Illocutionary Intention Research Articles

A tale of two sovereigns: the responsibility to protect and the competing notions of responsible sovereignty

ABSTRACT At the 2005 United Nations World Summit, member states unanimously acknowledged the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Despite this apparent unity, states have remained divided over the correct interpretation of the agreement. In this article, I propose that one of the issues sparking controversy relates to the exact characteristics of the kind of ‘responsible sovereign’ that R2P seeks to generate. Examining the first three formal General Assembly debates on R2P, I argue that the critics and advocates of the doctrine have proposed competing sets of requirements that reflect the fundamental disagreement on the meaning of R2P. Drawing upon Quentin Skinner’s ideas on illocutionary intentions and equipped with the teachings of the English School, I examine what kinds of ideal types of responsible sovereignty emerge from the debates when interpreted through the concepts of pluralism and solidarism. I conclude that whereas the responsible pluralist sovereign aspires to protect human rights by safeguarding the rights of states, its solidarist counterpart is prepared to disregard sovereign rights to protect the rights of those abused by their own governments.

THE PROBLEM OF THE EFFECTUATION OF AN EMPATHOGENIC COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION ON THE ILLOCUTIONARY FUNCTIONING OF EMPATHIC SPEECH ACTS

This article is an extension of the author’s study concerned with the verbal sphere of empathy in a func-tional-pragmatic focus. The purpose of the work is to demonstrate the conditionality of the illocutionary functio-ning of empathic speech manifestations according to the empathogenic communicative situation in the pragmatic structure of verbal empathy. The analysis was based on material borrowed from Russian and French communica-tion platforms with the common themes “He/she abandoned me” and “The birth of a child”. The author’s interpre-tation of the “empathogenic” situation was proposed as a result of the joint verbal behavior of the addressee and the addressee, whose illocutionary intention is to initiate and maintain dialogical statements with empathic potential. Two poles of an empathogenic situation are identifi ed based on the qualitative indicator of the valence of a posi-tive/negative sign characterizing the eventful nature of the situation, as well as the manifestation of positively or negatively charged emotions of communicants. The urgency is determined by the functional description of the pragmatic meanings of empathic utterances involving the previously unconsidered positive emotional range of in-teraction between communicants, an attempt to establish the substructural interaction of empathic functions and subfunctions in the illocutionarily organized spheres of empathy and co-rejoycing as well. As the issue, the obvious importance of the eff ectuation of an empathogenic speech situation on the verbalization of empathic illocution was established. The general illocutionary functions of “consolation” of the empathic sphere of empathy and “prolonga-tion of joyful feelings” of the empathic sphere of co-rejoycing are described. Subordinated empathic subfunctions with speech-acting manifestations in empathic messages are presented. Invariant subfunctions of empathic orien-tation, namely cognitive-evaluative, encouraging, and participative in situations of positive and negative emotional background, are determined. The illocutionary types of (sympathetic) understanding and argumentation of “this is life” are demonstrated as speech mechanisms of consolation in an empathogenic situation of a negative emotional range. A positively oriented communication situation is verbalized by a speech act of co-rejoycing, (good)wishes, praises, or a speech strategy to promote “I’m ready to help”.

Cognitive-epistemological, pragmatic, and psycholinguistic aspects of French interjections

Interjections as a lexical and grammatical category still belong to the interdisciplinary lacunae, as they require the concretization of interpretations in various aspects: terminological definitions, pragmatic functions, cognitive reception by a speaker, and an adequate reproduction by an addressee. Their functional capabilities to reflect and combine emotional and rational, verbal and non-verbal information in communication are significant. Interjections are closely related to a speech act, the mental characteristics of its participants, verbal and non-verbal means of communication, context, and objective reality. The current study aims to analyze the determinative interpretations and lexical and grammatical structures of interjections as a universal category used for determining communicative and pragmatic functions. A part of the psychological epic In Search of Lost Time/“A la recherche du temps perdu” – “Albertine Disappears” (“Albertine Disparue”) by Marcel Proust (1925) serves as a research material. Interjections, as a universal category, hold a prominent place in the lexical and grammatical system of languages. As a result of conducted quantitative analysis of interjections, the most common interjections discovered in the studied literary French-language text were one-word interjections, ‘oh!’ ‘ah!’, and ‘hélas!’, which, depending on the author’s illocutionary intention, their pragmatic function, as well as their position in the remark - at the beginning, in the middle or at the end - can create a range of meanings according to their emotional effect, such as hope, disappointment, doubt, embarrassment, confirmation, denial, request or call to action. Conversely, the texts frequently comprise interjection phrases that convey the processes of reflection on the inner experiences of a particular character and their psychological state. This, in turn, reveals the process of their personality development. Disclosure Statement The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. * Corresponding author: Oksana Rohach, 0000-0002-5304-0837oksanarog@vnu.edu.ua

