Context Of Utterance Research Articles

An Argument for the Obstinate Rigidity of Proper Names

A recent argument suggests that proper names are persistently rigid designators. Invoking the Kaplanian distinction between a world of the context of utterance and a world of the circumstance of evaluation, the argument maintains that names have to designate something only in the former, but not in the latter, implying thus that the designated objects must exist only in the former world. This paper shows that names designate something in both kinds of world and are thus obstinately rigid. This is achieved in three steps. First, the author argues that the contents of names must be available in possible worlds regardless of whether the named objects exist in them. Second, the author argues that these contents are expressed by English names in both kinds of world. Third, since Millianism suggests that names express contents by way of designating objects, the author argues that they have to designate something in both kinds of world.

Modal interpretation of tense in subjunctive conditionals

The paper gives an account of the meaning of subjunctive conditionals according to which the past tense receives a modal interpretation. The view allows the worlds of the antecedent to include the world of the context of utterance, and thus it avoids a problem pointed out by Mackay (2015) for previous modal views of the past tense in subjunctive conditionals. I argue that it also explains a variety of facts about the relationship among subjunctive morphology, counterfactuality, and presupposition. EARLY ACCESS

An Analysis on Pragmatic Force of Declarative Utterances Used by the Main Character in Mona Lisa Smile Movie and its Implication on Language Teaching

This research uses a descriptive qualitative method. The source of the data are document (the authentic manuscript) and video of “Mona Lisa Smile” film. The goals of this research are (1) to identify the contexts of declarative utterances uttered by the main character (Katherine Wattson) in the film entitled “Mona Lisa Smile”, (2) to explain the pragmatic forces of declarative utterances. To find the pragmatic forces of declarative utterances in the film entitled “Mona Lisa Smile” the researcher identifies the context of each datum in declarative utterance based on Austin’s classification of act performance in language. There are 69 utterances in the film, then the researcher randomly takes 35 utterances of declarative utterances to be analyzed. The results of this research are, that (1) In every utterance, context has important role in determine the meaning of the utterance, (2) The hearer’s response to Katherine Watson’s declarative utterances varies. The hearer’s response can be in forms of a statement, question, act and sometimes silence to Katherine utterances, (3) From the 35 of declarative utterances that have been uttered by Katherine Watson there are 13 kinds of force: consisting of insisting, claiming, complaining, apologizing, requesting, appointing, ordering, warning, suggesting, blaming, sentencing, asking, and advising. The implications of this research on teaching and learning activity are, (1) the pragmatic force of declarative utterances can be used as teacher’s classroom instruction, and (2) the pragmatic force of declarative utterances can be used as a teaching material. Keywords: pragmatic, speech act, illocution, declarative

The Mechanism of Implicature and Inference as Influenced by Primary Stimuli

Abstract This paper attempts to explain language as a process of meaning creation by a speaker (implicature) and meaning disambiguation by a hearer (inference) at the basis of which there is a complex mechanism of reality perception, internalization and verbalization. This mechanism of implicature/inference is studied from two interconnecting perspectives: Conversation Analysis and Neuro Linguistic Programming. While the former investigates the function of the utterance in context, the latter explores the way speakers and hearers internalize reality depending on how they see, hear and feel the world around them.

The dynamics of loose talk

AbstractIn non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (): Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. () and () agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone.Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content.

Digital text production as narrative: an analysis of text production in a multilingual classroom at primary school

In the study presented digital text production in a multilingual classroom is discussed. This involves students aged 7-8, manifesting their literacy by making use of both their writing and reading competence. To be able to discuss the text production, Bakhtin’s theories about heteroglossia are crucial, allowing for both social and historical contexts of utterances (Bakhtin 1994). These theories are here intertwined with Bruner’s notion of human beings as constituted by ‘narratives’ (Bruner 2002). By the use of linguistic ethnography (Creese 2008) and text analysis based on sociosemiotics (Kress, van Leeuwen 2006), the following questions are discussed: How do multilingual students make use of digital tools for meaning making in their digital text productions, and in what sense could they by creating these texts be said to contribute to their own literacy development? Text productions from four students are analysed to illustrate how multivocal spaces are created, and how these ‘spaces’ can explain the students’ literacy development. /Keywords: meaning making, literacy processes, multilingualism, narratives, sociosemiotics

