthen the case against minimal contents by addressing two received says-based definitions of lying. My analysis of the failure of minimalism suggests that the distinction between lying and misleading, at least in some important cases, calls for a kind of utterance content that is grounded on conventions of language.
... For example, schizophrenia has been associated with impairments and abnormalities in the ability to understand others' mental states-our 'Theory of Mind' or 'ToM' (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). ToM underpins our ability to communicate with others (Brown-Schmidt, Gunlogson, & Tanenhaus, 2008;Clark & Brennan, 1991;Sperber & Wilson, 1987;Watson, Nixon, Wilson, & Capage, 1999) and predict their actions (Cohen, Sasaki, & German, 2015;Wimmer & Perner, 1983). (Frith, 2004;Harrington, Siegert, & McClure, 2005;Langdon, Coltheart, Ward, & Catts, 2002;Lee, Farrow, Spence, & Woodruff, 2004; G. J. Pickup & Frith, 2001). ...
Preregistration for an investigation into what role schizotypy plays in the ability to take another agent's perspective and in different language contexts.
Samuel, S., & Boeckle, M. (2021, October 19). Bilingualism & Theory of Mind. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BFJEY
... For example, schizophrenia has been associated with impairments and abnormalities in the ability to understand others' mental states-our 'Theory of Mind' or 'ToM' (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). ToM underpins our ability to communicate with others (Brown-Schmidt, Gunlogson, & Tanenhaus, 2008;Clark & Brennan, 1991;Sperber & Wilson, 1987;Watson, Nixon, Wilson, & Capage, 1999) and predict their actions (Cohen, Sasaki, & German, 2015;Wimmer & Perner, 1983). (Frith, 2004;Harrington, Siegert, & McClure, 2005;Langdon, Coltheart, Ward, & Catts, 2002;Lee, Farrow, Spence, & Woodruff, 2004; G. J. Pickup & Frith, 2001). ...
The Foreign Language Effect (FLE) proposes that adults behave more rationally in a second-language rather than mother-tongue context. In a series of perspective-taking experiments we investigated the potential for a reduced effect of egocentrically biasing privileged information in German-English adult bilinguals when it was presented in their second language. We also investigated whether the apparently deleterious effects of high schizotypal traits on perspective taking would be reduced in the same fashion, following evidence that both patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals report fewer traits and symptoms in a second language context. Contrary to expectations, bilinguals performed similarly on both versions of the perspective taking task. In follow-up experiments, we found only very limited evidence in support of both a deficit in perspective taking with high schizotypy, or its modulation through language context. Finally, results from a carefully controlled comparison of schizotypy questionnaires, one in English and another in German, showed no evidence that bilinguals reported fewer traits in their second language. We discuss these results in the context of potential boundary effects to the FLE, whereby inferences may be required to be emotional for an effect of language to emerge. Furthermore, we interpret these data as suggesting that the link between schizotypy and language context may be weaker or less reliable than hitherto supposed.
... We will explore to what extent this kind of creativity has been brought within the scope of a systematic understanding, involving physical entities that exhibit it through recognisably natural mechanisms. (Sperber and Wilson, 1987;1995;Wilson and Sperber, 2004). We then go on to outline how the theory has been applied to research humour in general and the intentional production of linguistic humour in particular. ...
This paper explores some aspects of the scientific study of creativity by focusing on intentionalattempts to create instances of linguistic humour. We argue that this sort of creativity canbe accounted for within an influential cognitive approach but that said framework is not arecipe for producing novel instances of humour and may even preclude them. We start byidentifying three great puzzles that arise when trying to pin down the core traits of creativity,and some of the ways taken by Cognitive Studies in this quest. We then consider what we call‘creative humour’, which exhibits the core features of the aforesaid creativity. We then explorehow a key cognitive approach to human communication can account for creative humour.We end by drawing lessons and highlighting limitations to cognitive approaches to creativity.
... [TR] (Sperber i Wilson, 1987;1995;Wilson i Sperber, 2004). Després passarem a esbossar com s'ha aplicat la teoria a la investigació de l'humor en general i la producció intencional de l'humor lingüístic en particular. ...
[Both this and the Castilian versions are translations of the editor from a paper originally written in English that will appear in the Anual Review 6]. Aquest article explora alguns aspectes de l'estudi científic de la creativitat centrant-se en la creació d'humor lingüístic intencionat. Sostenim que aquest tipus de creativitat pot explicar-se dins d'un enfocament cognitiu influent, però que aquest marc no és una recepta per a produir exemples nous d'humor i fins i tot pot evitar-los. Començarem identificant tres grans problemes que sorgeixen en tractar de precisar els trets centrals de la creativitat i algunes de les formes adoptades pels estudis cognitius en aquesta cerca. Després considerarem què anomenem «humor creatiu», que exhibeix les característiques centrals de la creativitat abans esmentada. Després investigarem com un enfocament cognitiu clau per a la comunicació humana pot explicar l'humor creatiu. Acaberem extraient conclusions i destacant les limitacions dels enfocaments cognitius per a entendre la creativitat.
