Speech levels, social predicates and pragmatic structure in Balinese

This chapter analyzes the pragmatic structure of the clauses that make up Job's third reply (12-14), the pragmatic structure being the distribution of the functions of Topic and Focus in the clause. It presents the terminology that is used to describe this pragmatic structure. The chapter provides an outline of the objectives of the analysis. It clarifies the syntactic analysis that provides the materials for the pragmatic study. The author consistingly opts for the terminology developed by Simon Dik because it presents a unified account allowing for descriptive detail and because it is broadly accepted in general-linguistic circles. The function of Focus can be subcategorized not only on the basis of its scope, but also on the basis of its communicative point.Keywords: Job; linguistic expressions; Simon Dik; syntactic analysis

This chapter presents the theoretical discussion on the pragmatic structure of clauses and its linguistic expression. The chapter introduces the functional-linguistic account of what these pragmatic functions are and of how they are typically expressed in language in general. It discusses the linguistic expressions of pragmatic functions in Biblical Hebrew. In this chapter, the author concedes that the (singly occupied) preverbal field is the position for locating either the strongest Focus or the Topic (the about what) of the clause, and for connecting the clause with what immediately preceded it.Keywords: Hebrew; linguistic expression; pragmatic structure

In verbal communication, we always aim to establish and maintain harmonious relations with others. Proper use of expressions and the choice of the way we speak are closely connected with politeness. In Japanese speech level is a level of formality or politeness in conversation, which is expressed by the use of linguistic forms (formal vs. informal) within and at the end of an utterance and the use of honorific expressions. In Slovene the level of formality or politeness in conversation is mainly expressed by the use of formal language and general colloquial language. Speech level shift is a shift from one speech level to another – e.g. from a formal style to an informal, etc. According to previous research, these shifts express speaker's psychological distance and a change of attitude towards a hearer. In this paper I will first briefly present the theoretical framework of politeness and an outline of speech levels in Japanese and Slovene. I will then present the data and the method used in this study. Finally, I will present and discuss the results of the analysis of both Japanese and Slovene conversation.

Honorifics are linguistic forms that are used prototypically to express regard or esteem toward an entity worthy of respect, most typically a person of superior social standing. The concept is most frequently used in discussions of Japanese and Korean (typically the Standardized versions of these languages spoken in Tokyo and Seoul), which have highly developed systems of honorifics that include grammaticized verbal suffixes. In these languages, speakers need to make an obligatory choice between honorific and nonhonorific verb endings in every single sentence, depending primarily on social status and intimacy. For instance, when addressing a status superior, Japanese speakers will add masu to the end of every verb and Korean speakers will add -yo or -supnita, whereas these forms are omitted when addressing intimates. In languages without this system of verb endings, lexical substitutions can be recruited for marking honorification. In Standard Javanese, there are numerous lexical distinctions between ngoko (“low speech”) and krama (“high speech”). Thai features a number of speech levels including racha sap (“royal language”), which is used for addressing or referring to the royal family. In the Australian Aboriginal language Dyirbal, speakers switch to specific variations of the language known as “mother-in-law language” and “brother-in-law language” whenever so-called “taboo” kin—namely, the mother-in-law or brother-in-law—is in earshot. In English and European languages, honorifics tend to be limited mostly to respectful titles such as “Sir” or “Ma’am” and special second-person pronouns (e.g., in French, vous is the honorific form of tu [“you”]). Linguists recognize several different types of honorifics. “Referent honorifics” index the relationship between the speaker and referents within the sentence (or otherwise the relationship between different referents). Hearer honorifics (also known as “speech levels” or “speech styles”) directly index the relationship between the speaker and the hearer and do not require the hearer to appear as a sentence referent in order to appear. Bystander honorifics index the presence of specific onlookers at the scene of a speech event. These forms are appropriate for speaking in the presence of the bystander in question but are not necessarily appropriate when speaking about or to him/her. In addition to honorifics, languages may also contain humilifics: linguistic forms that humble or abase the speaker (e.g., “your humble servant”).

