Communicative Intentions Research Articles

Justifying the accusation

Abstract Accusations of trolling (deceiving participants about one’s communicative intention, conducted for amusement, Dynel 2016; Hardaker 2013) and bad faith (dishonestly denying a speaker’s committing meaning, de Saussure and Oswald 2009; Oswald 2022) abound in digitally mediated communication. The labels chosen by posters significantly impact the outcome of discussions, as accusations of trolling tend to result in more abrupt settlements of disputes compared to accusations of bad faith. However, proving these deceptive activities can be challenging for posters. As a result, they often substantiate the “bad faith” label by mentioning in their accusations what they perceive as strategies indicating their interlocutors’ bad faith. In this paper, I examine 161 accusations of trolling and bad faith gathered from a forum. The analysis draws on Hardaker’s (2010, 2013) research and proposes a comparison of the strategies mentioned in these accusations. The aim is to describe the ways in which posters justify the label they opt for when confronted with deceptive activities.

Communicative and functional intentionality of femininity and masculinity: Grammar and semantics

Communicative and functional intentionality of femininity and masculinity: Grammar and semantics

LEXICAL DESYNONYMY IN B. VIAN’S NOVEL “FROTH ON THE DAYDREAM”

The article is dedicated to the studies of lexical desynonyms that are formed and transformed in the space of the operating time of the mental kineticism by means of cognitive polyoperations (psychomechanisms) during the first formal seizure by the thought of its movement in two stages: 1) phenomenological construction of the being and its structures and categories by the addresser as a result of which is formed the lexical primary structure having as basis “sublinguistic schemes”, typical models used to construct different simple and complex linguistic signs; 2) creation of simple secondary desynonymic linguistic signs from which the speaker chooses the co(n)textually (linguistically and/or situationally) pertinent structure. They are actualized in the form of ludic preferential options, according to the communicative intention to facilitate or to complicate the interpretation of the information to the receiver or to the author’s idiostyle, which are characterized by the asymmetry of semasiological and denotative meanings in the language and in the discourse at intrasign and intersigns levels. The goal of the article is to identify the processes of the formation and actualization of asymmetrical desynonymic signs, to identify the types of lexical desynonyms in B. Vian novel “Froth on the Daydream” and to justify their co(n)textual pertinence depending on the communicative intention and the idiostylistic features of the writer. In this research, we use the transformational method, which makes possible the identification of structural and semantic peculiarities of primary and secondary desynonymic constructions as asymmetrical signs in language and discourse, the method of systematization which helps to establish the typology of lexical desynonyms in the novel “Froth on the Daydream” by B. Vian and the linguo-stylistic and interpretative analyzes in order to reveal and characterize the idiostylistic features of the author and to justify the co(n)textual pertinence of the distinguished lexical desynonyms. In the process of analysis of the novel “Froth on the Daydream” by B. Vian, they revealed reduced, extended and quantitatively equacomponential desynonyms phonologically resembling or phonically identical to the primary structure, the derivative desynonyms, the preferential options with the surimpression and with a new semantic co(n)textual meaning in order to precise the author’s idea, to accentuate a qualifier of an object or a character, to transmit the supplementary information on аn exteriorized referent to the reader. All the distinguished types of lexical desynonyms perform the intra- and interphrasal stylistic‑expressive function reflecting the author’s individual vision of the objective reality. It is concluded that desynonymic lexical units represent biunambiguous emphatically accentuated linguo-discursive signs constructed and transformed in the space of the operating time of the causation of the linguo-discursive act which are not stabilized in use being substitutable in a particular co(n)text serving to enrich the intra- and interphrasal content by means of complementary co(n)textual semantic nuances facilitating or complicating the identification of desynonymized referents to the receiver.

Truthfulness as the basis for ethical safeguards in deceptive research: An interview study with researchers

ABSTRACT Ethical safeguards such as debriefing are often recommended or required for research studies in which participants are deceived. However, existing guidance on these safeguards seems insufficiently coherent and precise, which may be associated with their suboptimal implementation in practice. This study aimed to contribute to a more coherent and precise framework of ethical safeguards in deceptive studies through semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 24 researchers who had significant experience with deception. Interviewees discussed which ethical safeguards they implemented and how, as well as their relation to the notion of truthfulness (i.e., the intentional communication of true information). Moreover, interviewees provided a variety of reasons for and against implementing these safeguards, as well as how these reasons varied with the particular context of a study. Overall, the current study contributes to a more coherent and precise understanding of ethical safeguards in deceptive research that could be useful for guiding researchers and ethics reviewers in their ethical decision-making, although certain imprecisions and incoherent aspects remain in need of further investigation and normative reflection.