... (es decir, que el humor creativo lingüístico puede explicarse dentro de un marco cognitivo), primero presentaremos los principios clave y generales de la Teoría de la Relevancia [TR] (Sperber y Wilson, 1987;1995;Wilson y Sperber, 2004). Luego pasamos a esbozar cómo se ha aplicado la teoría a la investigación del humor en general y la producción intencional del humor lingüístico en particular. ...
[Both this and the Valencian versions are translations of the editor from a paper originally written in English that will appear in the Anual Review 6]. Este artículo explora algunos aspectos del estudio científico de la creatividad centrándose en la creación de humor lingüístico intencionado. Sostenemos que este tipo de creatividad puede explicarse dentro de un enfoque cognitivo influyente, pero que dicho marco no es una receta para producir ejemplos novedosos de humor, e incluso puede excluirlos. Comenzaremos identificando tres grandes problemas que surgen al tratar de precisar los rasgos centrales de la creatividad y algunas de las formas adoptadas por los estudios cognitivos en esta búsqueda. Luego consideraremos a qué llamamos «humor creativo», que exhibe las características centrales de la creatividad antes mencionada. A continuación exploraremos cómo un enfoque cognitivo clave para la comunicación humana puede explicar el humor creativo. Por último, extraeremos conclusiones y destacaremos las limitaciones de los enfoques cognitivos para entender la creatividad.
... The problem we would then face is actually accounting for conceptual structure in communication given that it can't simply be read off of the surface form of the expression and that there obviously aren't any linguistic conventions concerning conceptual structure; in effect, the problem is accounting for conceptual structure in our pragmatics, and it's a serious problem at that. 8 Speakers don't have intentions or make inferences concerning complexes or correlates (see, e.g., Grice 1989;Sperber & Wilson 1986;Bach & Harnish, 1979), there certainly isn't anything in the common ground concerning conceptual structure (see, e.g., Stalnaker 1978Stalnaker , 2002Garcia-Carpintero 2015), and there is nothing discernible in the context more broadly construed (e.g., Kaplan 1989) that tells us anything about the structure of the concepts being expressed. Even if one of these approaches could somehow be applied here, there are further problems that follow; for instance, how cases in which we don't share the same concepts are actually supposed to be resolved or, if the mechanism involved were, say, inference, what would even prompt someone to make an inference to a concept with a different structure if both concepts in question always work with the initial interpretation and lead to the expected outcome. ...
The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical architecture of semantic atomism and its consequences with respect to natural language. In particular, it looks to explore the notion of possible concepts using the fundamental distinction between simple and complex concepts and expressions in Jerry Fodor’s atomism. The distinction is exploited to produce an unusual type of concept referred to as a correlate, which effectively mirrors complex concepts while maintaining a distinct underlying structure. Though harmless in and of themselves, their presence in the context of polymorphemic expressions suggests that atomism harbors a tacit and unintuitive form of polysemy that is problematic in its own right and that leads to other complications, some of which may be demonstrated on the example of communication. These issues are tied to the way atomism is structured, and although they seem to have gone largely unnoticed, they appear to bear negatively on the adequacy of atomism where natural language is concerned.
... As far as zero anaphora resolution is concerned, it is inferred that the question may not be what zero anaphora can do for the discourse, but what the discourse can do for zero anaphora. The anaphoric relationship in discourse is established by nouns, but maintained by pronouns and zero referents (Xiong, 2000). ...
Anaphora is the main linguistic means to establish discourse coherence, and anaphora resolution is the psychological process to maintain this coherence. Chinese discourse is characterized with providing multiplicity of linguistic clues to readers by employing various referential apparatuses such as pronoun anaphora, zero anaphora, and so on. As a way of avoiding repeated reference to an object that is mentioned beforehand, zero anaphora is frequently employed in discourse. The production and resolution of zero anaphora largely concerns some constraints underlying psychological mechanisms. We particularly focus on zero anaphora resolution in the present study to try to discover some specific aspects of the underlying mechanism, hoping to find out some factors unique to the resolution process. We designed the first two experiments to probe into the psychological reality when participants were presented with sentences containing either pronoun anaphora or zero anaphora or both under discourse condition with topic continuity in Experiment 1a and topic discontinuity in Experiment 1b. We did not find any significant difference in the reaction time between zero anaphora resolution and pronoun anaphora resolution, indicating that zero anaphora possibly works within the processing mechanism on which pronoun anaphora resolution depends. However, we found significantly longer time in reading the first sentence in any of the discourse, showing that the first-mention effect exists in anaphora resolution. We further explored the time course of zero anaphora resolution by measuring the reaction time during the period when participants read sentences that varied according to the location where zero anaphora occurred under two conditions: topic continuity (Experiment 2a) vs. topic discontinuity (Experiment 2b). The strategies of searching for the referential information were found divergent: the exhaustive searching strategy was adopted when the topics within a discourse were kept continuous and the heuristic searching strategy was employed when the topics were discontinuous. The design of Experiment 5 took the factor of voice type and situation consistency into consideration, investigating in what way do those factors influence the resolution of zero anaphora. The voice type, according to the results, plays a significant role for its exclusively close relationship with the first-mention effect.