The Javanese speech levels have received considerable attention from linguists and lexicographers, but little has been written about a very specialized speech style used exclusively among the upper members of the priyayi elite, who once defined standard Javanese usage. Within the highest male priyayi circles of Yogyakarta and Surakarta (= Solo) a special was use, known the latter city as basa kedhaton, the former more generally as basa bagongan. Names, forms and uses of palace language have varied from locale to locale and from time to time, but one basic contextual feature crucially and consistently defined palace language: it was exchanged among courtiers when speaking the presence of the king formal audience, and/or at his behest. A common Javanese phrase referring to this place--ing ngarsa dalem, in the royal presence--connotes a conception of ruler as locus of power and definer of an area within which special modes of behavior are obligatory. 1 In this respect, palace language is a special manifestation of a particular ideology of kingship and politics. What follows is intended as a supplement to Poedjosoedarmo's wordlist of nonngoko vocabularies, together with a very broad and somewhat tentative characterization of palace usage. 2 Palace language is set off from the everyday speech levels by the same types of features through which non-ngoko and ngoko speech are distinguished, and the palace language forms can be divided into subclasses functionally analogous to various subsets of the everyday speech level wordclasses. For this reason, the basic Javanese metalinguistic vocabulary presented Poedjosoedarmo's description of the speech levels can and will be used here, accordance with the definitions and descriptions he provides. 3 Difficulties dealing with palace language stem from its double marginality. First, crucial distinguishing marks setting it off from everyday speech are found for only a small number of lexical/morphemic contrasts. Second, palace language 1. The area within which palace language was obligatory (and so the royal presence) was defined very precisely terms of the location and purpose of a given audience. Four such types of audience are distinguished the Serat Wewaton Tata-krama, Pisungsungipun Radbn Ngab~hi Jayadarsana Kaliwon Ganrdhbk saking mara sepuh RadOn Ngabbhi Ranggawarsita (Surakarta: Mesiom Radyapustaka ms. # 74, Javanese character catalog).

This study explores the speech level shifts from non-honorific to honorific situation by analyzing Korean spoken corpora of conversations between native speakers of Korean through a discourse-analytic framework. Although non-honorific styles (e.g., panmal) are used as frequently as honorific ones (e.g., contaysmal), little attention has been paid to non-honorific expressions in Korean, let alone to the speech level shift between non-honorific and honorific. Analyzing interactions between native speakers of Korean revealed that, depending on the change of their stance in response to the interlocutor’s utterance, speakers dynamically switched their speech levels not only within the boundary of non-honorifics or honorifics, but also across the dichotomous categories, that is, they changed from non-honorific to honorific speech styles. In general, speakers employed the speech level elevation from non-honorific to honorific when indexing a confrontational stance toward a topic and an object, or when upgrading an epistemic stance in naturally occurring interactions. The findings of this study encourage researchers to actively construct and use corpora of authentic/naturalistic conversations to explore the dynamicity of the speech level shift and its functions, which in turn contributes to developing instruction materials that reflect the dynamicity of the Korean honorific system.

In the Japanese language different levels of honorific speech are used to convey respect, deference, humility, formality and social distance. In this paper, we present a method for controlling the level of formality of Japanese output in English-to-Japanese neural machine translation (NMT). By using heuristics to identify honorific verb forms, we classify Japanese sentences as being one of three levels of informal, polite, or formal speech in parallel text. The English source side is marked with a feature that identifies the level of honorific speech present in the Japanese target side. We use this parallel text to train an English-Japanese NMT model capable of producing Japanese translations in different honorific speech styles for the same English input sentence.

Social computing needs a capability to reason with qualitatively fuzzy relations and analogy if it is to be capable of pattern matching using commonsense reasoning. The paper proper begins with an introduction to the first-order predicate calculus and heuristics. Using everyday simple examples, it shows where heuristic reasoning can be invaluable and where deductive reasoning falls short. The ∀ qualifier is replaced with Ψ (i.e., for most) and the ∃ qualifier is replaced with E (i.e., for some). That is, the realization of a heuristic calculus necessarily fuzzifies the predicate calculus. Moreover, computational analogy is shown to be possible through the use of multiple analogies. These may be defined by way of a (non-square) matrix, which serves to explain the predicates in terms of one or more disjoint predicates - including various permutations of arguments. These predicates are also subject to composition. Union and intersection operations are used to define predicates in terms of other predicates having common defining heuristic matrices. Finally, an introductory heuristic calculus is defined and exemplified. In particular, context-sensitive left and right-hand transformations are developed for the creation of knowledge, which is open under deduction. Local knowledge is validated through constraint checking and converges just short of validity.

Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, Laine Berman shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the rigid constraints of an hierarchical social order. She does this by identifying the silences, the “unsaid”, and by revealing both the structure and function of silence in terms of its indexical reference to local meaning. It is here that the force of the Javanese language as used in everyday interaction shows itself to be an extremely potent philosophical entity as well as a means of social control. Thus, at least in regard to the urban poor, the book boldly questions the difference between traditional definitions of Javanese elegance and oppression. This study will contribute to our understanding of the social consequences of language use, to the linguistic knowledge of Indonesia and Java, and to such basic linguistic issues as narrative structure and function, speech levels and styles, and indexicality features.