Can Ex-Parliamentarians Tell Political Counter-Narratives?

Telling counter-narratives has sometimes been exclusively reserved for marginal and minority groups. This article asks, instead, whether such elite group members as veteran parliamentarians will also tell counter-narratives in their oral history interviews. When the telling of counter-narratives is understood as a communicative strategy, open to various actors, the decisive question concerns about how to recognize these narratives. Previous literature provides such criteria as the stance toward some other narratives and illocutionary intent, which are helpful but not yet decisive. This article suggests that the limits of counter-narrative are and will remain negotiable since there is no easily recognizable participant orientation or speech act of telling a counter-narrative. This article proceeds to study empirically the possible markers of narrative countering.

Jeffrey S. Krohn. Mormon Hermeneutics: Five Approaches to the Bible by the LDS Church

Jeffrey S. Krohn. <i>Mormon Hermeneutics: Five Approaches to the Bible by the LDS Church</i>

The language of opinion change on social media under the lens of communicative action

Which messages are more effective at inducing a change of opinion in the listener? We approach this question within the frame of Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which posits that the illocutionary intent of the message (its pragmatic meaning) is the key. Thanks to recent advances in natural language processing, we are able to operationalize this theory by extracting the latent social dimensions of a message, namely archetypes of social intent of language, that come from social exchange theory. We identify key ingredients to opinion change by looking at more than 46k posts and more than 3.5M comments on Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView, a debate forum where people try to change each other’s opinion and explicitly mark opinion-changing comments with a special flag called delta. Comments that express no intent are about 77% less likely to change the mind of the recipient, compared to comments that convey at least one social dimension. Among the various social dimensions, the ones that are most likely to produce an opinion change are knowledge, similarity, and trust, which resonates with Habermas’ theory of communicative action. We also find other new important dimensions, such as appeals to power or empathetic expressions of support. Finally, in line with theories of constructive conflict, yet contrary to the popular characterization of conflict as the bane of modern social media, our findings show that voicing conflict in the context of a structured public debate can promote integration, especially when it is used to counter another conflictive stance. By leveraging recent advances in natural language processing, our work provides an empirical framework for Habermas’ theory, finds concrete examples of its effects in the wild, and suggests its possible extension with a more faceted understanding of intent interpreted as social dimensions of language.

Pragmatic (In)appropriateness of Diminutives in Russian Language

The article discusses the issue of pragmatic meanings of diminutive forms in the Russian language from the point of view of politeness and speech act theories. The impact of diminutives on the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of speech acts raises the question of their appropriateness in various communicative situations. Since there is a negative bias towards diminutives among lay native speakers, it was decided to analyse their opinions, beliefs and feelings in order to define 1) the speakers illocutionary intentions; 2) contexts of use and 3) perlocutionary effects. The online articles, forums, posts on social networks and comments of Internet users were collected, with a total amount of 23 sources and 714 user comments. The emic and bottom-up approach referred to speakers intuition reveal 1) negative attitude towards diminutives in hierarchical relationships, 2) perception of diminutives as a positive politeness tool in low distance relationships, 3) perception of diminutives as a manipulative tool in unequal relationships. Thus, the appropriate use of diminutives calls for pragmatic skills to assess a communicative situation in terms of social variables, such as social distance and power, mutual costs and benefits, rights and obligations of interlocutors.

Cultural Implications of Connotations in English and Russian: Ways of Neutralizing Connotation Asymmetry in Translation

Connotation refers to the ethnic or cultural implications and associations that a word may carry, in contrast to its denotative (or literal) meanings. Сonnotation is a problem area for translators as it is an important mechanism for the expression of cultural values and attitudes. This article views translation methods of overcoming lingocultural barrier caused by connotative asymmetry as well as it views some mistakes which can arise in the target text due to differences in connotations. It is of paramount importance that translators be aware of it in order to grasp the illocutionary intent of messages and convey it adequately.