... La decodificación de una oración del lenguaje natural es posible gracias a nuestro conocimiento de lo que significan las palabras y cómo se combinan, pero esto no es suficiente para entenderla más allá de lo literal. Según Sperber, D. y Wilson, D. (1987), en este proceso de decodificación existe siempre una brecha (gap) en la comprensión del mensaje, es decir, la decodificación de la oración nunca es suficiente para entender el mensaje que el hablante trata de transmitir. Para zanjar esa brecha, tenemos que realizar una inferencia. ...
Se narran las experiencias académicas del Cuerpo Académico Consolidado UAA-CA-117 del Departamento de Música de la Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes desde la perspectiva Students as Partners.
... Pragmatic inference or implication may explain the suspect's evidence perception as an underlying mechanism (for a review, see Harris & Monaco, 1978; see also Luke & Alceste, 2020). Oral communication is the most important method of exchanging our thoughts by giving linguistic signals (utterances) to one another (Sperber & Wilson, 1987). People make pragmatic inferences when the speaker's utterances suggest another piece of information, which is not directly asserted or logically implied (Harris & Monaco, 1978). ...
When conducting an investigation, police officers collect evidence from various sources (e.g., humans, objects, areas). The type of evidence (i.e., physical vs. personal) can affect the investigators’ beliefs about the suspect and how the evidence can be used. In turn, how the evidence is used during the interrogation can impact the suspect’s perception of how much evidence the police hold. To date, no study has systematically examined the extent to which types of collected evidence affect investigative decision-making and suspects’ perceptions of evidence. This thesis examined the effects of evidence on the two parties (i.e., police investigators and suspects). In Study Ⅰ, police officers in South Korea (N = 202) read four crime reports where one suspect and one piece of critical evidence were given. The critical evidence was manipulated by four different evidence types (DNA, CCTV, fingerprint, and eyewitness evidence). Then, they rated the suspect’s culpability and the reliability of the critical evidence. Significant differences were found between the conditions in the predicted directions, such that eyewitness testimony (vs. DNA, CCTV, and fingerprint evidence) significantly decreased officers’ ratings of the suspect’s culpability and the reliability of critical evidence. Moreover, experienced (vs. inexperienced) officers tended to perceive most types of criminal evidence as less reliable. Study Ⅱ was designed to examine the effects of available evidence on interrogators’ selection of specific tactics to use when interrogating a suspect. Police
interrogators (N = 106) were randomly allocated to one of five homicide scenarios in each of which only one type of critical evidence (DNA, CCTV, fingerprint, eyewitness, or no evidence) identified a suspect. Officers were then asked to imagine what tactics they would use when interrogating a suspect. A list of 27 tactic names and descriptions was given for their selection, which was classified into five types of tactics. No significant differences were observed between the conditions – that is, the evidence type did not affect the type of interrogation tactics chosen. Study Ⅲa was conducted with prisoners (N = 59) to examine how suspects’ perceptions of the evidence would vary depending on the type of interrogation tactics applied to them. Participants rated their perceived evidence for five interrogation tactic types: (a) Evidential/Substantiated,
(b) Evidential/Unsubstantiated, (c) Nonevidential/Crime-Relevant, (d) Nonevidential/CrimeIrrelevant, (e) Context-Manipulation. Prisoners tended to infer that the interrogator held more evidence when the tactics that related to using substantiated (reliable) evidence were employed. Study Ⅲb surveyed laypersons with no prior criminal experience (N = 117). The same design, procedure, and materials were adopted. As with prisoners, laypersons’ ratings were significantly higher for the tactics with substantiated evidence than for the other four types. Additional group comparisons in evidence perception show that prisoners’ ratings fluctuated much more across the 27 individual interrogation tactics than did laypersons’ ratings. In summary, the results suggest that evidence appears to be influential with respect to investigators’ judgments about the culpability of a suspect before interrogation. Also, some of the interrogation tactics may be more effective than others in affecting the suspect’s perception of the evidence; further research is needed into factors associated with diverse police tactics affecting the perception of evidence. The present findings supplement our understanding of the effects of evidence on investigators’ and suspects’ decision-making in a police investigation.