Pragmatic Forces in the Language of Two American Presidential Candidates

This article explains about pragmatic force that found in the language of two American presidential candidates in 2012 US Presidential Debate about foreign policy where the purpose on sharing a belief and influencing the other’s people view are appeared significantly in the utterances of two candidates. The pragmatic forces in this research are revealed by analyzing the illocutionary force that appeared and the reason of its performing related to the context of the utterance through pragmatics’ perspective, speech act. The result of analysis indicates that (i) four of five types of illocutionary forces were found and (ii) two of three reasons are used by the two American presidential candidates on the debate. The paper tries to highlight the pragmatic force that the speakers want to deliver where on this case was focused on sharing their belief in order to influence the other people’s (society and audiences) view. The paper also highlights some of the general considerations relating to the contexts of utterances. In analyzing the text, the writer used a combination method of quantitative and qualitative.

AN ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACT CLASSIFICATION IN BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Pragmatics is study of significance aspects and language use which are dependent to the speaker, the addressee and other characteristics about the context of utterance. Along with communication, we are as humans do it as speakers who deliver utterance or anything to the addressee. Therefore communication and language are related to another one with pragmatics. Usually people utilize language in spoken and written, for instance conversation writing ideas, thoughts and so on in the book. For example cerebration contained in fairy tale stories were poured through the writer that one may be understood by readers. These ideas are expressed in the form about speech acts as described in Yule's theory in his book Pragmatics: Speech Act Classification (1996), there are five classifications of speech act pragmatically that can be proposed with a speaker such as representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. The researchers used Beauty and the Beast short story to be analyzed classification about speech act. The method used in this analysis is a descriptive qualitative method. The results in this study, there are 10 speech act in short story Beauty and the Beast. In the outcomes of this study, that speech act classified into 4 types. Speech act classification is mostly Directives (50%); Representatives (30%); Declarations (10%); and Commissives (10%). The classification type unfound in the story above is Expressives.

Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against Donnellan

In this paper I discuss Donnellan’s claim of the pragmatic ambiguity of the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite des-criptions. The literature on the topic is huge and full of alternative analysis. I will restrict myself to a very classical topos: the challenge posed by Kripke to Donnellan’s distinction with the case of a dialogue on an attempt to update a misdescription. I claim that to treat the problem of the referential use of definite descriptions we need not only to take into account the context of utterance, but also the cognitive context with its epistemic restrictions and the possible different contexts of reception of the same utterance. I try to show different aspects of what can be called “pragmatic ambiguity”, which seem not correctly considered by Kripke, and connect them to the basic tenets of Grice Cooperative principle.

Analysis of Intonation Patterns of Selected Nigerian Bilingual Educated Speakers of English

The intelligibility of everyday speech is built on the mastery and the use of appropriate intonation patterns. This makes intonation the music of everyday speech of which its appropriate use has been the final hurdle that the majority of the speakers of English as a Second Language have not crossed. This paper investigated the intonation patterns of the randomly selected 45 bilingual educated speakers of English, from diverse educational backgrounds representing the three senatorial zones in Ebonyi State. A paragraph from Roach (2010) was given to the participants to read. It was recorded and converted to WAVE audio with the use of audio converter. The utterances of interest to the research were extracted with the use of Sony Sound Forge and segmented on a text grid window on Praat. Pierrehumbert’s Auto-segmental Metrical approach to intonation served as the theoretical framework and the transcription was done using ToBI. The study revealed a low level of proficiency in the use and assignment of accurate patterns of intonation in the speeches of the participants. Aside the widely known and commonly used intonation patterns of fall, rise, rise-fall and fall-rise, it was observed that there was the presence of the use of low pitch accent, low boundary tone in the speeches of the participants. Significant inclination towards the use of the falling tone was observed. However, bilingual make-up or educational qualification does not determine appropriate use of intonation patterns. In a bid to, therefore, account for effective communication among educated bilingual speakers of English, more time should be given to the development of this skill using meaningful utterances in context rather than the use of words or sentences in isolation.

Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots With Hierarchical Aggregation Network of Multi-Representation

Matching an appropriate response with its multi-turn context is a crucial challenge in retrieval-based chatbots. Current studies construct multiple representations of context and response to facilitate response selection, but they use these representations in isolation and ignore the relationships among representations. To address these problems, we propose a hierarchical aggregation network of multi-representation (HAMR) to leverage abundant representations sufficiently and enhance valuable information. First, we employ bidirectional recurrent neural networks (BiRNN) to extract syntactic and semantic representations of sentences and use a self-aggregation mechanism to combine these representations. Second, we design a matching aggregation mechanism for fusing different matching information between each utterance in context and response, which is generated by an attention mechanism. By considering the candidate response as the real part of the context, we try to integrate all of them in chronological order and then accumulate the vectors to calculate the final matching degree. An extensive empirical study on two multi-turn response selection data sets indicates that our proposed model achieves a new state-of-the-art result.

