Perspective Of Interlocutors Research Articles

Water Rights in a Time of Fragility: An Exploration of Contestation and Discourse around Cape Town’s “Day Zero” Water Crisis

South Africa is an interesting case study on the right to water. It is an upper-middle income country with a history and current reality of extreme racialised inequality, including the water services sphere. It is water scarce, and during 2018, Cape Town was expected to be the first major metropolitan city in the world to run out of water. South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, which incorporated socio-economic rights including the right to water as explicitly justiciable long before the international right to water was recognised. However, despite clear water-security and water-equity fault lines on the one hand and conducive legal frameworks on the other hand, there has been relatively little water rights contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. It is this paradox and, in particular, how it played out in the clear case of water insecurity in Cape Town’s “Day Zero” crisis that are the subjects of examination in this article. Aiming to make an original contribution to the scholarship on the “Day Zero” crisis by exploring it from the perspective of interlocutors and those affected by it, this article also hopes to contribute towards a better understanding of the nature and application of water rights more broadly.

Improving Theory of Mind Skills in Down Syndrome? A Pilot Study

Effective communication requires an understanding of the interlocutor's perspective. Being able to infer someone else's knowledge about a situation is a critical skill in any communication and social interaction. These abilities are part of Theory of Mind (ToM) skills and are known to be impaired in Down syndrome (DS). It therefore makes sense to investigate ToM development in this population. In our pilot study, we explore the possibility of improving ToM abilities in participants with DS and typically developing (TD) children matched for nonverbal mental age. Participants were assessed with the French adaptation of the “ToM Inventory” before and after a 10-week training session. Results show that trained groups perform significantly better on ToM tasks than untrained groups, whose performances remain stable between pre- and post-test. These results are encouraging as they suggest that, with a specific training, children with DS can improve their ToM skills.

What Makes Us More Egocentric in Communication? The Role of Referent Features and Individual Differences

The perspective-adjustment model of language interpretation assumes an initial egocentric stage in comprehension that is only later adjusted to the interlocutor's perspective. Moreover, substantial processing resources are involved in perspective-taking. However, many experiments in the perspective-adjustment framework do not control for visual salience and semantic typicality of referents. We conducted a referential task experiment focusing on salience and typicality as potential factors that may increase the cognitive costs of an interpretation. We additionally manipulated the interactive versus non-interactive nature of the task (with or without an interlocutor) to test the effects of perspective-taking on interpretation. Saliency and typicality of referents influenced the interpretation process when they were in conflict with the perspective-taking factor. Also, the interactive situations were more cognitively demanding than the non-interactive ones. These results are consistent with the constraint-based model that views interpretation as a probabilistic process of competition between constraints.

Character, Impropriety, and Success: A Unified Account of Indexicals

AbstractCore indexicals like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ sometimes appear to refer to an object, place, or time other than the speaker, location, or time of utterance. This presents well‐known problems for Kaplan's view, which treats reference shifting as a violation of the character rules that give the meaning of indexicals. I propose a view according to which indexical reference is essentially a matter of the mutually‐accepted perspective of interlocutors. It follows that contexts need not be ‘proper’ in Kaplan's sense, and a successful convergence of perspectives is needed for indexical reference to succeed. I provide reasons for embracing these conclusions.

Why do we say what we say the way we say it?

This paper seeks answer to the question why exactly we say what we say the way we say it. Although Giora (1997, 2003) argued that cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, play the most important role both in production and comprehension of language, most attention in pragmatics research has been focused on comprehension rather than production. This paper claims that salience plays as important a role in language production as in comprehension, and discusses how salience of an entity can be interpreted as a measure of how well an entity stands out from other entities and biases the preference of the individual in selecting words, expressions, and complex constructs in the process of communication. It is argued that there is a unique interplay between linguistic salience and perceptual salience both in production and comprehension. The role of perceptual and linguistic salience involves a relation between prominence of entities in a ranking, and preference of a choice among alternatives.From the perspective of interlocutors, three theoretically significant categories are distinguished: inherent salience, collective salience, and emergent situational salience. Inherent salience is largely equivalent to cognitive status. It is characterized as a natural built-in preference in the general conceptual and linguistic knowledge of the speaker, which has developed as a result of prior experience with the use of lexical items and situations, and changes both diachronically and synchronically. Inherent salience is affected by collective salience and emergent situational salience. Collective salience is shared with the members of a speech community, and changes diachronically. Emergent situational salience that changes synchronically refers to the salience of specific objects or linguistic elements in the context of language production and comprehension, and may accrue through such determinants as vividness, speaker motivation and recency of mention. In an actual situational context inherent, individual salience is affected and shaped both by collective and situational salience. When the speaker is faced with the choice of a word or an expression, a ranking of the available choices is obtained on the basis of the degree of salience of entities in the generation context. The word or phrase then is selected for utterance on the basis of maximum salience. This paper argues that inherent salience is dominated by linguistic salience, while emergent situational salience is usually governed by perceptual salience.As stated above salience is equally important both in production and comprehension. However, the focus of this paper will mainly be on speaker production because this issue has received less attention so far.

Pragmatics, Cognitive Flexibility and Autism Spectrum Disorders

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter‐subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false‐belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false‐belief tasks require taking an alternative perspective on the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter‐subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs.

The Variable Effects of Some Task-Based Learning Procedures on L2 Communicative Effectiveness

This study attempted to evaluate the benefits of some task-based procedures used to develop L2 communicative effectiveness in spoken English among a group of advanced proficiency learners. Using three information transfer tasks and intervening discussion sessions, we attempted to investigate the actual communicative outcomes of interaction prompted by the tasks. When the intervening discussion focused on linguistic aspects of task performance, there was a tendency for speakers to adopt a noticeably more egocentric perspective in a subsequent communicative task. When referential aspects of the task were discussed, subsequent communicative performance was characterized by speakers taking their interlocutor's perspective much more into account. It is suggested that L2 communicative effectiveness in an information transfer task will be enhanced when the speaker is led to think primarily about the listener's needs rather than the form of the speaker's message.