... Relatedly, many theorists argue that standing meaning will not typically determine a complete proposition (Bach, 1994;Carston, 2002;Recanati, 2004;Sperber & Wilson, 1986). If this is correct, then standing content, unlike assertoric content, will typically be highly indeterminate. ...
I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech.
... Constituting only a minority of the total, such postings with no replies are considered to generate little interest from the Hong Kong Travel Forum community. Based on the Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975) and Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986), the functions of replies are strongly determined by the topics, if the replies are to be considered communicatively meaningful and relevant. As such, the focus of the present study lies in the functions of the topics, but not of the replies. ...
Previous research on online travel communication has paid little attention to destination forums, where thousands of travellers worldwide post and view topics related to a place. The present study examines the functions of a destination forum on TripAdvisor. Through the first large-scale corpus-assisted discourse analysis of thousands of topic-initiating posts, this study identifies the functions of the forum, analyses how these functions are realised through prominent linguistic and discursive features, and investigates how these functions are performed by members at different levels of contribution and knowledge. The findings show that destination forums are functionally distinct from closely-related online travel texts and from forums in other professional contexts. This demonstrates the need to carry out detailed analyses of actual online travel communication across the spectrum to fully grasp the richness and subtlety of a set of interrelated forms of tourism discourse both as a whole, and as part of the whole.
... This extends Henrich Gil-White's logic: when sampling several models, it can make sense to pay a deferential cost even to someone who is not particularly competent, as long as his/her opinion is original. Second, on a psychological level, our model can also be framed in terms of relevance theory (55). "Originality" is actually a way to characterize a "relevant" utterance in the sense of Sperber & Wilson, which is, in turn, rewarded (56). ...
... This extends Henrich Gil-White's logic: when sampling several models, it can make sense to pay a deferential cost even to someone who is not particularly competent, as long as his/her opinion is original. Second, on a psychological level, our model can also be framed in terms of relevance theory (55). "Originality" is actually a way to characterize a "relevant" utterance in the sense of Sperber & Wilson, which is, in turn, rewarded (56). ...
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of why would anyone engage in individual information seeking, which is a necessary condition for social learning's efficacy. We propose an evolutionary model solving this paradox, provided agents (i) aim not only at information quality but also vie for audience and prestige, and (ii) do not only value accuracy but also reward originality -- allowing them to alleviate herding effects. We find that under some conditions (large enough success rate of informed agents and intermediate taste for popularity), both social learning's higher accuracy and the taste for original opinions are evolutionary-stable, within a mutually beneficial division of labour-like equilibrium. When such conditions are not met, the system most often converges towards mutually detrimental equilibria.
... Writing down the implicated meaning explicitly boils down to attributing a sentence vector to another sentence and labeling it as representing the implicated meaning of this other sentence. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995), implicated meaning is propositional, which is why there is arguably no principled difference between representing explicit meaning or implicated meaning using a vector. This means that the sentence vector would represent the meaning of a proposition in both cases and that they could both be derived by combining word vectors. ...
Distributional approaches (DA) to modelling meaning in use are getting more and more attention. Inspired by the distributional hypothesis of Harris (1954), they represent the meaning of a word using a vector consisting of the relative occurrence of this word with respect to other words occurring in its vicinity. Representing the meaning of a word using a vector facilitate the assessment of the similarity of meanings between words. If the distance between two word-vectors is small, then these words have similar meanings, which is to say that they occur in a given corpus with similar surrounding words at similar frequencies. One advantage of DA is that they take some types of contextual clues into account while simultaneously lending themselves to computational implementations (Landauer et al. 1998; Lenci 2008). Distributional models of meaning were first developed to deal with word-vectors (Lenci 2018), but some expanded its scope so that they could represent sentence-vector by combining word-vectors together (Clark 2015). However, such measures of word similarity do not transfer easily to notions of sentence similarity, especially when we consider various kinds of implicatures: compositional distributional approaches completely omit the treatment of the implicated meaning. Nowadays, sentence similarity measures have many applications like paraphrase detection and short answer tasks (Koleva et al. 2014), automatic summarization (Erkan & Radev 2004), and machine translation (Liu & Zong 2004) and it is important to make sure sentence similarity measures take into account the full meaning conveyed by a sentence. This, as I claim in this chapter, will only be possible if both the explicit and the implicated meaning of a sentence are considered.
