Context Of Utterance Research Articles

The English Possessive Marker in a Framework of Relevance

English nominals constructed with the morpheme {-s} as a so-called possessive marker may be assigned an indefinitely large number of interpretations depending on the context of utterance. This raises interesting questions concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, most obviously concerning the more specific nature of the contextually invariable encoded content of the morpheme as well as the contribution made by that content to the process of comprehension. This article aims briefly to suggest one solution to these problems by proposing an underdetermined procedural semantics feeding into a principled cognitive process of inference as proposed within the framework of relevance theory.

Cogency and Context

The problem I address is: how are cogent inferences possible? In § 1 I distinguish three senses in which we say that one is “compelled” by an inference: automatic, seductive-rhetorical and epistemic compulsion. Cogency (in my sense) is epistemic compulsion: a cogent inference compels us to accept its conclusion, if we accept its premises and we aim at truth. In §§ 2–3 I argue that cogency is intelligible if we consider an inference as a compound linguistic act in which several component acts (assertions and hypotheses) are related to one another by a commitment that the premises support the conclusion. Non-automatic inferences are primarily public acts in an intersubjective context. But cogency arises in special contexts described in § 4, epistemic contexts, where the participants care for truth, i.e. are intellectually virtuous. An inference is cogent in an epistemic context if it stands up to all the objections raised in the context. In § 5 I consider three different kinds of cogent inferences. In § 6 I argue that in all three cases cogency is fallible and propose a fallibilist variety of inferentialism. In § 7 I distinguish context of utterance and contexts of evaluation. Cogency is relative to epistemic contexts of evaluation. However, validity, i.e. stable cogency, is transcontextual.

On the Wording of Images and Dispersion: Poe’s Breathing Method. A Canvas and Dialectic of Flowing Waters Within

This essay, not an evaluative but a descriptive, inspecting and interpreting one, intends to theorize about the cognitive hallmarks within Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional universe of nemesis, rhetorical grotesque semantics, foregrounded and highlighted macabre philosophical vestiges, both in terms of the constants and prisms playing a fundamental role in his encoding creative process depicting reality –context of utterance– and productively transforming it into an abiding and refuge-like paradise of the ineffable –context of reference–, as well as on the significant choices and pragmatic maxims involved in his gradual and methodic regression into madness as a purely literary and individual quest for the Sublime. The lines that follow are also impelled, as a second articulation of our proposition, to provide the reader with some of the most prominent and notorious features in Poe’s prose and poetry: his patterns of impact and scars of defamiliarization, his peculiar and obsessive delineation of sequenced states heading for the last glimpse of unity after self-annihilation, the disciplined wording or orchestration of microeffects towards the knowledge of the Absolute, aiming to establish a parallelism between the different seasons covering the envisioning of the innerly maturing self and the explicit pattern of dawning colours that founds the definition of the erotically desirable, the mannequin of the supernal or macroeffect of everlasting existence categorized by inner metaphors and intrinsically artistic inventions.

Reescrituras de las Danzas de la Muerte en Óscar Hahn y Leopoldo María Panero

En el presente artículo se estudian las reescrituras de las Danzas de la Muerte en los poemas “Danza de la muerte” y “Venid a la danza mortal” del chileno Óscar Hahn y en el poemario Danza de la muerte del español Leopoldo María Panero. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar qué elementos del género se conservan, qué transformaciones se perciben y qué sentido tendrían estas reescrituras postmodernas de las danzas medievales de la muerte. Se caracteriza el contexto de enunciación de estas danzas como neomedieval, desde el pensamiento de Umberto Eco.

Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty

We offer a new argument in favor of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centered on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty regarding certain descriptive facts. Contextualists, relativists, and invariantists all have plausible ways of explaining these cases, and one could reasonably judge the debate between these views to be a stalemate. We argue that this stalemate can be broken by shifting focus to a case that involves normative uncertainty rather than descriptive uncertainty. While relativist and invariantist rivals of contextualism can give plausible accounts of the descriptive uncertainty cases, only contextualism can provide a plausible account of the normative uncertainty case.

The semantics of person and de se effects in free indirect discourse.