Contextualismo vs Minimalismo: um embate sobre a (in)dependência entre Semântica e Pragmática

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um debate entre duas correntes teóricas opostas: o minimalismo semântico e o contextualismo semântico. Mostraremos que o cerne dessa disputa faz referência às relações estreitas que a semântica e a pragmática possuem no que tange ao tratamento do significado de uma sentença e a possível influência do contexto em sua compreensão. Para os minimalistas Cappelen & Lepore (2005), o significado de uma sentença é definido em grande parte pelos seus elementos gramaticais; nessa concepção, a referência contextual não apresenta qualquer influência em seu conteúdo semântico, salvo os indexicais. Já os contextualistas como Recanati (2010) defendem que o contexto modaliza o conteúdo semântico de uma sentença: diferentes significados podem ser atribuídos a uma mesma sentença a depender do cenário dos atos de proferimento. A discussão entre essas diferentes abordagens parece uma alusão ao quão dependente ou independente a semântica é da pragmática, se elas estão ou não em relação de interface no tratamento do significado e do contexto. Se considerarmos a concepção minimalista, a semântica e a pragmática são áreas de estudos separadas; porém, se considerarmos a concepção contextualista, essas áreas são interdependentes, ou seja, as condições de verdade de uma sentença dependem da informação contextual do ato de fala.

Elementos para una teoría de los grados de justificación.

En este escrito se presentan las bases de una estrategia pragmática, contextualista e inferencialista para articular una teoría que dé cuenta de los grados de justificación de nuestras aserciones. Se arguye que hay contextos de emisión de aserciones configurados con ciertos criterios inferenciales, los cuales responden a propósitos prácticos o teóricos, y conforman, en consecuencia, diferentes estándares de justificación en esos contextos. Finalmente, a partir de una caracterización de tipos de proposiciones, inferencias, compromisos asertivos y esquemas de justificación, se muestra cómo determinar el grado de justificación alto, medio o bajo de una aserción con respecto a un contexto de emisión de aserciones dado

Multiple Sluicing, Scope, and Superiority: Consequences for Ellipsis Identity

This article defends a semantic identity account of ellipsis licensing. The argument comes from examples of multiple sluicing, especially from Russian. Concentrating on antecedents that contain two quantified statements, we uncover a surprising asymmetry: surface scope antecedents can license a multiple sluice, but inverse scope antecedents cannot. We explain this finding in terms of semantic accounts of ellipsis licensing, where ellipsis is licensed when the sluice corresponds to an (implicit) question under discussion. We show that QUDs cannot be computed from the truth-conditional content of the antecedents alone; instead, they must be computed only after (scalar) implicatures have been calculated and added to the common ground, along with the context of utterance. We further discuss the commitments required of syntactic/LF identity accounts of ellipsis licensing in order to accommodate multiple sluicing with quantified antecedents, and argue that such accounts are practically untenable.

Predicates of personal taste in communication: A case of disagreement

Abstract The aim of the paper is to defend the idea that, from the semantic point of view, predicates of personal taste behave in communication like ordinary indexical expressions (pronouns, demonstratives, etc.). It means that they express different semantic contents relative to relevantly different contexts of utterances. This is a consequence of the claim that “tasty” (which is our paradigm example of a predicate of personal taste) and “tasty for (someone)” (where “someone” is a placeholder for an agent) express the same, or very similar, semantic contents relative to the same context of utterance. Now this idea can be challenged by pointing to certain communicative phenomena, such as disagreements about matters of personal taste. It is argued, however, that there is an explanation of taste disagreements that is compatible with the indexical nature of predicates of personal taste. Moreover, it is shown that an explanation along these lines is rather natural because it seems to be necessitated by communication-based evidence.

Pupillometry Reveals That Context Benefit in Speech Perception Can Be Disrupted by Later-Occurring Sounds, Especially in Listeners With Cochlear Implants.