Language comprehension and the ability to infer others’ thoughts (theory of mind [ToM]) are interrelated during development and language use. However, neural evidence that bears on the relationship between language and ToM mechanisms is mixed. Although robust dissociations have been reported in brain disorders, brain activations for contrasts that target language and ToM bear similarities, and some have reported overlap. We take another look at the language-ToM relationship by evaluating the response of the language network, as measured with fMRI, to verbal and nonverbal ToM across 151 participants. Individual-participant analyses reveal that all core language regions respond more strongly when participants read vignettes about false beliefs compared to the control vignettes. However, we show that these differences are largely due to linguistic confounds, and no such effects appear in a nonverbal ToM task. These results argue against cognitive and neural overlap between language processing and ToM. In exploratory analyses, we find responses to social processing in the “periphery” of the language network—right-hemisphere homotopes of core language areas and areas in bilateral angular gyri—but these responses are not selectively ToM-related and may reflect general visual semantic processing.
We commonly evaluate search engines and the results they return, but what grounds those evaluations? One straightforward way of evaluating search engines appeals to their ability to satisfy the goals of the user. Are there, in addition, user-independent norms, that allow us to evaluate search engines in ways that may come apart from their ability to satisfy the individuals who use them? One way of grounding such norms appeals to moral or political considerations. I argue that in addition to those norms, there are also distinct user-independent epistemic norms that apply to search engines. Evaluating search engines relative to them, however, requires us to appreciate the impact search engines have on our practices and norms of inquiry more broadly: by systematically altering the accessibility of information, search engines don’t just give us information but shape our collective imagination, and the categories it operates over.
The book focuses on the construction of meaning within the framework of cross-gender talk-in-interaction among Romanian language speaking participants and aims at identifying the importance of the variable of gender in the determination of different conversational styles for men and women. The theoretical background includes ample inquiry into language and gender, linguistic sexism and stereotyping, an extensive survey of traditional and most recent views of feminism. Following a case-study using the Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches, the conclusion is that, although there are recurrent features, such as conflict talk for male speakers and cooperative verbal interaction for female speakers, the generalizations regarding the variable of gender are impossible when analyzing conversational styles. The findings of this research might be of help for both Romanian and other language scholars belonging to a multiplicity of domains such as linguistics, sociology, psychology, who are interested in the male/female interactional construction of meaning.
This study looks into the persuasive strategies used in Prophet Mohammed's final sermon (PBUH). The qualitative design was used in this study. The persuasive strategies theory was used in this study to analyze Prophet Mohammed's final sermon. The analysis of this sermon revealed that it contains all three persuasive strategies: logos, pathos, and ethos. The results revealed that the frequency percentages for the selected strategies are as follows: logos 50%, pathos 40%, and ethos 10%. Furthermore, the sermon contains a variety of speech acts. This study is significant because the speaker is well-known, which piques the interest of many readers/listeners. Furthermore, the sermon is clear and full of logical sentences, which appeals to a wide range of readers, including politicians, speechmakers, and researchers. Furthermore, this study is significant for linguists and researchers because it examines the sermon from previously overlooked perspectives.
Taboo is a form of prohibited act that exists due to customary factors, cultures, and beliefs. In the context of the multicultural Malaysian society, a lot of information and knowledge regarding cultural taboos, especially that of language, are kept within the race, ethnicity, or culture itself, and are not known by those outsides of the community. As a result, the unintentional use of taboos by non-native speakers due to the lack of in-depth information and knowledge about the language’s taboos will cause dignity threatening acts and arise negative impressions towards the speaker. Thus, a study that aims to explain the mutual knowledge (mutual/shared knowledge) about taboos to ensure the use of polite language by speakers is highlighted. Using the interview method, data on taboos obtained from several respondents in Tawau, Sabah were analyzed based on the idea of shared knowledge by Sperber and Wilson (1995). Shared knowledge of taboos in a cross-cultural society will ensure polite communication between language users.
The types of speech acts in Prophet Mohammed's farewell sermon were investigated in this study. The last sermon of Prophet Mohammed was analyzed using the speech acts theory in this qualitative case study. According to the analysis, the sermon contains a variety of speech acts. Directives, assertives, commissives, declaratives, and expressives were the speech acts used in this sermon. This study is significant because the speaker is well-known, piquing the interest of many readers. Furthermore, because the sermon is clear and full of logical sentences, many readers, such as politicians, speechmakers, and researchers, may benefit from the choice of words or the structure of the sermon. Furthermore, this research is important for linguists and researchers. Furthermore, this study is significant for linguists and researchers because it examined the sermon from previously overlooked perspectives.