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of interpretation in FID, the factors that account for the observation that person and tense behave similarly in FID. At the same time, we will also discuss the main controversies to which the ongoing debate on FID has given rise in the literature, showing that Schlenker (Mind Lang 19(3):279–304, 2004)’s distinction between a Context of Thought (CT) and a Context of Utterance (CU) still provides a fundamentally valid insight into the nature of FID, in spite of many qualifications that are necessary and some well-motivated criticism. However, our main task here is more ambitious than simply taking a stand on the many unsettled controversies surrounding FID. In fact, we claim that Schlenker’s split between CU and CT can be derived in a principled way from the inner nature of FID as a linguistic process of ‘phenomenal identification’, whereby a Higher Experiencer attempts at reproducing (at a distinct time) the phenomenal experience proper to a Lower Experiencer. This distinction between qualitatively identified but numerically distinct experiences provides the conceptual basis for the derivation of virtually all remarkable properties of FID (including its somehow intermediate status between Direct and Indirect Discourse), while connecting, at the same time, with some intriguing semantic properties of first-person pronouns, such as the different varieties of de se readings.

Why we should(n’t) be discretionists about free will

One of the projects Shaun Nichols takes up in Bound is to provide a folk psychological diagnosis of the problem of free will. As part of this diagnosis, Nichols suggests that the dispute between eliminativists (those who claim free will does not exist) and preservationists (those who claim free will does exist) depends to some extent on assumptions about the way ‘free will’ refers. In light of this, he argues that we might have good reason to accept a discretionary view of free will. Here, I will focus on teasing out some of the more fine-grained features of the discretionary view Nichols proposes. In so doing I will challenge the idea that there is a tenable strategy for consistently preserving two main features of the view: (1) that eliminativists and preservationists can both speak truly, and (2) that the apparent disagreement between them can be diffused by appealing to the role that different practical interests play in the context of utterance. I will conclude with some suggestive remarks on how the spirit of the discretionary view Nichols offers might still be preserved despite the challenge I raise, and why there are good reasons to pursue this kind of view further.

On Something Similar

The use of expressions something similar/something like that/and the like is a pervasive feature of spoken natural language, and thus must be accounted for if we hope to develop a semantic account of dialogue. These expressions exhibit an anaphoric type dependency, but at the semantic-pragmatic level rather than the syntactic level. The meaning of these utterances depends upon the context of utterance: if the meaning of the utterance is regardedas fixed, then utterances which intuitively are coherent receive incoherent interpretations. To model what happens with utterances containing these phrases, we require both a formal theory of discourse structure, and accessibility to the lexicon.

Inaccuracy in Indonesian Subtitles of The King’s Speech Movie (2010)

Movie subtitles is a product of translations, so the rules of translations must be followed. The research explored how translation mistakes in Indonesian subtitles of “The King’s Speech” Movie (2010) and distort the meaning of the original utterances. The data were the dialogues in English and their Indonesian translations. Qualitative method was applied in this research. The analysis was done by comparing the meaning of the original utterances and their Indonesian subtitles. It is found that the types of mistakes that mostly occurred in the Indonesian subtitles of the movie were ambiguity and omission mistakes. To avoid these mistakes, the context of the original utterance must be considered. In general, it can be concluded that accuracy in subtitling should be taken into account.

Nord-Sud aller-retour. Le récit de voyage érudit au xix e siècle entre orientalisme et boréalisme

The article discusses the concept of « borealism », elaborated by analogy with Edward Said’s « orientalism », and the way it might be applied to the works of three French language scholars from the second half of the nineteenth century who visited the north of Scandinavia as well as North Africa and the Middle East. The travelogues from trips to Lapland and to Algeria by the botanist Charles Martins and the philologist Xavier Marmier, both members of La Recherche-expedition (1838-1839), are examined in the first place. The essay of Belgian historian and traveler Eugene Goblet d’Alviella, Sahara and Lapland (1873) completes the picture. The similarities and differences in the discursive and imaginary structures of the texts, describing geographically and culturally distant territories (even seen as opposite according to the North/South paradigm), show in each case the importance of the context of utterance (historical, ideological, individual) and make it possible to evaluate the methodological validity of the concept « borealism ».

Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

tions (‘knows’), predicates of taste (‘tasty’, ‘delicious’, ‘cool’), colour ascriptions (‘red’), epistemic modals (‘might’, ‘must’, ‘probably’), deontic modals (‘ought’, ‘may’), and indicative conditionals. A dispute about whether an expression is context-sensitive is a dispute between a contextualist and an invariantist. A contextualist about an expression claims that the expression is context-sensitive; an invariantist denies this. Although the dispute between contextualists and invariantists is about subsentential expressions, it is often helpful to cast the dispute at the sentential level. Let a contested sentence be a sentence that contains one contested expression but no other potentially context-sensitive expressions. The dispute between contextualists and invariantists then centres around the following question: Do utterances of a contested sentence express the same proposition irrespective of the context of utterance? Invariantists say yes; contextualists say no. Invariantists think that there is more cross-context 1 In setting up the dispute between contextualists and invariantists, I follow Ross and Schroeder, both in their 2013 (pp. 43{51) and in previous drafts of their paper that were made available online. Ross and Schroeder focus on ‘epistemic’ expressions, such as epistemic modals, deontic modals, and indicative conditionals. But as they note (see their n. 5), a similar dialectic arises for other contested expressions.

The Role of Speaker and Hearer in the Character of Demonstratives

Demonstratives have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. But it is surprisingly difficult to describe the function from contexts to contents (i.e. the character) which determines the semantic value of a given use of a demonstrative. It is very natural to think that the intentions of the speaker should play a significant role here. The aim of this paper is to discuss a pair of problems that arise for views which give intentions this central role in explaining the characters of demonstratives. As will emerge, these problems lead quickly to a foundational question about the semantics of demonstratives and many other context-sensitive expressions: the question of whether, in explaining their characters, we need to understand them as sensitive, not just to facts about the psychology of the speaker of the context, but also to facts about the audience of the context. I critically examine Jeffrey King’s theory of demonstratives, which answers this question in the affirmative, and argue that it ultimately collapses into a purely speaker-based view of the character of demonstratives. I then show how to develop a much simpler speaker-based theory which both handles all of the cases handled by King’s theory and avoids some of the more serious problems which King’s theory faces. Towards the end I consider how we might solve the very difficult problems which result from cases in which speakers use demonstratives with conflicting referential intentions

Context as Relevance-Driven Abduction and Charitable Satisficing.

It has been widely assumed that the full meaning of a linguistic expression can be grasped only within a situation, the context of the utterance. There is even agreement that certain factors within the situation are particularly significant, including gestures and facial expressions of the participants, their social roles, the setting of the exchange, the objects surrounding the participants, the linguistic, cultural and educational backgrounds of the participants, their beliefs, including those concerning the situation, the social procedures and conventions that regulate the situation. Finally, there is some agreement that context is dynamic, reflexive (the speakers are mutually aware of their beliefs), not limited to linguistics actions, and last but not least, a psychological construct. This definition of context is not (very) controversial, but it leaves out two major problems, which will be addressed in this paper: how is context arrived at? And, since a perfectly natural interpretation of the above definition could be that the context of each utterance is the entire universe, how is the relevant context delimited? Four related concepts will provide the answer to both questions: abductive reasoning, driven by relevance and cooperation, and bounded rationality and the principle of charity. Simply put, context is derived abductively by the speakers assuming that for the speakers to behave the way they behave and do so rationally, a given context must be available to them. The context is bounded by the simple requirement that speakers not try to optimize their interpretation/calculation, but rather satisfice, i.e., find the first acceptable solution and by the need to follow the principle of charity, which forces intersubjective agreement. Thus, abductive reasoning and bounded rationality will be shown to be sufficient to calculate the relevant context of utterances (or other rationality-driven interactions) and to effectively delimit the potentially infinite search space that must be explored to do so.

Descriptive Interpretation of Korean Indexicals

This study includes a few proposals about Korean indexicals. Korean indexicals including personal pronouns, which are linked to the context of utterance, are also interpreted as anaphoric and descriptive uses. Based on Korean data, contra Kaplan(1989), I argue that there is no lexical list of pure indexicals in Korean and that indexicality is a kind of uses, which is interpreted under the context of utterance. It also demonstrates that descriptivism is more resonable theory than referentialism in that the former can provide the proper perspective to Korean indexicality but the latter cannot. In addition, by integrating anaphoric and descriptive uses of Korean indexicals, some categories in Korean can be neutralized. Specifically, first and second person pronoun can be interpreted in a similar way with third person pronoun because all of them can be interpreted as deictically and anaphorically.

