Pragmatic Ambiguity Research Articles

A Study on Subtitling Translation from a Multimodal Pragmatic Perspective: A Case Study of the English Subtitles of Return to Dust

Return to Dust is an outstanding mainland Chinese film that was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. This paper, using the theories of conversational implicature and the relevance principle, explores the implicit meanings in the film's subtitles from a multimodal perspective. It also examines whether the subtitling translation of the film is reasonable and appropriate. The paper argues that the subtitling translation should pay more attention to the cultural context of the dialogues and the pragmatic ambiguities within the film. By doing so, it can better convey the plot and adopt more suitable translation techniques and methods.

Humor through Exploitation of Meaning Duality in English Memes

There are many mechanisms to integrate humor in English memes. One common method is to make incongruity through two different interpretations. The incongruity can be implemented on different levels, such as lexical, syntactic, and more. However, not everyone can understand these levels; thus, the delivery of humor is not achievable. Therefore, this study aims to analyze meaning duality causing humor in English memes. There were 30 data collected from Pinterest through documentation method. The analysis was conducted with content analysis method through descriptive-mixed approach based on theories of incongruity, ambiguity, context of situation, and generative transformation. The result shows that all types of ambiguity is found and can create meaning duality that causes humor from incongruous finishing text. Lexical ambiguity is the dominant type of meaning duality causing humor. This study also found that one meme can contain two ambiguities. Among the five types of ambiguity, this study found a different characteristic of humor for pragmatic ambiguity. These findings can help unveil how humans play with English to create humor.

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.

Unravelling Emotional Tones: A Hybrid Optimized Model for Sentiment Analysis in Tamil Regional Languages

Review comments from digital platform such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube used for identification of emotional tones from text. Nowadays, reviews are posted in different languages such as English, French, Chinese, and Indian regional languages such as Tamil, Telegu, and Hindi. Identification of emotional tones from text written in Indian regional language is challenging. During the translation of the regional language to the English language for sentiment analysis, lexical and pragmatic ambiguity are the major problem. The above problem arises due to dialects in language such as regional, standard, and social dialects. In this paper, dialect-based ambiguity problems solve through proposed Hybrid optimized deep learning transformer Models like M-BERT, M-Roberta, and M-XLM-Roberta for Tamil language dialects recognise and classified. The proposed algorithms provide better sentimental analysis after Hybrid optimization due to adaptation mechanisms, dynamic changes in the parameters and strategies in fine-tuning the search. The proposed Hybrid optimized algorithms perform better than existing algorithms such as SVM, Naïve Bayes, and LSTM with an accuracy of 95%.

Detecting Pragmatic Ambiguity in Requirement Specification Using Novel Concept Maximum Matching Approach Based on Graph Network

Detecting Pragmatic Ambiguity in Requirement Specification Using Novel Concept Maximum Matching Approach Based on Graph Network

Pragmatic Ambiguity, Implicatures, and Translation1

AbstractThe goal of this work is to put forward a pragmatic and translational framework for analysing target texts (TT) and source texts (ST) containing conversational implicatures that lead to pragmatic ambiguity. Ambiguity, sensu lato, is deemed to be related to indeterminacy and vagueness. Nevertheless, in the strict sense, ambiguity is understood as ‘more than a single processing instruction for a given utterance’. More specifically, pragmatic ambiguity arises whenever differences in cultural conventions between SL speakers and TL speakers lead to differences in the existence, meaning and salience of implicatures among ST and TT. Using real translation cases selected from a purpose‐built corpus containing fiction written and oral texts, we show which pragmatic ambiguities translators come across, and how translation techniques are used, either to maintain ambiguity or to select one intended processing instruction.