Contextual cues can be used to improve speech recognition, especially for people with hearing impairment. However, previous work has suggested that when the auditory signal is degraded, context might be used more slowly than when the signal is clear. This potentially puts the hearing-impaired listener in a dilemma of continuing to process the last sentence when the next sentence has already begun. This study measured the time course of the benefit of context using pupillary responses to high- and low-context sentences that were followed by silence or various auditory distractors (babble noise, ignored digits, or attended digits). Participants were listeners with cochlear implants or normal hearing using a 12-channel noise vocoder. Context-related differences in pupil dilation were greater for normal hearing than for cochlear implant listeners, even when scaled for differences in pupil reactivity. The benefit of context was systematically reduced for both groups by the presence of the later-occurring sounds, including virtually complete negation when sentences were followed by another attended utterance. These results challenge how we interpret the benefit of context in experiments that present just one utterance at a time. If a listener uses context to “repair” part of a sentence, and later-occurring auditory stimuli interfere with that repair process, the benefit of context might not survive outside the idealized laboratory or clinical environment. Elevated listening effort in hearing-impaired listeners might therefore result not just from poor auditory encoding but also inefficient use of context and prolonged processing of misperceived utterances competing with perception of incoming speech.

The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature.

Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from "She ate some of the cookies" that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children's (N=209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually derived ad hoc implicatures revealed that 4- to 5-year-olds reliably computed ad hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with "some" and "none" was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands.

Partial Truths: Adults Choose to Mention Agents and Patients in Proportion to Informativity, Even If It Doesn’t Fully Disambiguate the Message

How do we decide what to say to ensure our meanings will be understood? The Rational Speech Act model (RSA; Frank & Goodman, 2012 ) asserts that speakers plan what to say by comparing the informativity of words in a particular context. We present the first example of an RSA model of sentence-level (who-did-what-to-whom) meanings. In these contexts, the set of possible messages must be abstracted from entities in common ground (people and objects) to possible events (Jane eats the apple, Marco peels the banana), with each word contributing unique semantic content. How do speakers accomplish the transformation from context to compositional, informative messages? In a communication game, participants described transitive events (e.g., Jane pets the dog), with only two words, in contexts where two words either were or were not enough to uniquely identify an event. Adults chose utterances matching the predictions of the RSA even when there was no possible fully “successful” utterance. Thus we show that adults’ communicative behavior can be described by a model that accommodates informativity in context, beyond the set of possible entities in common ground. This study provides the first evidence that adults’ language production is affected, at the level of argument structure, by the graded informativity of possible utterances in context, and suggests that full-blown natural speech may result from speakers who model and adapt to the listener’s needs.

Shifty Contextualism About Epistemics

According to a highly natural, orthodox view, epistemic modals like might and must are contextually variable, allowing us to express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. This view (contextualism about epistemic modals) is the orthodox one because the only other ways of making sense of how epistemic expressions are sensitive to information (views like relativism, expressivism, and dynamicism) carry such unorthodox commitments. Yet it has faced more than its share of challenges. In this paper, I will argue that two important challenges for contextualism about epistemic modals receive the very same solution: one problem about disagreement, and one problem about the reasonableness of our epistemic beliefs. The first of these challenges is very familiar, and the second less so, but equally important.

The significance of theme

This paper explores the area of mismatches between the grammatical semantics of definite NPs and equivalent features actually operative in common ground in a given context of utterance. It does so with a view to examining the provision for accounting for their significance in terms of a Prague School approach and in terms of Systemic Functional Linguistics; and finds problems, of different kinds, with both these approaches. The rhetorical exploitation of such mismatching demonstrated by opening a text in medias res is discussed; and a third approach, that of “significance generation”, is proposed. This approach of significance generation, which has previously been applied with respect to the meaningfulness of different sentence types, is proposed here as offering a new perspective on a confusing area of different kinds of meaningfulness in the treatment of theme. It involves a “change of gear” between features of meaning associated with the forms of language (linguistic semantics) and features operative in a context of their use. It is based on the claim that a single variable, such as ‘± given’, may have a different value according to whether it is derived from “context as is”, or from the semantics of the linguistic expression used in that context. For example, the linguistic semantics may indicate ‘+ given’, where there is nothing in context to validate this, and so the value as derived from context would be ‘− given’. By allowing for features from these two different sources to clash, this approach provides for a significance outcome, seen as a category in pragmatics which is the product of their combination, to be different from both of them: that is, here, “clash” , as opposed to either ‘+ given’ or ‘− given’. In so doing, I suggest that it provides a framework in terms of which to account for ways in which such opposition may be exploited for rhetorical effect.