Pragmatic Factors Research Articles

Insult as a Linguistic and Legal Phenomenon

In the article, on the material of the texts of linguistic expertise on cases of insult, the main problems and ways of their solution in conducting forensic linguistic expertise of a case of insult in the courtroom are presented. It was stated that when conducting linguistic expertise of conflicting statements, it is not a verbal strategy of achieving the result that matters, but an attack on a person's honor, dignity, and business reputation. The need to include extralinguistic and pragmatic factors in the attention of linguistics expert is emphasized: the focus of insult on a particular person, gestures and the indication of part-of-speech characteristics of the analyzed word.

Communicative Failures and Their Causes as a Result of Unsuccessful Communication

The article treats the phenomenon of a communicative failure as a result of unsuccessful communication and analyses the factors leading to this occurrence. The research is based on the communicative-pragmatic method, which considers a variety of pragmatic factors affecting the realization of the communicative situation, and the descriptive method which is oriented on studying the language as a system of units and rules of their use. The illustrative basis consists of the situations expressing the meanings of epistemic possibility and epistemic necessity. The research enables us to single out six groups of reasons which can serve as factors leading to a communicative failure: disregard for the norms of social and speech etiquette, inadequate perception of the interlocutor and phenomena of the extra-linguistic reality, communicative failures as a result of the influence of the personality of the participants of communication and background information that the interlocutors possess, failure in the realization of the communicative intention of the speaker, intentional or unintentional striving for a communicative failure, inability to build a speech utterance. The indicated factors lead to the conclusion that they are often determined by the difference of an intra-cultural character, and the use of epistemic markers on the whole does not affect the success of communication.

A aceitabilidade do singular nu pré-verbal em Português Brasileiro

Nossa pesquisa investiga o julgamento de falantes nativos de Português Brasileiro (PB) com relação ao singular nu pré-verbal, dada a proposta de que a aceitabilidade de construções com esse nominal pode melhorar diante de fatores pragmáticos tais como o foco contrastivo. Em uma Tarefa de Julgamento de Aceitabilidade, falantes nativos de PB julgaram sentenças: i) genéricas; ii) com predicados-de-espécie; iii) com predicados-de-estágio. Nossos resultados sugerem que a presença do foco contrastivo pode interferir na aceitabilidade de construções com o singular nu pré-verbal, e que construções com predicados-de-espécie são gramaticais na língua. As sentenças com predicados-de-estágio apresentaram taxas baixas de aceitação.

What do speaker judgments tell us about theories of quantifier scope in German?

In this paper we use German data to evaluate configurational and multi-factor approaches to quantifier scope. Configurational theories derive scope relations syntactically at the level of Logical Form; semantic and pragmatic factors are either built into the syntactic representation or ignored, at least during the first derivational step. By contrast, multi-factor approaches consider syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of quantifiers as multiple constraints affecting quantifier scope. We examined predictions for quantifier scope in German of the configurational theory by Frey (1993) and of the multi-factor account by Pafel (2005). These fundamentally different approaches were tested in a series of picture verification experiments to assess scope preferences in doubly quantified German sentences. The results show that at least three factors affect the preferred scope. Our findings are neither fully consistent with Frey’s configurational theory nor with Pafel’s multi-factor approach; both theories made incorrect predictions for German doubly quantified sentences with a subject-before-object word order. For object-before-subject sentences, however, the experimental data by and large support the predictions of Pafel’s (2005) multi-factor approach.