A riddle is a question that usually occurs in prose and poetic form. The composition of poetic riddles is complicated since it encompasses trick structure of English utterances that require more efforts and deep thinking on the part of readers to reach the intention of the riddle maker. The present study investigated the interpretation of utterances in poetic riddles when translated into English. The main objective was to extend the tricky utterances in poetic riddles to obtain the intention of the riddle maker through translation. To achieve this target, a Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson (1986; 1995) was adopted to cognitively interpret how the poetic riddles worked through translation. Then, Bach’s (1994) Ambiguity was also used to explain the meaning that fell under a word, phrase or even a statement. Finally, Gutt’s (1991; 1998; 2000) notion on the directness and indirectness of the interpretation was employed. Overall, the results showed that Arabic poetic riddles included ambiguous words as well as implicit meanings that require decoding to gain the intent word made by the riddle maker. Furthermore, Arabic poetic riddles are full of attribute words to help getting the intent word.
Upon hearing the phrase Some cats meow , a listener might pragmatically infer that ‘Some but not all cats meow’. This is known as a scalar implicature and it often arises when a speaker produces a weak linguistic expression instead of a stronger one. Several L2 studies claim that pragmatic inferences are generated by default and their comprehension presents no challenges to L2 learners. However, the evidence obtained from these studies largely stems from offline-based tasks that provide limited information about how scalar implicatures are processed. This study investigated scalar implicature processing among L2 speakers of English and the degree to which differences in L2 proficiency and Theory of Mind abilities would modulate pragmatic responding. The experiment used an online sentence verification paradigm that required participants to judge, among multiple control items, the veracity of under-informative sentences, such as Some cats are mammals , and to respond as quickly as possible. A true response to this item is indicative of a logical some and perhaps all reading and a false response to a pragmatic some but not all reading. Our results showed evidence that scalar inferences are not generated by default. The answer linked to the pragmatic reading some but not all took significantly longer to make relative to the answer that relies on the logical interpretation some and perhaps all . This processing slowdown was also significantly larger among participants with lower English proficiency. Further exploratory analyses of participants’ Theory of Mind, as measured by the Social Skill subscale in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, revealed that socially inclined participants are more likely than the socially disinclined to derive a scalar inference. These results together provide new empirical insights into how L2 learners process scalar implicatures and thus implications for processing theories in experimental pragmatics and second language acquisition.
Pragmatics Online examines the use and interpretation of language and communication in digitally mediated contexts. It provides insight into how meaning is communicated online, with a focus on how users negotiate and navigate the constraints and resources of social media sites and other online contexts.
The book introduces key concepts in the study of digital contexts and online communication, and discusses how these can be understood from the perspective of pragmatics. Each chapter examines a different topic and includes an overview of key research alongside original pragmatic analyses of data. Topics include sharing and liking, emoji and emotions, memes, and clickbait. Kate Scott focuses on how ideas and topics from pragmatics can be applied to mediated contexts, irrespective of the particular media.
The book is an essential guide to the pragmatics of online discourse and behaviour for students and researchers working in the areas of digital pragmatics, language and media, and English language, linguistics, and communication studies.
Human pointing is foundational to language acquisition and sociality. The current chapter explores the ontogenetic origins of the human pointing gesture in infancy. First, the authors define infant pointing in terms of function, cognition, motivation, and morphology. Then, the authors review current evidence for predictors of infant pointing on child and caregiver levels, because any predictors provide insights into the basic developmental factors. From this review, the authors introduce and discuss a number of pertinent accounts on the emergence of pointing: social shaping accounts (pointing-from- reaching; pointing-from-non-communicative pointing) and social cognition accounts (pointing-from-imitation; pointing-from-gaze-following). The authors end by presenting a synthesis, which holds that child-level cognitive factors, specifically directedness andsocial motivation, interact with caregiver-level social factors, specifically responsiveness and assisting actions relevant to infants’ directed activity. The interaction of these factors creates social goals and formats that scale up to pointing acts expressing triadic relations between infant, caregiver, and entities at a distance in the context of joint activity and experience.
