Modularity and pragmatics

The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of language use for a scientific theory of language will be discussed, noting the possible further implications for a science of the mind. It will be argued that a corollary of the creative aspect of language use is that a science of language can study the mechanisms that make language use possible, but that such a science cannot explain how these mechanisms enter into human action in the form of language use.

This study explores how Japanese L2 users in a higher education workplace in Japan experience language use and identity negotiation in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) discourse community, specifically focusing on whether/how pragmatic norms are constructed. The narrative analysis of the participants’ stories of their interactional experiences shows that the macro- as well as the mezzo-level discourses circulating around the intercultural workplace discursively made a significant impact on their pragmatic aspect of language use. The analysis also highlights the challenges faced by the participants in navigating their identities between contradictory sociocultural norms and co-constructing ad-hoc pragmatic norms. Yet, developing intercultural awareness relevant to ELF communication could lead to a breakthrough in achieving interactional robustness. The findings suggest the need for further investigations into the holistic use of ELF in intercultural workplaces in East Asia, as well as the implementation of ELF-focused pragmatic instruction in English education in Japan.

The dynamic processes involved in language use and development of a given bilingual/cultural group within a monolingually‐dominant society necessitate constant language modification for the bilinguals, the consequence of which is modification of their cultural identity (self‐ or other‐defined). The degree of modification of self‐identity of a bilingual in a multicultural society can be correlated with the disappearances/appearances of aspects of language use which may wane and wax in relation to a dynamically‐shared culture. In other words, cultural identity may be perceived by an individual as the result of an on‐going process of logogenesis. The present study investigates aspects of Greek and English language use among some second, and third generation bilinguals living in the Australian urban social context of Adelaide, where the dynamic process of code interaction has created a sociolinguistic continuum that is used to define ingroup memberships. This process establishes levels of self‐catego...

Severe traumatic brain injury, frontal lesions, and social aspects of language use: A study of French-speaking adults

Pragmatics as a branch of linguistics can be characterized as the study of the relations between linguistic properties of utterances on the one hand, and aspects of the context in which a given utterance is used on the other. Computational pragmatics is pragmatics with computational means, which include models of dialogue management processes, collections of language use data, annotation schemes and standards, software tools for corpus creation, annotation and exploration, process models of language generation and interpretation, context representations, and inference methods for context-dependent utterance generation and interpretation processes. The linguistic side of the relations that are studied in pragmatics is formed primarily by utterances in a conversation or sentences in a written text. In the case of written text the context side consists of the surrounding text and the setting in which the text is meant to function. In spoken or multimodal dialogue, the context of an utterance is formed by what has been said before and the interactive setting, but additionally by other perceptual, social, and mutual epistemic information (see Context Modeling). Much of this information is dynamic, as it changes during a dialogue and, more importantly, as a result of the dialogue, since the participants in a conversation influence each other’s state of information when they understand each other. Dialogue contexts are thus updated continuously as an effect of communication. Central to computational pragmatics is the development and use of computational tools and models for studying the relations between utterances and their context of use. Essential for understanding these relations are the use of inference and the description of language in terms of actions that are inspired by the context and that are intended to change the context. This bibliography therefore focuses on publications concerned with the computational modeling of dialogue in terms of communicative actions including the use of inference for utterance interpretation. It also considers the more static analysis of discourse coherence and semantic relations in text, and concludes with references to recent activities concerning the construction and use of resources in computational pragmatics, in particular annotation schemes, annotated corpora, and tools for corpus construction and use. The popularity of probabilistic approaches to natural language processing can also be seen in studies of pragmatic aspects of language use, although these approaches are so far not as important as in some other areas of language processing. The so-called rational speech acts (RSA) model treats language use as a recursive process in which probabilistic speaker and listener agents reason about each other’s intentions to enrich the literal semantics of their language along broadly Gricean lines. The core references for this approach are also included in this biography under Inference in Language Processing.

The present study attempts to expand the scope of investigation on the role of bilingualism in third language use. Recent studies have attributed an advantage to bilinguals over monolinguals with respect to particular aspects of language use like communicative sensitivity(Oskaar, 1990), metalinguistic awareness(Cenoz & Valencia, 1994; Jessner, 1999; Lasagabaster, 1998) and interactional competence(Jessner, 1997). Nevertheless, very little research to date has been devoted to investigate pragmatic competence of third language learners(Fouser, 1997). On that account, our study aims at ascertaining the effect of bilingualism in third language learners' pragmatic production and metapragmatic awareness with a focus on request acts linguistic formulations. Regarding pragmatic production, we analyzed the use of request formulae by 80 monolingual(Castilian) and 80 bilingual(Catalan and Castilian) female learners of English as a foreign language in a discourse completion test and role-play task. We also contrasted participants' responses to a discourse evaluation test in determining their degree of metapragmatic awareness. Results from our analysis point to the advantage of bilinguals over monolinguals in justifying their evaluation on the appropriateness of certain requests'strategies to particular contexts, as well as on their use of request realizations. Findings from our study seem to call for further research on the pragmatic competence of third language learners of English thereby considering other speech acts or pragmatic aspects and also by analyzing subjects from different linguistic backgroun ds.