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) display gaze alternation and referential communication in an impossible task

Gaze cues play a vital role in conveying critical information about objects and locations necessary for survival, such as food sources, predators, and the attentional states of conspecific and heterospecific individuals. During referential intentional communication, the continuous alternation of gaze between a communicative partner and a specific object or point of interest attracts the partner's attention towards the target. This behaviour is considered by many as essential for understanding intentions and is thought to involve mental planning. Here, we investigated the behavioural responses of seven bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) that were given an impossible task in the presence of two experimenters (a ‘commanding experimenter’ and a ‘non-commanding experimenter’), whose attentional state towards the dolphins varied. We found that the dolphins spontaneously displayed gaze alternation, specifically triadic referential pointing, only when the human commanding experimenter was facing them. However, they ceased to alternate their gaze between the impossible object and the commanding experimenter when the experimenter had their back turned. Notably, the dolphins' behaviour differed from general pointing and gaze, as their triadic sequence occurred within a narrow time window. These findings suggest that the dolphins were sensitive to human attentional cues and utilized their own gaze cue (pointing) as a salient signal to attract the attention of the commanding experimenter towards a specific location.

Societal Resilience as Intangible Critical Infrastructure

The concept of societal resilience – the central concept of the National Defence Strategy – is, to a certain degree, not only semantically, but especially pragmatically ambiguous, as the concept has not been operationalised in the literature, on the one hand, and the state societal resilience, implementable through formal, non-formal and informal education, has not benefitted from adequate levers for application, on the other hand. The recent educational reform, achieved through the two laws, on pre-university education and on higher education, adopted in 2023, does not directly contribute to societal resilience. Under these circumstances, of an inadequately designed security education and of a pragmatic ambiguity of the strategy, which means that the communication intentions (obligation, recommendation, suggestion) are not clarified, it is necessary to exceed the classical normative framework that regulates the national educational system and to design the education-resilience binomial as critical national infrastructure. Resilience, coming from the field of safety culture studies, can be considered intangible critical infrastructure, which needs a tangible system defined or possibly defined in the Romanian legislation regarding critical infrastructure, so that it can trigger the mechanism for implementing the projection of the National Defence Strategy. The present article contributes to the identification of possible projective directions of the education-resilience binomial as critical infrastructure.

Reziliența societală ca infrastructură critică intangibilă

The concept of societal resilience – the central concept of the National Defence Strategy – is, to a certain degree, not only semantically, but especially pragmatically ambiguous, as the concept has not been operationalised in the literature, on the one hand, and the state societal resilience, implementable through formal, non-formal and informal education, has not benefitted from adequate levers for application, on the other hand. The recent educational reform, achieved through the two laws, on pre-university education and on higher education, adopted in 2023, does not directly contribute to societal resilience. Under these circumstances, of an inadequately designed security education and of a pragmatic ambiguity of the strategy, which means that the communication intentions (obligation, recommendation, suggestion) are not clarified, it is necessary to exceed the classical normative framework that regulates the national educational system and to design the education-resilience binomial as critical national infrastructure. Resilience, coming from the field of safety culture studies, can be considered intangible critical infrastructure, which needs a tangible system defined or possibly defined in the Romanian legislation regarding critical infrastructure, so that it can trigger the mechanism for implementing the projection of the National Defence Strategy. The present article contributes to the identification of possible projective directions of the education-resilience binomial as critical infrastructure.

Digging Communicative Intentions: The Case of Crises Events

In emergency situations users of social networks convey all sorts of what have been called communicative intentions, well-known since the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) as speech acts (SA). While speech acts have been the focus of close scrutiny in the philosophical and linguistic literature (see (Portner, 2018) for extended discussion), their role has been only rarely understood and exploited in processing social media content about crisis events, our focus here. Current work on communicative intentions in social media are topic-oriented, focusing on the correlation between SA and specific topics such as crisis (e.g., earthquakes) but also politics, celebrities, cooking, travel, etc. It has been observed that people globally tend to react to natural disasters with SA distinct from those used in other contexts (e.g., celebrities, which are essentially made up of comments). Here, we explore the further hypothesis of a correlation between different SA types and urgency and propose an in depth linguistic and computational analysis of communicative intentions in tweets from an urgency-oriented perspective. Indeed, SA are mostly relevant to identify intentions, desires, plans and preferences towards action and to ultimately produce a system intended to help rescue teams. Our contribution is four-fold and consists of: (1) A two-layer annotation scheme of speech acts both at the tweet and sub-tweet levels, (2) A new French dataset of about 13K tweets annotated for both urgency and SA, targeting both expected (e.g., storms) and unexpected or sudden (e.g., building collapse, explosion) events, (3) A thorough analysis of the annotations studying in particular the correlation between SA and the urgency of the message, SA and intentions to act categories (e.g., human damages), and SA and crisis types, finally, (4) A set of deep learning experiments to detect SA in crises related corpora. Our results show a strong correlation between SA and urgency annotations at both the tweet and sub-tweet levels with a particular salient correlation in the latter case, which constitutes a first important step towards SA-aware NLP-based crisis management on social media.