Ujaran tidak langsung (UTL) yang berbentuk ayat tanya yang terdapat dalam skrip drama bahasa Melayu sering kali digunakan untuk menyampaikan makna yang tertentu yang sukar untuk difahami makna sebenarnya secara jelas dan tepat. Pentaksiran terhadap makna UTL yang berbentuk ayat tanya perlu dilakukan dengan penuh teliti supaya makna sebenar bagi ujaran tersebut dapat difahami dengan jelas dan tepat oleh pendengar atau pembaca skrip drama. Oleh itu, pentafsiran makna UTL yang berbentuk ayat tanya perlulah dilakukan dengan berpandukan pendekatan pragmatik. Sehubungan itu, kajian ini dijalankan bagi menghuraikan makna UTL yang berbentuk ayat tanya dalam skrip drama terpilih berpandukan Prinsip Makna dalam Interaksi. Prinsip Makna dalam Interaksi digunakan dalam kajian ini kerana prinsip ini bersifat menyeluruh, yakni dengan cara berorientasikan penutur dan pendengar, serta memfokuskan faktor sosial dan faktor kognitif tanpa menyisihkan satu daripadanya. Data kajian merupakan tiga UTL yang berbentuk ayat tanya yang diambil daripada tiga buah skrip drama bahasa Melayu hasil tulisan Mustapha Kamil Yassin, iaitu Atap Genting Atap Rumbia, Dua Tiga Kucing Berlari, dan Di Balik Takbir Harapan. Tiga UTL tersebut ialah “Apa nak berkerusi meja benar.”, “Siapa pula yang berkatakan saya nak bermenantukan jantan Cina?” dan “Apakah encik hendak membiarkan keadaan kami begitu?”. Hasil kajian mendapati bahawa tiga ujaran tersebut diucapkan secara tidak langsung, mengandungi potensi makna yang relevan dengan dibantu oleh konteks yang melatari perbualan antara penutur dan pendengar. Potensi makna yang relevan itu ialah menyatakan penolakan terhadap pelawaan pendengar, mempamerkan ciri penggunaan metafora, sindiran, keterujaan, tegahan, penggunaan amalan kesantunan dan kesopanan, pujukan dan sebagainya.
We aim to analyze how state rhetoric influences conceptualizations of COVID-19 presentation in the media.
No other form of communicative interaction has had a broad impact on the
development and conceptive capacity of communication as an implicature.
Implicature has long been recognized as a highly psychological phenomenon, and
this research has shown that it is the most psycho-cognitive method of all
interpretation processes. One of the most subtle impacts of implicature on
communicative development is shown on the letters traded-off between Imam Ali
and Muawiya. It has been observed, in letters, it is often the meaning that the writer
means through expressions, and words seem more than what is written. In the
pragmatic domain, this is called “Implicature.” There has been very little work
directed towards letters in general, and it may be almost non-existent for the letters
exchanged between Imam Ali and Muawiya in particular. In relevance theory, an
understanding of the receivers’ abilities and assuming propositions on the
expectation that they will spend little effort to grasp the conveyed meaning. This
type of cooperation contributes to facilitating the process of interpretation, and it
seems an effective factor to achieve a successful interaction.
This interpretive-analytical study is conducted on 15 letters traded-off between
Imam Ali and Muawiya. Data are collected by a valid and reliable observation,
document analysis of data interpretation based on strategies offer by relevance
theory. On the relevance model, to arrive at implicature, the inference seems an
urgent necessity. It is a psych-cognitive process, locates in mindreading, intentions,
encyclopedic entries, recursive studies, as an input to perform matching,
comparing, and recognizing. Following the psycho-cognitive path (inference)
contributes to bridging the gap between what the lexicons assume and their truth�conditions; this then reduces possible ‘loose use opportunities.’ Besides,
disambiguation, reference assignment, enrichment, and ad hoc concept are
involved in facilitating the process of interpretation and arriving at the
communicator’s implicature. This study investigates the validity of its hypotheses
in which relevance theory is intelligible for investigating the present data since
implicature might be recovered psychologically rather than linguistically, which
views language\cognition and culture\behaviour are important to identify the
communicators’ intentions. Elaboration of purpose attention has also been paid to the way that the senders followed in conveying implicatures, and what are the
logical strategies can be used to recover the implied meaning.
The study finds that this kind of correspondence is political implicature, where it
reveals issues related to the Caliphate, Islamic state, and allegiance. For the two�ground layer species, the study finds that Imam Ali’s implicatures depict his
argumentative, factual, and informative intentions, while Muawiya’s implicatures
employ polemical, emotional, and procrastinative intentions. Implicature, from
Imam Ali’s viewpoint, is an effective means that works to change or modify beliefs,
thoughts intuitively, or contemplatively when it is logical, relevant, evidential, and
reason-based content. This research concludes, there is a purpose identified in the
sender’s letters that are argumentative or polemical intention. These two intentions
are employed in four purposes: convincing, threatening, preaching, and warning.
This thesis subdivided into five chapters. First chapter is the introduction
includes some information, which seem necessary to understand the general
perception of the thesis. Second chapter includes some scholarly sources and views
about pragmatics, implicature, letters and political discourse. Third chapter is the
research methodology focuses on the research type, data collection and analysis.
Fourth chapter concentrates on analysis of the data. Fifth chapter is the conclusions
recommendations and suggestion for further studies.
A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature of autism is difficulty with social communication. Traditionally, these difficulties are regarded as autistic impairments, related to proposed cognitive and social deficits. From this perspective the onus of failures in mutual understanding
is placed within the mind/brains of the autistic individuals involved. However, recent research in the social sciences and critical autism studies is beginning to demonstrate that non-autistic people have challenges in understanding autistic people too, and to reframe the communicative difficulties as a two-way double empathy problem.