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions.

This research sought to identify changes in terms of word choice, sentence structure, and semantics introduced by ChatGPT and how the functionality of ChatGPT impacts the pragmatics of the English language: politeness, deixis, and discourse markers. This study used corpus analysis as part of the methodology involving Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for part-of-speech tagging and sentiments, analyzing changes in wordings, syntaxes, and semantic elements generated by ChatGPT as an advanced language modal. A qualitative approach, including user surveys and comparative analysis, proved useful in clarifying the changing patterns of politeness, deixis, and discourse markers in AI-supported communication. Henceforth, ChatGPT generates neologism, unique cultural references, verbal contextual adaptations, and a wide range of technical terms. Moreover, the researchers found that user preferences for communication mediums vary, which showed a complex field of users and their expectations in the context of language generated by ChatGPT. Thus, it was observed that ChatGPT contributes significantly to developing the pragmatic aspects of language use in the modern era. Hence, the study proposes that the ChatGPT polishes the usage of politeness terms and improves its deixis along with formal discourse markers. This highlights the need for continuous improvement, especially in areas such as politeness, deixis management, and integration of discourse markers for the developers.

This chapter focuses on one particular component of the human capacity for language, which Chomsky calls the ‘creative aspect of language use’ (CALU). It argues that the CALU is a distinct module of the mind, and that it is innate in humans. It shows that the biological paradigm adds nothing to our understanding of it. On the contrary, there is a striking lack of evidence that this part of the language faculty is neurally embodied, genetically encoded, or an evolved adaptation. It seems to be characterized by a kind of abductive reasoning that does not even fit within the computational theory of the mind. The chapter concludes that this may be an instance of a sort of nativism that falls outside the purview of evolutionary psychology and would fit better within a different explanatory paradigm.

The Douglas Fir Group Framework as a Resource Map for Language Teacher Education

Form predictability has long been known to influence speaker behaviour in language learning and use. However, this observation has largely remained dissociated from the question of the most apt theoretical framing of the effects observed. We set out to seek evidence that speakers’ relationship to form predictability is best characterised in paradigmatic terms: in an experimental task comparable to prediction of one word form from a related one, speakers appear sensitive to the probabilistic, implicative relations that make up a morphological paradigm. We find this effect to be omnidirectional, from any paradigm cell to any paradigm cell. Form predictability does not impact speaker behaviour in a vacuum, but instead works together with aspects of memory and learning to organise the mental lexicon and inform language use. In a corpus study, we map out the complex relationships that exist between paradigmatic form predictability, lexeme frequency and cell frequency in the context of naturalistic language use. Speakers appear to exploit all available probabilistic relationships between the word forms of a language in a way that is predicted by Word and Paradigm theories of morphology, with memory and predictive processing playing a mediating role in all aspects of language use.

By examining the complex aspects of language use and attitudes among Korean-Chinese students living in Heilongjiang Province in China, this study aims to analyze the bilingual patterns of Korean-Chinese students from various angles and provide an in-depth understanding of their language usage patterns, attitudes toward language, and how bilingual skills are formed and developed in socio-cultural contexts. In this paper, based on the national public language supply policy at Heilongjiang Korean-Chinese School, a field survey and survey were conducted on students from Heilongjiang Province Korean-Chinese School to accurately grasp the status and attitude of bilingualism in Chinese and Korean. For the conduct of the study, first of all, the survey method and the subject of the survey were confirmed as students of 32 Korean-Chinese schools in Heilongjiang Province. Next, the pattern of bilingualism in Korean and Chinese was analyzed through a survey on language attitude, language status cause, language and character use, and language relationship. Next, the problems of bilingualism were confronted, and a strategy for optimizing bilingualism according to the cause was devised. The results of the survey showed that Korean-Chinese school students were deeply interested in Chinese and Chinese culture. In other words, it was premised that they should be able to accurately recognize the superiority of China's bilingual policy and speak both Korean and standard Chinese, which are the native languages of the Korean people, but it showed the reality that the Korean language ability was weakening day by day compared to Chinese. Therefore, in this paper, the optimization strategies for bilingualism were divided into five categories: language dissemination and education programs, socio-cultural environment encouraging language use, the development of bilingual education programs, home and community support for language use, and policy support for language preservation. Therefore, the Heilongjiang provincial government, schools, and parents should set up an environment where Korean language education can develop soundly through policies and measures to promote full promotion and distribution by developing Korean and Chinese in a balanced manner.