A Wizard of Oz Study Simulating API Usage Dialogues With a Virtual Assistant

Virtual Assistant technology is rapidly proliferating to improve productivity in a variety of tasks. While several virtual assistants for everyday tasks are well-known (e.g., Siri, Cortana, Alexa), assistants for specialty tasks such as software engineering are rarer. One key reason software engineering assistants are rare is that very few experimental datasets are available and suitable for training the AI that is the bedrock of current virtual assistants. In this paper, we present a set of Wizard of Oz experiments that we designed to build a dataset for creating a virtual assistant. Our target is a hypothetical virtual assistant for helping programmers use APIs. In our experiments, we recruited 30 professional programmers to complete programming tasks using two APIs. The programmers interacted with a simulated virtual assistant for help - the programmers were not aware that the assistant was actually operated by human experts. We then annotated the dialogue acts in the corpus along four dimensions: illocutionary intent, API information type(s), backward-facing function, and traceability to specific API components. We observed a diverse range of interactions that will facilitate the development of dialogue strategies for virtual assistants for API usage.

TYPOLOGY OF EVALUATION SPEECH ACTS

The given research is dedicated to the study of typology of evaluation speech acts. In this article questions connected with the analysis of the appearance of the evaluation in the utterance are being discussed. Particular attention is paid to the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of evaluation speech acts. The purpose of the given article is to consider the most common features of evaluative speech acts and determine their place in the hierarchy of speech acts in general. The research methods, used in the study, are determined by the purpose, theoretical direction of the article and are comprehensive. The research methods integrate the basic notions of modern cognitive theory and theory of communication. The minimum unit of communication is speech act. The structure of the speech act includes four levels. They are locution, proposition, illocution and perlocution. In the evaluation speech acts, semantic basis is the category of evaluation. The author of the article offers the following classification of evaluation speech acts. Based on semantic and pragmatic properties of the object of our study, the article proposes to distinguish the following types of evaluation speech acts: 1) focus on the subject; 2) focus on the object. Among evaluation speech acts, oriented on the object, proper evaluation speech acts (for example, praise, condemnation) and emotional evaluation speech acts (for example, admiration, anger, respect) can be selected. The given approach is based on the fact that the evaluative verbs are direct representatives of illocutionary intention of evaluation speech acts. So, we consider that the classification of evaluation speech acts can rely on semantic and pragmatic features of evaluative verbs.

THE NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS AS A COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION FACTOR: A TYPOLOGY OF SITUATIONS WITH THREE PARTICIPANTS

The topicality of the study of communicative situations with three participants is conditioned by, firstly, the fact that pragma-linguistic characteristics of such form of speech interaction as trilogue should serve as a basis for the program development of chat-robots - virtual interlocutors; secondly, a traditional understanding of a communicative situation without reference to the number of the participants does not fully allow to identify the peculiarities of a person’s speech behavior in small-size speech groups. A communicative situation with three participants possesses a variety of pragmatic characteristic features conditioned by a limited number of verbal communication participants; regularities of turn-taking - the speaker and the listener - among the three participants; the configuration of the participants and the specificity of their relationship; the role-based status of the third person and other circumstances that influence the intentional and semantic aspects of utterances. For the classification of communicative situations two factors are important, particularly, the configuration of the participants and the specificity of their relationship; these features are the ones that determine the other pragmatic characteristics of a communicative situation. Based on these factors three major types of a communicative situation are distinguished: in the first type each of the three communicants are participants of verbal communication taking turns in a conversation, where necessary, with various illocutionary intentions; in the second type one of the communicants is the speaker and two others are addressees; in the third type the first two communicants are primary (the speaker and the addressee) while the third participant is secondary, optional. “The third person” can acquire a definite status in the communicative situation depending on the degree - from minimal to high - of his/her involvement in communication.