A survey of the literature reveals the need for further empirical investigation of the proposed double empathy problem. This thesis builds on contemporary studies examining intersubjectivity between autistic and non-autistic people, and moves this research into the domain of cognitive linguistics. It explores, theoretically, whether relevance theory (a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) might help make sense of what is happening pragmatically during these breakdowns in mutual understanding. It also examines whether a radical reframing of these breakdowns as akin to intercultural problems might provide any valuable insights.
The thesis begins with an interdisciplinary literature review that outlines the central constructs and themes contained within. To begin, the thesis presents an overview of autism research, covering both traditional biomedical theories and more recent phenomenological perspectives informed by the neurodiversity paradigm. Autistic minds are considered as autistically embodied agents navigating a social world comprised of non-autistically shaped norms. Relevance theory
is then introduced within the wider context of cognitive pragmatics, and its application to interactions across dispositional borders (i.e. between autistic and non-autistic individuals) technically explored.
The second half of the thesis reports on and discusses the results of a small-scale linguistic ethnographic case study. Eight core autistic participants engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with; (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner;
(2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions to investigate where mutual understanding is and is not
achieved.
There is increasing acknowledgement of the importance of autistic stakeholder involvement in autism research. In order to bring my own autistic insights more centrally into this work, I have taken an autoethnographic approach. This method draws on the lived experience of the researcher as a member of the group being studied, and as such offers an emancipatory mechanism for raising up previously marginalized voices.
Der Umgang mit rechten Diskursen und Agitateuren ist vielfach Medienthema, sowie Thema unter JournalistenMedien und anderen Medienmachenden. Die These, die Provokationen und Falschaussagen politisch ungeliebter Akteure nicht unwidersprochen zu lassen, bedarf einer kritischen Überprüfung. Sie ignoriert zumeist die Erkenntnisse über die Funktionsweise von Sprache und anderer Zeichen und deren kognitive Wirkung.
Understanding of art will be complete if it can express a particular value. One source of values in art is the pleasure of its objectivity, which encompasses intrinsic and extrinsic values with aesthetical visualization. The values of implicature in the Srimpi Anglir Mendhung can be found by referring to the expression of verdictive speech acts in its verbal and nonverbal components. In order to study the implicature values contained in Srimpi Anglir Mendhung, the researcher uses a qualitative research methodology based on the theory of pragmatics and theory of performing arts. The strategies used for collecting data are a library study, a study of visual recordings, a study of audio recordings, and interviews. The technique of analysis is interactive and involves the triangulation of data, methodology, and theory. The results of the discussion show that the implicature in the expression of verdictive speech acts in Srimpi Anglir Mendhung is a form of adulation and homage to the noble king, Sultan Agung Hanyakra Kusuma from the Mataram Kingdom. The values of heroism and virtue contained in Srimpi Anglir Mendhung are a reflection of the values of life, which should be emulated and appreciated by the audience and general public.Keywords: implicature, expression of verdictive speech acts, and Srimpi Anglir Mendhung dance. ABSTRAKPemahaman tentang seni terjadi secara lengkap apabila mampu untuk mengungkapkan suatu nilai. Satu sumber nilai seni adalah kenikmatan yang diberikan oleh objektifitas terhadap nilai-nilai instrinsik dan ekstrinsik dengan visualisasi estetis. Merujuk pada ekspresi tindak tutur verdiktif pada komponen verbal dan nonverbal, Tari Srimpi Anglir Mendhung dapat ditarik implikatur nilainya. Untuk mengkaji implikatur nilai yang terkandung dalam Tari Srimpi Anglir Mendhung, peneliti menggunakan metodologi penelitian kualitatif dengan berlandaskan teori pragmatik dan teori seni pertunjukan. Strategi pengumpulan data berupa studi pustaka, studi rekaman visual, studi rekaman audio, dan wawancara. Teknik analisisnya bersifat interaktif dengan mentrianggulasikan data, metodologis, dan teori. Hasil pembahasan ditemukan bahwa implikatur ekspresi tindak tutur verdiktif Srimpi Anglir Mendhung merupakan bentuk sanjungan dan penghormatan terhadap raja yang dimuliakan yaitu Sultan Agung Hanyakra Kusuma dari Kerajaan Mataram. Nilai-nilai keprajuritan dan kebajikan yang terkandung dalam Srimpi Anglir Mendhung merupakan cerminan nilai-nilai kehidupan, layak diteladani dan diapresiasi oleh audiens maupun masyarakat luas.Kata kunci: ekspresi, implikatur, Tari Srimpi Anglir Mendhung, tindak tutur verdiktif
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