대학생의 스포츠의류 쇼핑성향, 제품속성, 의복추구혜택이 만족도와 재구매의도에 미치는 영향

This research assembled data from 350 university students to analyze the effect of shopping orientation, product attributes, and clothing benefits sought on satisfaction and repurchase intent. Researchers and assistants visited 6 universities and collected data after demonstrating the purpose of research. Descriptive statistics, factorial analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis is used to find out the influence of shopping orientation, product attributes, and clothing benefits sought on satisfaction and repurchase intent when university students buy sports clothing. The result of this study is as follows. To begin with, from the effect of shopping orientation on satisfaction, two of three sub-factors (efficiency, price searching) of shopping orientation showed meaningful results while the other sub-factor (pleasure) didn’t. Second, from the effect of clothing benefits sought on satisfaction, three of five sub-factors (popularity, somatotype expression and compensation, price competitiveness) showed meaningful results while other two factors (brand power, personality) didn’t. In addition, from the effect of product attributes on satisfaction, every factor (aesthetic factor and pragmatic factor) of product attributes showed meaningful results. Lastly, from the effect of sports clothing satisfaction on repurchase intent, it is showed that satisfaction has meaningful influence on repurchase intent.

Processing of non-canonical word orders in (in)felicitous contexts: evidence from event-related brain potentials

ABSTRACT In many languages with flexible word orders, canonical word order has a processing advantage over non-canonical word orders. This observation suggests that it is more costly for the parser to represent syntactically complex sentences. Alternatively, this phenomenon may relate to pragmatic factors because most previous studies have presented non-canonical word orders without felicitous context, which violates participants’ expectations regarding the information structure. The present study conducted an event-related potential experiment to examine the locus of the processing difficulty associated with non-canonical word orders in Japanese by manipulating word order (SOV vs. OSV) and the givenness of arguments. The results showed that OSV elicited a sustained left anterior negativity from O to S and a P600 effect at S compared to that of SOV in the infelicitous but not in the felicitous context. This result suggests that the processing difficulty of non-canonical word orders in Japanese is alleviated by discourse factors.

PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONAL-AND-PRAGMATIC POTENTIAL OF A SPOKEN ENGLISH PROVERB

The paper is a study of the prosodic features involved in the oral actualisation of English proverbs as influenced by structural, emotional and pragmatic factors, which are defined within the framework of a new energetic approach to the research of phonetic phenomena. On the basis of auditory and acoustic analyses of English proverbs, the authors describe the energetic specificity of their prosodic organisation. This description introduces energy-grams formed with the use of a quantitative K -criterion of the texts’ emotional and pragmatic potentials, as well as their typical intonation patterns. Using the traditional method of linguistic interpretation of the results obtained, the authors substantiate invariant and variant intonation patterns of English proverbs, whose parameters are described both within the text’s structural elements and at their junctures. The authors come to the conclusion that an energetic approach to the study of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors makes it possible to present a comprehensive description of invariant and variant prosodic patterns for any type of texts on the basis of such fundamental linguistic categories as emotion, pragmatics, structure, and meaning.

The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis

AbstractThis article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties ofil y a‘there is’ clefts in comparison withc’est‘it is’ clefts in French.Il y aclefts, which are prototypically said to be “presentational” or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect toc’estclefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study ofil y aclefts in three different registers, revealing that these clefts most often express an all-focus articulation, but also quite often express a focus-background articulation, which has not been acknowledged often in the linguistic literature. Moreover, the corpora contain contrastiveil y aclefts (displaying properties of both all-focus and topic-comment sentences), which to our knowledge have not been noticed before. It follows from these data that althoughc’estandil y aclefts can both express all-focus and focus-background, they clearly differ with respect to the topic-comment articulation and have specialized for different functions. Finally, several syntactic and pragmatic factors are presented that may account for the (distributive) differences between the two cleft types, e.g., the impossibility of non-(pro)nominal clefted elements inil y aclefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION FROM THE STANDPOINT OF DETERMINISTIC SOCIAL SENSE (ARCHETYPAL APPROACH)