Intonation words in initial intentional communication of Mandarin-speaking children.

Intonation words play a very important role in early childhood language development and serve as a crucial entry point for studying children's language acquisition. Utilizing a natural conversation corpus, this paper thoroughly examines the intentional communication scenes of five Mandarin-speaking children before the age of 1;05 (17 months). We found that children produced a limited yet high-frequency set of intonation words such as " [a], [æ], [ε], [ən], [ə], eng [əŋ], [o], and [i]." These intonation words do not express the children's emotional attitudes toward propositions or events; rather, they are utilized within the frameworks of imperative, declarative, and interrogative intents. The children employ non-verbal, multimodal means such as pointing, gesturing, and facial expressions to actively convey or receive commands, provide or receive information, and inquire or respond. The data suggests that the function of intonation words is essentially equivalent to holophrases, indicating the initial stage of syntactic acquisition, which is a milestone in early syntactic development. Based on the cross-linguistic universality of intonation word acquisition and its inherited relationship with pre-linguistic intentional vocalizations, this paper proposes that children's syntax is initiated by the prosodic features of intonation. The paper also contends that intonation words, as the initial form of human vocal language in individual development, naturally extend from early babbling, emotional vocalizations, or sound expressions for changing intentions. They do not originate from spontaneous gesturing, which seems to have no necessary evolutionary relationship with the body postures that chimpanzees use to change intentions, as suggested by existing research. Human vocal language and non-verbal multimodal means are two parallel and non-contradictory forms of communication, with no apparent evidence of the former inheriting from the latter.

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Religion, authority and denunciation in the paradigm of mediatization: The case of the Congolese diaspora of the Salvation Army

The article aims to explain denunciation as a form of communication with regards to contestation. It examines this object within the limits posed by the conceptual triangle that associates religion, authority and media. The empirical field investigated considers the case of two virtual communities of the Congolese diaspora of the Salvation Army. Denunciatory occurrences were identified using the thematic analysis of occurrences with the aim of understanding the function and communicational substance of the public denunciation of the respective religious leadership, as well as the major issues that focus the questioning of the authority of this leadership on social media. Findings indicate that the influence of mediatization on religious diasporas have produced a challenge to religious authority that is forged through practices of public denunciation in digital media. Religious leadership, religiosity, doctrines and dogmas are subject to a communicative intention which makes them vulnerable.

Hate Speech in American Political Discourse: A Functional-Linguistic Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse how the concept of hatred is represented in American political discourse. The problem of intensified hate speech requires thorough linguistic investigation as political discourse is becoming more openly conflictual. The empirical material of this study comprises public speeches by American politicians, politically themed analytical articles in the press, and posts and statements of politicians in social networks. The main method used in the analysis is the functionallinguistic analysis of discourse. The author analyses confrontational communicative tactics, e.g. discrediting, scorn, insult, accusation, mockery, etc. The objects (or victims) of such rhetoric are political opponents of the subject of speech, who may have different points of view, religious beliefs, cultural backgrounds and social status. Hate speech, which is an extreme form of how the concept of hatred can be verbalized, may be directed against confessional and ethnical groups. The paper places a special emphasis on the communicative goals and intentions of discourse participants who resort to hate speech. Usually it is the desire of the subject of speech to publicly demonstrate disrespect, mock, belittle the authority of opponents and favourably represent oneself in the eyes of the audience. The rhetoric of hatred comprises such typical means as negative and offensive epithets and metaphors; hyperbolic, comparative, rhetorical and lexical constructions with the pragmatical meaning of irony. In situations when the subjects of speech emphasize the difference between them and their opponents (national, religious, social etc.), the functional fields of the concept of hatred and the “in-group/out-group” concept may overlap. In these cases, the communicative goal of the speaker is to alienate political opponents and emphasize their dissidence in a negative way.