Linguistic, Pragmatic, and Stylistic Peculiarities of 2018 FIFA World Cup Representation in British Media-Discourse

The purpose of the present research is to analyse linguistic, pragmatic, genre and stylistic peculiarities of the articles from British mass-media which cover the organization and the results of the 2018 World Cup. The importance of such analysis is determined by the necessity to investigate the public evaluation of the phenomenon under study. This will contribute to the understanding of mundane interpretations of sport in a particular culture and analyse the means of the country’s image formation. Quality and tabloid newspapers were used as the basis for the analysis, with the aim of creating an integral picture of the world’s attitude to the World Cup. The methods of discourse analysis and the analysis of the communicative situations let the author conclude that political discourse has an enormous influence on sport discourse. The politicization of sport discourse happens because of the discussion of topics from the conceptual sphere POLITICS, through the inclusion of controversial issues, on which Russia has not yet reached an understanding with the world community, into defamatory contexts. In the framework of sport discourse, the ‘friend-foe’ opposition becomes explicit, which is also characteristic of political discourse. In the British mass-media the materials with a positive illocutionary intention are mostly realized alongside with the foregrounding of politically charged issues and axiologically marked concepts. The analysis of publications in foreign mass-media is important for the purpose of understanding that ambitious sport projects help to ruin the stereotypes about Russia and create a positive image of the country on the world arena.

Utterances without Force

In this paper the author attempts to reconcile two claims recently defended by Mitchell Green. The first is that illocutionary force is part of speaker meaning (Green 2018). The second is that illocutionary force is a product of cultural evolution (Green 2017). Consistent with the second claim, the author argues that some utterances – particularly those produced by infants and great apes – are produced with communicative intent, but without illocutionary force. These utterances lack the normative properties constitutive of force because their utterers have no grasp of the norms that operate on developed speech. If there can be utterances produced with communicative intent that lack force, we must consider how exactly force is a part of speaker meaning. In response the author argues that force is an inessential and acquired part of speaker meaning. As a result we need a conception of communicative intent more basic than illocutionary intent. He spells this out in terms of a ‘perlocutionary’ intention.

Groups speaking for themselves: Articulating first-person plural authority

This paper examines the ways in which group speech acts involve speakers. Against the view that groups need spokespeople speak for (or on behalf of, or in the name of) them, I argue that groups can speak for themselves. Group speech acts are a special type of joint intentional action. Groups speak when they express their illocutionary intention. Group illocutionary intentions are collective intentions of their members, and they are collective in virtue of the members' plural pre-reflective self-knowledge of what it is they – together – want to say. It is only in virtue of the groups’ ability to speak for themselves that they can authorize individual spokespeople to speak for them.1

Group speakers

This paper examines group speech acts to argue against the view, here called speaker intentionalism, that one is a speaker behind a speech act in virtue of having the relevant communicative illocutionary intention. An alternative view is presented called speaker responsibilism according to which one is a speaker in virtue of having certain responsibilities. Complexities are considered which arise from the kinds of responsibilities the speaker has and the specific ways in which they are acquired.

Les lettres philosophiques en anglais ou l'abondance de la traduction premiere

O presente artigo confronta o texto inglês das Lettres philosophiques [Cartas filosóficas] de Voltaire (Letters concerning the English Nation) (1733) a três traduções modernas, de Ernest Dilworth (1961), Leonard Tancock (1980) e Prudence L. Steiner (2007). A análise se centra em particular sobre a décima-terceira e a décima-quarta cartas, uma consagrada a John Locke e a outra a uma comparação entre Descartes e Newton. A tradução antiga, de John Lockman, é cortante, devido a seu tom incisivo, e destaca bem mais que as versões modernas o aspecto sedicioso da argumentação de Voltaire ao invocar o empirismo de Locke e a cosmologia a de Newton. O tradutor contemporâneo ao Iluminismo reproduz plenamente o que Bergman chama de significância do texto original através de uma ênfase fiel ao projeto ilocucionário de Voltaire. Graças à “simultaneidade histórica” (Annie Brisset), o texto inglês de 1733 transmite com vigor o que Voltaire, desejoso de evitar a censura, exprime de modo mais contido na versão francesa. Reproduzindo essa evasão da fala, as traduções modernas não trazem as marcas subversivas que, em conformidade ao projeto de Voltaire, Lockman havia, pelo contrário, ampliado.