Fine-tuning natural language imperatives

This paper considers imperatives as sentential form types of natural languages that are canonically used for orders or commands. Linguistic theory aims to account for this connection by assigning conventional meanings that interact accordingly with a suitable representation of the utterance context. I revisit the main challenges for a semantic analysis of imperatives and compare a few recent accounts. I propose that imperatives contain modal operators and express propositions; they trigger presuppositions that constrain and guide their interaction with the contextual settings. I evaluate the effects predicted for a couple of different constellations and argue that our intuitions about the speech acts occurring in these settings are modeled successfully.

Classifying Prosocial Lies

The term prosocial lies refers to lies speakers produce with benevolent intentions. Such lies can be further divided into categories depending upon the context of utterance and the person who benefits from the lie (Levine and Schweitzer, 2014). This paper defines prosocial lies as a distinct pragmatic category of a lie. In order to examine this category, university students were provided with 10 vignettes containing prosocial lies and were asked (using a Likert Scale) whether they considered each target utterance to be a lie, a polite utterance, and an act benefiting the speaker and/or the hearer. The results show that prosocial lies are judged as lies proper. Furthermore, the study gives support for several categories of prosocial lies.

A tale of two intentions

Speaker intention is conceptualized as a property of utterances in context, not speakers; it is based on communally shared knowledge of discursive means to ends. The article’s main theoretical claim is that utterances, in addition to being produced with an intention about their pragmatic meaning, are also produced with an intention to bring about some post-interactional end result. Both types of intention bear on the utterance’s pragmatic meaning. Empirical aspects of the theoretical difference between these two types of speaker intention are shown through analysis of naturally occurring interactions; here, the analytical focus is on the scope, interdependence, recognizability, and fulfillment of each type of intention, with special attention to the functionality of an utterance’s content, composition, and sequential placement as a means of getting a response from the interlocutor(s) that goes along with what the speaker intends as regards the end result of the interaction.

Retractions

Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are.

ANALYSIS ON PRAGMATIC FORCE OF DECLARATIVE UTTERANCES IN FILM ENTITLED “AVATAR”

<p>This is a descriptive qualitative research. The data sources are thevmanuscript and video of “Avatar” film. From the sources, the researcher takes 40 declarative utterances uttered by the main character (Jake Sully) to be analyzed. The research goals are 1) to identify the contexts of declarative utterances, 2) to identify the hearer’s responses of declarative utterances, 3) to explain the pragmatic force of declarative utterances viewed from the illocutionary force. Before define the force, the researcher explains the context for a better understanding about the speaker’s intention. The results of this research are, 1) every utterance has its own context: situation, participants, ends, act sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genre, 2) the hearer’s responses are words response and act response, 3) utterance’s function reflects the pragmatic force, those 40 declarative utterances bring various forces; suggesting, appointing, reporting, requesting, claiming, thanking, asking, complaining, apologizing, confirming, blaming, ordering, advising, and sentencing.</p>

A PRAGMATIC STUDY ON THE ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE OF EXPRESSIVE UTTERANCES IN “THE KING’S SPEECH” MOVIE TRANSCRIPT

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This is a descriptive qualitative research. The goals of this research are, (1) to describe the contexts of expressive utterances that are used by the characters of the movie entitled “The King’s Speech”, (2) to explain the illocutionary forces of expressive utterances used by the characters of the movie entitled “The King’s Speech”. The data of this research are expressive utterances taken from “The King’s Speech” movie transcript. The researcher found 55 data of expressive utterances in the transcript. In classifying the kinds of expressive utterances, the researcher refers to Leech and Cutting’s theory. And in explaining the illocutionary forces of the utterances employed by the characters in the movie, the researcher used Thomas’ concept of illocutionary forces. The results of this research are: (1) there are four kinds of expressive utterances that are used in “The King’s Speech” film transcript, made up of declaratives (30%), interrogatives (2.5%), imperatives (5%) and ellipsis (62.5%), (2) The function of expressive utterances found in “The King’s Speech” film transcript were divided into four categories: apologizing that covers eleven data (27.5%), eleven data of congratulating (27.5%), ten data of thanking (25%) and the rest is eight data of welcoming (20%).</span></p></div></div></div>