The features and the role of deterministic social sense in the context of the archetypical approach are considered in the article; the specifics of the existence of the above-mentioned phenomenon in relation to public administration are presented. The nature, principles of the functioning of archetypes as a direct, pragmatic decision-making factor of the personality are represented. It is argued that archetypes are significantly different from those historically established or transformed by human characters, whose senses are not mentally inherited, but transmitted from generation to generation. The emphasis is placed on the relevance of the archetypal approach for research in the management sector in general and deterministic social sense — in particular. The author emphasizes that the archetype is a direct pragmatic factor in personal decision-making, acting as a created internal complication that ensures the course of certain socially deter mined processes in the human brain. Attention is focused on the continuity of the concepts of “sense” and “culture”: from the moment of alienation of a person from the surrounding natural world, all thoughts, created things, found and used means and methods of actions are given meanings. Thus, the decision, that is, the choice, appears to be the natural basis for an individual’s being in ontological reality, acting as a necessary precondition for structuring his administrative, legal and so on needs in modern society. Further investigation of the archetypal approach to the study of the phenomenon of deterministic social sense is seen in the study of the features of citizens’ reflection on the images and symbols created by the government in order to achieve some behavioral manifestations in the latter, allowing more deeply and clearly understand the needs of the people, and also to update the relevant role of public administration in his life. At the same time, from the standpoint of social, psychological, culturological pragmatics etc., the archetype is the primary form of sense stratified according to the types described by Jung. This differentiation of this phenomenon is natural, due to its universalism, which allows us to speak about the degree of social adaptability of the latter.

The grammaticalization of object pronouns: Why differential object indexing is an attractor state

AbstractWhile the grammaticalization of person agreement is a widely-cited and apparently uncontroversial topos of grammaticalization theory, the striking differences in the outcome of subject pronoun, and object pronoun grammaticalization, remain unexplained, and the relevant literature continues to assume a unified grammaticalization pathway. This paper argues that the grammaticalization of object pronouns is fundamentally different to that of subject pronouns. More specifically, although object pronouns may be rapid early grammaticalizers, often losing prosodic independence and cliticizing to a verbal head, they do not advance further to reach the stage of obligatory agreement markers typical of subject agreement. Typically, object markers remain at the stage of Differential Object Indexing, where their realization is conditioned by a bundle of semantic and pragmatic factors exhibiting close parallels to those operative in Differential Object Marking. Evidence from language typology, and from the diachrony of person markers across two millennia of Iranian languages, is adduced to back up these claims. Thus the widely-assumed grammaticalization cline for the grammaticalization of agreement needs to be reconsidered; for object agreement, there is evidently an attractor state, that of Differential Object Indexing, beyond which object agreement seldom proceeds. Finally, explanations grounded in discourse data are proposed, which also account for why obligatory object agreement in the category of person is so rare, while gender and number agreement for objects is far less constrained.

The new privatized market: A question of ideology or pragmatism within the Swedish addiction treatment system?

AbstractGiven its traditions of universal welfarism and social democracy, Sweden had already scored unexpectedly high on New Public Management by the 1980s. Health and welfare services remain primarily tax‐funded, but the production of care is increasingly transferred to a competitive quasi‐market. To what extent can this development be understood in terms of right‐wing governments, and to what extent in terms of other, socioeconomic and pragmatic factors? We examined this question through official statistics on providers of institutional addiction care since 1976, and through the total expenditure and purchases by local‐level municipal social services of interventions for substance users in Sweden in 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014. We have analyzed the distribution across public and private providers within the addiction treatment system, and whether national developments and local differences across the 290 municipalities—which bear the major treatment responsibility—can be understood in terms of local‐level political majority, population size, and local wealth. The share of purchased services has remained stable, but the treatment system shows increasing financial turnover and an increasing share of for‐profit providers among producers of purchased care, especially in outpatient treatment. While venture capital enterprises emerged as a new actor, non‐governmental organizations lost out in importance. Bourgeois government correlated with larger shares of purchasing and purchases from for‐profit providers. However, purchasing on a market dominated by for‐profit providers has also become the “new normal”, regardless of ideology, and recent years have shown a reversed effect of left‐wing municipalities purchasing more services than right‐wing governments. Pragmatic reasons also influence local‐level purchasing.