Multifaceted Dimensions of Ambiguity in English

Language is an effective means of communication. Words, phrases, and sentences are the standard units of a language. Every word is associated with a particular meaning/sense. Sometimes the meaning of a word undergoes a change, depending on the context or the structure. This triggers ambiguity. When a word, a phrase or a sentence is said to have more than one meaning or multiple meaning, they are said to be ambiguous. Homophonous or polysemous words can give rise to ambiguity depending on the context. There are various types of ambiguity in English. They include lexical ambiguity, syntactic/structural ambiguity, pragmatic ambiguity, phonological ambiguity, scope ambiguity, anaphoric/ referential ambiguity, semantic ambiguity, etc. Lexical ambiguity arises due to polysemous words. Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase, clause or a sentence possesses more than one meaning. Phonological ambiguity arises when homophonous words—words having identical sounds –are used. Anaphoric ambiguity is perceived when there is more than one potential antecedent in the text. Scope ambiguity is found when a structure has two or more than two quantifiers or floating quantifiers and conveys more than one meaning. When the functional value of a phrase or a sentence changes, we find pragmatic ambiguity. When a sentence or a structure has more than two meanings, it contains multiple ambiguity. Ambiguous words lend a spicy dimension to the use and application of the language. Ambiguous words or phrases or sentences present in a text enhance the value of the text. Ambiguous words, phrases, and sentences are interesting and entertaining. Ambiguity tests our sophisticated cognitive skills for disambiguating. This disambiguation imparts pleasure to us. Ambiguity can assess our competence in the language. It tests the skill of comprehension. We enjoy disambiguating words, phrases and sentences in English from the core of our heart, and our disambiguating these whets our competence in the language.

Interpretation of the Positive Functions of English Pragmatic Ambiguity Based on Adaptation Theory

Interpretation of the Positive Functions of English Pragmatic Ambiguity Based on Adaptation Theory

The Role of Prosody in Disambiguating English Indirect Requests.

Ambiguity pervades language. The sentence "My office is really hot" could be interpreted as a complaint about the temperature or as an indirect request to turn on the air conditioning. How do comprehenders determine a speaker's intended interpretation? One possibility is that speakers and comprehenders exploit prosody to overcome the pragmatic ambiguity inherent in indirect requests. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment, we find that human listeners can successfully determine whether a given utterance was intended as a request at a rate above chance (55%), above and beyond the prior probability of a given sentence being interpreted as a request. Moreover, we find that a classifier equipped with seven acoustic features can detect the original intent of an utterance with 65% accuracy. Finally, consistent with past work, the duration, pitch, and pitch slope of an utterance emerge both as significant correlates of a speaker's original intent and as predictors of comprehenders' pragmatic interpretation. These results suggest that human and machine comprehenders alike can use prosody to enrich the meaning of ambiguous utterances, such as indirect requests.

Semantic and Pragmatic Implications of Inaccurate Translations of Shari’a-Court Phrases & Sentence Extracts into English

The present paper aims to highlight the semantic and pragmatic implications of the inaccurate English translations of Gazan shari’a-court phrases and sentence extracts. The researchers analyze the translations of five shari’a-court phrases and five sentence extracts from shari’a-court documents of different shari’a courts in Gaza Strip. The descriptive analytical approach was adopted to conduct this research paper. The texts used in this paper are extracted from a thesis on the linguistic difficulties Palestinian translators face when rendering shari’a-court terms in which the researchers participated as a master student and a supervisor. When selecting the source texts, the researchers consulted an assistant professor in law to identify the legal phrases and sentential extracts which require specific familiarity with shari’a-court terms. Then, the selected texts were given to four Palestinian sworn translators who rendered the translations which were afterwards analyzed by the researchers in light of explanations of the legal meaning of the shari’a-court terms by the law specialist. The findings of the selected translations, five phrases and five sentential extracts from fifty phrases and thirty-five sentential extracts in the original thesis, show that the inaccurate translations of shari’a-court terms have semantic and pragmatic implications which are mainly reflected in semantic loss and pragmatic ambiguity which lies in lack of specific reference to intended persons. The researchers recommend integrating specific contents in legal translation courses to better familiarize student translators and trainee translators with the semantic complexity of shari’a-court terms and the practical methods which can be adopted to translate such terms into English. Attention should also be given to the legal terms which are characterized by culture-based meanings.