Fast speech has largely been ignored by theoretical linguists. The literature is scant. In this paper, however, I will argue that fast speech has some properties phonology has to account for: first, the differences between the formal style (which is the speech level that is taken as the basis of phonological descriptions) and the fast speech level are systematic. Second, the phonology has to deal with is the large amount of variation within fast speech.The general idea I propose is that the differences in speech rate or style do not result from different rule orderings, but from different domain sizes, on which one single block of rules applies. By comparing fast speech phonology to the phonology of (simple) cliticization, I will show that postlexical phonology provides further evidence for the prosodic view of cliticization (see Booij (ms); Lahiri et al. (1990)).

In recent years, research has used psycholinguistic features in public discourse, networking behaviors on social media and profile information to train models for depression detection. However, the most widely adopted approach for the extraction of psycholinguistic features is to use the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) dictionary and various affective lexicons. Other features related to cultural factors and suicide risk have not been explored. Moreover, the use of social networking behavioral features and profile features would limit the generalizability of the model. Therefore, our study aimed at building a prediction model of depression for text-only social media data through a wider range of possible linguistic features related to depression, and illuminate the relationship between linguistic expression and depression. We collected 789 users' depression scores as well as their past posts on Weibo, and extracted a total of 117 lexical features via Simplified Chinese Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, Chinese Suicide Dictionary, Chinese Version of Moral Foundations Dictionary, Chinese Version of Moral Motivation Dictionary, and Chinese Individualism/Collectivism Dictionary. Results showed that all the dictionaries contributed to the prediction. The best performing model occurred with linear regression, with the Pearson correlation coefficient between predicted values and self-reported values was 0.33, the R-squared was 0.10, and the split-half reliability was 0.75. This study did not only develop a predictive model applicable to text-only social media data, but also demonstrated the importance taking cultural psychological factors and suicide related expressions into consideration in the calculation of word frequency. Our research provided a more comprehensive understanding of how lexicons related to cultural psychology and suicide risk were associated with depression, and could contribute to the recognition of depression.

The paper presents a critical assessment of the place reserved for lexical expressions with discourse-related meanings in four major functional theories of language, also considering a few narrower-scope accounts of linguistically encoded pragmatic meaning. I argue that the status of discourse-related lexemes is not duly recognized in most functionally-oriented frameworks and make the point that, by contrast, Functional Discourse Grammar finds itself in an optimal position to offer an adequate account of this specific type of linguistic expressions. Yet, I will claim that the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to lexical expressions of pragmatic meaning is not entirely satisfactory, namely in that the lexemes in question are assumed to be inserted into the relevant slots of underlying pragmatic structure without being modeled as a separate type of linguistic unit. I will therefore suggest that discourse-related lexemes be redefined as a distinct layer of the hierarchically organized pragmatic structure of linguistic utterances, just as lexemes with purely representational content are assigned to a distinct layer of semantic structure. Empirically, the advantages of this proposal are illustrated with the analysis of authentic English examples, mainly from the GloWbE corpus (https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/: Davies and Fuchs in English World-Wide 36:1–28, 2015), plus a number of other examples from the internet and from previously published research.

Mandarin lexical tone duration: Impact of speech style, word length, syllable position and prosodic position

There has been much controversy about the role and place of speech act theory in the study of language. Following Morris (1975), semiotics is traditionally divided into three branches: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax deals with relations that exist only between linguistic expressions (e.g., the rules of formation of sentences), semantics with relations that exist between linguistic expressions and their meanings (e.g., their senses or their denotations), and pragmatics with relations that exist between linguistic expressions and their meanings and uses in contexts of utterance. Because speakers use language to perform speech acts, most philosophers and linguists, following Carnap, have first tended to place speech act theory in pragmatics rather than in semantics.

Given a question about an image, Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) needs to provide not only a correct answer, but also a rationale to justify the answer. VCR is a challenging task due to the requirement of proper semantic alignment and reasoning between the image and linguistic expression. Recent approaches offer a great promise by exploring holistic attention mechanisms or graph-based networks, but most of them do implicit reasoning and ignore the semantic dependencies among the linguistic expression. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit cross-modal representation learning network for VCR by incorporating syntactic information into the visual reasoning and natural language understanding. The proposed method enjoys several merits. First, based on a two-branch neural module network, we can do explicit crossmodal reasoning guided by the high-level syntactic structure of linguistic expression. Second, the semantic structure of the linguistic expression is incorporated into a syntactic GCN to facilitate language understanding. Third, our explicit crossmodal representation learning network can provide a traceable reasoning-flow, which offers visible fine-grained evidence of the answer and rationale. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the public VCR dataset demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. The full code for our work is available in the supplementary material.