YN AN EARLIER PAPER an attempt was made to show a | relationship between two forms of linguistic expression and the way Xrelationships to objects were established.l It was argued that one form of language use, called a public language, facilitated thinking of a descriptive order and sensitivity to a particular form of social interaction. In the earlier paper a public language was discussed with reference to its use by the unskilled and semi-skilled strata, but approximations to a public language may well be spoken in such widely separated groups as criminal sub-cultures, rural groups, armed forces and adolescent groups in particular situations. Characteristics of a public language are: 2 I. Short, grammatically simple, often unfinished sentences, a poor syntactical construction with a verbal form stressing the active mood. 2. Simple and repetitive use of conjunctions (so, then, and, because). 3. Frequent use of short commands and questions. 4. Rigid and limited use of adjectives and adverbs. 5. Infrequent use of impersonal pronouns as subjects (one, it). 6. Statements formulated as implicit questions which set up a sympathetic circularity, e.g. 'Just fancy?', 'It's only natural, isn't it?' 'I wouldn't have believed it.' 7. A statement offact is often used as both a reason and a conclusion, or more accurately, the reason and conclusion are confounded to produce a categoric statement, e.g. 'Do as I tell you', 'Hold on tight', 'You're not going out', 'Lay of that'. 8. Individual selection from a group of idiomatic phrases will frequently be found. 9. Symbolism is of a low order of generality. IO. The individual qualification is implicit in the sentence structure, therefore it is a language of implicit meaning. It is believed that this fact determi-'es the form of the language.

In studies of non-native varieties of English (hereafter NNVE's), with few exceptions (D'Souza 1987; Kachru 1982, 1983, 1986; Smith 1983), not much attention has been paid to what may be called the pragmatic aspects of language use. By pragmatic aspects, I mean topics such as how certain speech acts, such as informatives, directives, commissives, etc. (cf. Austin 1962; Searle 1969) are performed in these varieties. Since NNVE's differ from native varieties in the performance of speech acts more than in formal properties, it is possible that the pragmatic approach may succeed in capturing the uniqueness of a NNVE where structural analyses fail to do so.

Language is the medium through which all literature finds its manifestation. It is therefore necessary to have a language-based perspective for the study of literature. Since one finds in literature not only the referential but the creative and aesthetic aspects of language use, it is necessary to show that with a global perspective linguistics, through its sub discipline ‘stylistics’, can explicate literary texts as well. Hence, the paper consists of two parts: the first presenting a brief picture of linguistics as a discipline with a global orientation that is capable of studying not only the structures but also the functions and uses of language, and the second consisting of a stylistic analysis of S. H. V. Agyeya ‘s modern poem cup-caap nadii (The silent river). The first part briefly delineates the form of stylistics needed for explicating poetic texts. The paper emphasizes that stylistics must be semiotic in orientation, be sensitive to the context of situations and be rooted in ‘fictiveness’. Hence the approach has been called ‘semiolinguistics’ in order to distinguish it from other linguistic approaches. At the heart of stylistic meaning lies the multi-tiered stylization process which is attempted to be captured by positing three separate, though integrated, levels of the ‘sentence symbols’, ‘symbols in art’ and the ‘art symbol’. The paper focuses mainly on the level of the sentence symbol, since this is where stylization takes place, and the other two levels are implicated in the conclusions. This functional model is used for the analysis of the Hindi poem cup-caap nadi. The stylistic analysis of cup-caap nadi at the level of ‘sentence symbol’ views the poem as a linguistic construct in terms of its phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic/ pragmatic aspects. While the phonological level shows, through the irregularity of meter, a ‘prose rhythm’, the lexical level reveals the signification of continuous motion, and the contrasts in lexicon signify the poem’s focus on a mental ‘state’ rather than on any physical scene. At the syntactic level, the contrasting simple and complex structures of the poem signify respectively the steady and calm motion of external nature which by-passes or submerges all obstacles in verse paragraph A, and a continuous violent motion of an ‘internal’ river that cannot submerge or obliterate the ever standing obstacles of 'desires' and hence remains in a state of constant collision in verse paragraph B. The semantic/ pragmatic level reveals that the continuous motion and the memories and desires are a permanent feature of the poem 'I's personality along with his sense of helplessness.