Understanding “Sectarianism”: Sunni-Shiʿa Relations in the Modern Arab World

Understanding “Sectarianism”: Sunni-Shiʿa Relations in the Modern Arab World

Creating and Disrupting Othering During Policymaking in a Polarized Context

Abstract As the United States has become increasingly polarized, policymakers have had difficulty gaining bipartisan support for policy proposals. Political polarization can lead to the othering of individuals, a process characterized by the tendency to construct members of an opposing party in negative ways. In this article, we examine the creation and disruption of othering through the lens of language convergence/meaning divergence (LC/MD) and pragmatic ambiguity. LC/MD and pragmatic ambiguity framed our case study of the successful bipartisan passage of the Global Food Security Act (GFSA) in 2016. We found that othering was produced through a maestro Discourse of Polarization that structured interactions between other Discourses, including the Discourse of National Security and the Global Good Discourse. Discordant framings of the three Discourses created the ambiguity necessary to disrupt othering and achieve collective action. The findings provide new theoretical insights into othering processes while pragmatic ambiguity broadens LC/MD in important ways.

“May you fall [dead] while standing!”

Abstract This paper presents two types of maledictions in Thadou-Kuki. The first deals with the various forms of maledictions which on the surface appear as though they are curse words in terms of their forms and meanings. But a close examination reveals that the mere presence of such maledictions does not constitute cursing. Rather, it is the context of who said what to whom and why that determines whether they should be interpreted curses or not. The second deals with words that are used purely as abuses or insults and, as such, do not have such semantic or pragmatic ambiguities like the various forms of maledictions. The paper shows that maledictions are expressed with the help of imperatives of which the directive -în and the command tâng are used with slight nuances in meaning. That is, with the latter, the wish is more pronounced and indicates the true intent of the speaker to inflict harm upon the addressee, which the former lacks. Abuses or insults, on the other hand, are momentary emotional reactions to the things that happened around the speaker and unlike true curses are not carefully thought out expression of words. They are rather words that the speaker picked up as and when the situation demands and may involve an element of bragging.

From Lean Production to Lean 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review with a Historical Perspective

Over recent decades, the increasing competitiveness of markets has propagated the term “lean” to describe the management concept for improving productivity, quality, and lead time in industrial as well as services operations. Its overuse and linkage to different specifiers (surnames) have created confusion and misunderstanding as the term approximates pragmatic ambiguity. Through a systematic literature review, this study takes a historical perspective to analyze 4962 papers and 20 seminal books in order to clarify the origin, evolution, and diversification of the lean concept. Our main contribution lies in identifying 17 specifiers for the term “lean” and proposing four mechanisms to explain this diversification. Our research results are useful to both academics and practitioners to return to the Lean origins in order to create new research areas and conduct organizational transformations based on solid concepts. We conclude that the use of “lean” as a systemic thinking is likely to be further extended to new research fields.

‘그러니까’의 의미 기능과 실현 양상 연구

The purpose of this study is to classify the pragmatic-semantic function of ‘Geureonikka’ and to explore the pragmatic-semantic function and realization aspect of ‘Geureonikka’ through an analysis of a written Korean corpus. Therefore, Sweetser’s(1990) cognitive approach to the analysis of pragmatic ambiguity was examined, and his theory was applied to describe the realization aspect in a written Korean corpus of the conjunctive adverb ‘Geureonikka’. Subsequently, four findings were identified. First, the semantic function of ‘-nikka’ correlates with that of ‘Geureonikka’. and the connective ending ‘-nikka’ was verified as a cause for the semantic function formation of ‘Geureonikka’. Second, similar to ‘because’ in English, ‘Geureonikka’ was used in every domain: content connection, epistemic connection, and speech-act connection. Third, ‘Geureonikka’ in a written Korean corpus was extensively used in epistemic connection while it was infrequently used in content connection. Fourth, the syntactic position of ‘Geureonikka’ was determined by the semantic function of ‘Geureonikka’. The limitations of this study were also identified: (i) The analyzed genre of a written Korean corpus was limited, and (ii) further research is needed to investigate similar conjunctive adverbs to ‘Geureo’ to reveal their differences from ‘Geureonikka’. Nevertheless, this research is meaningful as the pragmatic-semantic function of ‘Geureonikka’ was classified and the realization aspect of ‘Geureonikka’ in a written Korean corpus was demonstrated. (Yeungnam University)

Actions do not speak louder than words in an interactive false belief task.