Utility of Single Items within the Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R): A Bayesian Network Approach and Relative Importance Analysis.

The Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R) comprises four content-specific items widely used to assess the history of suicide-related thoughts, plans or attempts, frequency of suicidal ideation, communication of intent to die by suicide and self-reported likelihood of a suicide attempt. Each item focuses on a specific parameter of the suicide-related thoughts and behaviors construct. Past research has primarily focused on the total score. This study used Bayesian network modeling and relative importance analyses on SBQ-R data from 1160 U.S. and 1141 Chinese undergraduate students. The Bayesian network analysis results showed that Item 1 is suitable for identifying other parameters of the suicide-related thoughts and behaviors construct. The results of the relative importance analysis further highlighted the relevancy of each SBQ-R item score when examining evidence for suicide-related thoughts and behaviors. These findings provided empirical support for using the SBQ-R item scores to understand the performances of different suicide-related behavior parameters. Further, they demonstrated the potential value of examining individual item-level responses to offer clinically meaningful insights. To conclude, the SBQ-R allows for the evaluation of each critical suicide-related thought and behavior parameter and the overall suicide risk.

A Study on Chinese Culture in High School English Textbooks of BNUP from the Perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory for Multimodal Metaphors

At the end of the 20th century, scholars represented by Forceville dived into the construction and representation of metaphors using various modalities, leading the shift of metaphor studies towards multimodality, which consequently put the study of multimodal metaphors in the spotlight. English textbooks, as a combination of visual and linguistic modes of expression, contain a large number of metaphors. From the perspective of conceptual blending theory, the paper explores the construction and meaning of multimodal metaphors of Chinese culture in three compulsory high school English textbooks of Beijing Normal University Press. It is found that these three compulsory high school English textbooks of Beijing Normal University Press (BNUP) contain many multimodal metaphors of Chinese culture, and these multimodal metaphors can activate student’s cultural background knowledge and convey the communicative intention of the pictures, thus arousing students’ interest in Chinese culture and fostering cultural confidence.

Pinpointing Linguistic Emphasis in Classical Greek

Abstract Emphasis is a ubiquitous notion in classical scholarship, but its vagueness has repeatedly been criticized (and its usefulness, consequently, questioned) by Greek linguists. This brief study seeks to identify (and secure) a place for this notion in the analytical toolbox for the description of Classical Greek by applying the strict but nuanced definition of emphasis in Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008) to the identification and classification of linguistic devices in the ancient language. In particular, this study argues for a distinction between emphasis as a rhetorical effect and emphasis as a communicative intention. In the former understanding, emphasis may be produced secondarily by a number of linguistic and rhetorical devices. Conversely, linguistic emphasis stricto sensu would only be conveyed by linguistic devices used primarily to intensify linguistic entities of any level (discourse acts, propositional contents, subacts).

Involvement of the anterior insula and frontal operculum during wh-question comprehension of wh-in-situ Korean language.

In this research, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neurological basis for understanding wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages such as Korean, where wh-elements maintain their original positions instead of moving explicitly within the sentence. Our hypothesis centered on the role of the salience and attention network in comprehending wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages, such as the discernment of wh-elements, the demarcation between interrogative types, and the allocation of cognitive resources towards essential constituents vis-à-vis subordinate elements in order to capture the speaker's communicative intent. We explored subject and object wh-questions and scrambled wh-questions, contrasting them with yes/no questions in Korean. Increased activation was observed in the left anterior insula and bilateral frontal operculum, irrespective of the wh-position or scrambling of wh-element. These results suggest the interaction between the salience and attentional system and the syntactic linguistic system, particularly the left anterior insula and bilateral frontal operculum, in comprehending wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages.

Works of R. Edelbauer in Context of Contemporary Austrian Literature of Early 21st Century

This study explores the novels of contemporary Austrian writer Raphaela Edelbauer (Raphaela Edelbauer, b. 1990) “The Fluid Land” (Das flüssige Land, 2019), “DAVE” (DAVE, 2021), “The Incommensurables” (Die Inkommensurablen, 2023) in the context of contemporary Austrian literature of the early third millennium. The relevance of the research is driven by the necessity to comprehend the trends in Austrian literature during an era of global changes. It is revealed that, on one hand, the author continues the traditions of Austrian literature of the second half of the 20th century, particularly on a thematic level (Austrian identity, overcoming the past, the false idyll of provincial Austria, conflicts between fathers and children, etc.), while on the other hand, delving into pressing contemporary issues (transhumanism, artificial intelligence, etc.). The concept of fictionality is central to the analysis, exploring the ways and specifics of its implementation in the artistic text in alignment with the author’s communicative intentions. Special attention is given to Edelbauer’s individual style, the uniqueness of narrative organization in the examined genre varieties (parable novel, science fiction novel, historical novel), and the quest for a “personal” language. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that Edelbauer’s work, distinguished by prestigious literary awards in Austria and Germany, has not been a subject of study in Russian literary studies.