SPECIFIC NATURE OF EVALUATIVE SPEECH ACTS

The article discusses the issues connected with the analysis of appearance of the evaluation in the utterance. Particular attention is paid to the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of evaluative speech acts. The speech act is viewed in the paper as the minimum unit of communication. The structure of the speech act includes four levels: locution, proposition, illocution and perlocution. In the evaluative speech acts semantic basis serves as the category of evaluation. Considering semantic and pragmatic properties of the object of our study, the author proposes to distinguish the following types of evaluative speech acts: 1) focus on the subject; 2) focus on the object. Among evaluative speech acts, oriented on the object, the author singles out proper evaluative speech acts (praise, condemnation) and emotional evaluation speech acts (admiration, anger, respect). This approach is based on the fact that evaluative verbs are direct representatives of illocutionary intention of evaluative speech acts. The author comes to the conclusion that the classification of evaluative speech acts can rely on semantic and pragmatic features of evaluative verbs.

Teething problems? Chinese student interpreters’ performance when interpreting authentic (cross-) examination questions in the legal interpreting classroom

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to introduce new assessment criteria to test the quality of interpreted renditions, based on functionalist approaches to translation theory. Secondly, it aims to test these criteria by analysing the English to Chinese interpreted renditions of authentic legal language undertaken by a small number of student interpreters in an undergraduate legal interpreting course at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. The analysis will test student interpreter performance using the criteria outlined, and will focus on two very common syntactical constructions in Chinese which were used to interpret polar interrogatives and positive/negative declaratives with tag questions. The findings suggest that some of the Chinese constructions used by student interpreters resulted in interpretations which significantly deviated from the original involving loss of illocutionary intent.

Three Types of Intention in Lawmaking

The nature of legislative intent remains a subject of vigourous debate in legal theory. A conspicuous feature of the debate is that its participants perceive in many different ways. Some see it as an intention concerning the meaning of the words used in legal text, others as a will to enact the law, others still as a set of expectations regarding the law’s impact on reality. In this paper I identify the reason for such diverse perceptions: namely, that three intentions are involved in lawmaking, not one. The three intentions correspond to three aspects of a speech act: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. The first, the locutionary intention, roughly resembles the semantic intention, i.e. the intention to utter words with specific sense and reference. The illocutionary intention is the intention to perform a specific act by uttering those words, e.g. giving an order or making a promise. The perlocutionary intention is the intention to change reality, i.e. influencing the behaviour of other people by uttering words. The dominant approach in legal theory holds that legislative intent is a broadly semantic (locutionary) one. A closer examination shows that it is fact an illocutionary one.The paper starts with a summary of traditional approaches to legislative intent, showing the extreme diversity of the perspectives involved. In the second part, I propose a new theoretical framework, based on three types of intentions; first, I identify these three intentions; then I look at the different roles and actors in the legislative process and allocate intentions to them. In the final part of the paper, I draw the consequences for legal interpretation of this more theorised model of legislative intent. In the conclusion, I show that the proposed model explains the theoretical conflations, reconciles allegedly competing postions and opens new perspectives for the debate on legislative intent.

Re-Assessing the Speech Act Schema: Twenty-First Century Reflections

Bach and Harnish’s (1979) Speech Act Schema (SAS) breaks down into a series of inferential steps the process involved in understanding an utterance as a particular kind of speech act. At the heart of the SAS lies the notion of illocutionary intention, a special kind of reflexive intention whose fulfilment consists in its recognition. This article re-assesses Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Schema in two ways. First, I discuss three types of indirect speech acts—acts exchanged between intimates, alerts, and ritual indirectness—arguing that in all three cases, a perlocutionary effect of re-affirming or testing the degree of sharedness between speaker and addressee is also achieved, making all three types of acts overt collateral acts in Bach and Harnish’s terminology. Second, I consider cases when the speaker’s illocutionary intention exists in only a rudimentary form, such as children’s early directives and metaphorical utterances expressing feelings. In such cases, the hearer is called upon to play a more active role, by constructing (rather than recognizing) an understanding based on the linguistic material provided by the speaker. The need to account for this second set of acts challenges the centrality of the speaker’s illocutionary intention as the ultimate arbitrator of communicative outcomes and forces us to accord at least equal weight to the contribution of the hearer. The end result is a novel emphasis on the intersubjective aspects of linguistic communication, which were given less prominence in more traditional models, such as the SAS.