Traditionally, it had been assumed that meta-representational Theory of Mind (ToM) emerges around the age of 4 when children come to master standard false belief (FB) tasks. More recent research with various implicit measures, though, has documented much earlier competence and thus challenged the traditional picture. In interactive FB tasks, for instance, infants have been shown to track an interlocutor's false or true belief when interpreting her ambiguous communicative acts (Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907–912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x)). However, several replication attempts so far have produced mixed findings (e.g. Dörrenberg et al. 2018 Cogn. Dev. 46, 12–30. (doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001); Grosse Wiesmann et al. 2017 Dev. Sci. 20, e12445. (doi:10.1111/desc.12445); Király et al. 2018 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 11 477–11 482. (doi:10.1073/pnas.1803505115)). Therefore, we conducted a systematic replication study, across two laboratories, of an influential interactive FB task (the so-called ‘Sefo’ tasks by Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907–912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x)). First, we implemented close direct replications with the original age group (17-month-olds) and compared their performance to those of 3-year-olds. Second, we designed conceptual replications with modifications and improvements regarding pragmatic ambiguities for 2-year-olds. Third, we validated the task with explicit verbal test versions in older children and adults. Results revealed the following: the original results could not be replicated, and there was no evidence for FB understanding measured by the Sefo task in any age group except for adults. Comparisons to explicit FB tasks suggest that the Sefo task may not be a sensitive measure of FB understanding in children and even underestimate their ToM abilities. The findings add to the growing replication crisis in implicit ToM research and highlight the challenge of developing sensitive, reliable and valid measures of early implicit social cognition.

Text as Image: A Case Study of the Lithuanian Translation of Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel MAUS

This article contributes to the multimodal investigation of comics translation, a highly semiotic activity. The author discusses the visual representation of the text as an image through a case study of the Lithuanian translation of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS (translated into Lithuanian by Juškienė and Lempert, 2012). While viewing multimodality as a translation tool and a challenging area, he claims that the visual representation of the text is an integral part of the original multimodal event, whereby the meaning is conveyed through an intrinsic relationship between verbal and non-verbal elements, and that any distortion of those would result in alterations or losses in meaning. The results demonstrated that indeed even the smallest alterations of the visual representation of the text produced shifts in meaning; most of those shifts were pragmatic ambiguities, however, in certain instances there was a loss of semantic emphasis or narrative production. Comics translators and publishers are thus urged to fully comprehend the very dynamic and complex nature of multimodal texts and make every effort to ensure that translation would not result in any multimodal disruptions, if such preservation is technologically available.

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.

Lean culture: a comprehensive systematic literature review

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the level of pragmatic ambiguity (PA) lean culture has currently in the manufacturing and service literature.Design/methodology/approachA comprehensive systematic review of academic (journals, books and theses) and commercial literature was undertaken drawn from a six databases search of two keywords (“lean” and “culture”) and related citations.FindingsA total sample of 1,066 references (678 academic papers, 121 books, 103 theses and 164 commercial documents) were analyzed. The authors found contributions from 67 countries but oddly, only two came from Japan. In total, 89 percent of citations were directly about lean culture. However, for 86 percent of them, lean culture was only discussed superficially. All four literature segments show an over 85 percent agreement on lean culture being an organizational aim. The authors encountered 103 definitions of organizational culture and found 13 definitions of lean culture. Issues of culture gap, leadership, human resource management, sustainability and innovation are found to amplify lean culture’s already high PA level.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research and development are needed to decrease lean culture’s PA level and improve understanding of lean from a cultural perspective.Practical implicationsCurrent lean culture’s high PA level has positive and negative effects on lean implementation. Taking lean implementation from a cultural perspective may facilitate an organization’s lean transformation journey.Originality/valueThis is the first systematic literature review on lean culture using a broad and inductive approach. An original evidence-based definition of organizational culture is proposed.