The Effect of Augmented Reality Interactivity on Consumer Brand Engagement — A Chain Mediating Model

The use of augmented reality (AR) technology has changed the way companies and consumers engage with brands. Although some theoretical literature points out that the interactivity of augmented reality helps to improve consumer brand engagement, there is a lack of systematic empirical research on how the interactivity of augmented reality affects consumer brand engagement through process mechanisms. Based on the understanding of existing research gaps, relying on the theory of social presence and brand authenticity and 368 online questionnaire data, we constructed a structural equation model containing the chain mediation effect, and explored the chain mediation effect of social presence and perceived brand authenticity, as well as the moderating effect of psychological ownership and self-consistency. The results indicated that (1) augmented reality interactivity had a significant positive effect on consumer brand engagement; (2) social presence and perceived brand authenticity had a significant positive effect on consumer brand engagement; (3) social presence and perceived brand authenticity partially mediated between augmented reality interactivity and consumer brand engagement, and together they acted as a chain mediator; and (4) Psychological ownership positively moderates the relationship between social presence and consumer brand engagement; (5) Self-congruence positively moderates the relationship between perceived brand authenticity and consumer brand engagement; and (6) Consumer brand engagement has a significant positive effect on word-of-mouth communication and brand use intention. This study enriches the research on the interface between augmented reality technology and brand management, and provides practical significance for enterprises to utilize AR technology for brand marketing.

Evaluation of co-speech gestures grounded in word-distributed representation.

The condition for artificial agents to possess perceivable intentions can be considered that they have resolved a form of the symbol grounding problem. Here, the symbol grounding is considered an achievement of the state where the language used by the agent is endowed with some quantitative meaning extracted from the physical world. To achieve this type of symbol grounding, we adopt a method for characterizing robot gestures with quantitative meaning calculated from word-distributed representations constructed from a large corpus of text. In this method, a "size image" of a word is generated by defining an axis (index) that discriminates the "size" of the word in the word-distributed vector space. The generated size images are converted into gestures generated by a physical artificial agent (robot). The robot's gesture can be set to reflect either the size of the word in terms of the amount of movement or in terms of its posture. To examine the perception of communicative intention in the robot that performs the gestures generated as described above, the authors examine human ratings on "the naturalness" obtained through an online survey, yielding results that partially validate our proposed method. Based on the results, the authors argue for the possibility of developing advanced artifacts that achieve human-like symbolic grounding.

Emotion Classification Based on Pulsatile Images Extracted from Short Facial Videos via Deep Learning.

Most human emotion recognition methods largely depend on classifying stereotypical facial expressions that represent emotions. However, such facial expressions do not necessarily correspond to actual emotional states and may correspond to communicative intentions. In other cases, emotions are hidden, cannot be expressed, or may have lower arousal manifested by less pronounced facial expressions, as may occur during passive video viewing. This study improves an emotion classification approach developed in a previous study, which classifies emotions remotely without relying on stereotypical facial expressions or contact-based methods, using short facial video data. In this approach, we desire to remotely sense transdermal cardiovascular spatiotemporal facial patterns associated with different emotional states and analyze this data via machine learning. In this paper, we propose several improvements, which include a better remote heart rate estimation via a preliminary skin segmentation, improvement of the heartbeat peaks and troughs detection process, and obtaining a better emotion classification accuracy by employing an appropriate deep learning classifier using an RGB camera input only with data. We used the dataset obtained in the previous study, which contains facial videos of 110 participants who passively viewed 150 short videos that elicited the following five emotion types: amusement, disgust, fear, sexual arousal, and no emotion, while three cameras with different wavelength sensitivities (visible spectrum, near-infrared, and longwave infrared) recorded them simultaneously. From the short facial videos, we extracted unique high-resolution spatiotemporal, physiologically affected features and examined them as input features with different deep-learning approaches. An EfficientNet-B0 model type was able to classify participants' emotional states with an overall average accuracy of 47.36% using a single input spatiotemporal feature map obtained from a regular RGB camera.