A sense of agency

AbstractRoper Kriol exhibits variation in the shape of the first-person singular pronoun in subject position. This paper provides an account of the numerous syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that appear to influence the selection of eitheraiormibased predominantly on a study of a corpus of the written language. It is claimed that the synchronic distribution ofaiandmiis an innovation primarily motivated by speaker reanalysis of the semantic entailments frequently associated with English subject and object arguments – effectively evidence of the partial grammaticalisation of agentivity in these varieties. This work has implications for our understanding of ‘agentivity’ as a cross-linguistic, cognitive category and for the dynamic relationship between semantic roles and the morphosyntactic encoding of grammatical relations.

Catalysts towards cancer risk management action: A longitudinal study of reproductive-aged women with BRCA1/2 mutations

ABSTRACTDeleterious mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes increase a woman's lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Risk management guidelines endorse early detection and prevention behaviors. Despite expressed intent, uptake of these measures remains low. This longitudinal, qualitative study integrated retrospective and prospective data to distinguish factors shaping intent to act from those that are catalysts to taking action to reduce cancer risk. Twelve BRCA1/2 mutation-positive women participating in the National Cancer Institute's Breast Imaging Study aged 18–35 completed two semi-structured interviews three years apart. Researchers completed focused coding to identify points of behavioral intent and action and contextual factors acting as catalysts upon participant narratives. All women shared only two action steps: seeking information about cancer risk and completing genetic testing. The constellation of action steps created a unique action trajectory that was defined, with precise ideas about risk perception and clear behavioral response, or iterative, in which unanticipated life events shifted the speed, accessibility, or order in which risk management and family planning goals were prioritized, planned, or executed. Factors shifting action steps included salient, unanticipated life events, such as infertility, insurance/financial constraints, birth of the last child, or a relative's cancer diagnosis. Focus on cancer morbidity may obfuscate how women prioritize actions, and ignore varied pragmatic, relational, and social factors affecting how intended actions are completed, particularly during the reproductive years. We recommend providers update patients' risk management plans at each visit to assess readiness for next steps and reduce reluctance to discuss, or guilt associated with, change.

Variación diacrónica de las formas de tratamiento en el español de Chile. Una propuesta de studio

espanolEl presente trabajo es una propuesta de estudio de corte variacionista en el que se busca dar cuenta del desarrollo historico de las formas de tratamiento en el espanol de Chile en documentos producidos en los siglos xvi, xvii y xviii. La metodologia incluye un analisis integral en el cual confluyen factores pragmaticos, discursivos y culturales. Se trata de la primera vez que se plantea una investigacion diacronica en el espanol de Chile, cuyo objetivo es describir y analizar procesos de cambio linguistico a traves de una muestra significativa1. Como puntapie inicial, presentamos aqui el planteamiento de estudio y un analisis preliminar de documentos del siglo xvii en el que se abordan aspectos de variacion en los planos morfosintactico y pragmatico-discursivo. EnglishThe present study is a variationist proposal on the historical development of address forms in Chilean Spanish in documents from the xvi, xvii and xviii centuries. The methodology includes an integral analysis of pragmatic, discourse and cultural factors. This is the first diachronic research on Chilean Spanish whose goal is to describe and analyze the processes involved in linguistic change through consistent empirical data. To begin with, along with the research proposal a preliminary analysis on the use of xvii century address forms and their relationship to grammatical and discourse-pragmatic variables is presented.

Validity of the Middle Years Development Instrument for Population Monitoring of Student Wellbeing in Australian School Children

The importance of social and emotional wellbeing has long been recognised by education systems but the measurement of wellbeing still receives far less attention than the measurement of academic achievement. This paper reports on a five-year project to measure student wellbeing across an education system within the state of South Australia using the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI). All schools (Government, Catholic, and Independent) were invited to participate in the collection at no cost and aggregated school reports provided an incentive to participate. A total of 51,574 students completed the MDI between 2013 and 2015, with higher participation rates in Government schools than Catholic or Independent schools (65%, 18 and 13% respectively in 2015). Validity and reliability analyses confirmed that the MDI scales had good psychometric properties (i.e., favourable model fit in confirmatory factor analyses, high internal consistency, and correlations between scales were consistent with theoretical expectations). Test-retest reliability (based on a sub-sample of 82 children) was acceptable for most scales except for the connectedness to adults at school (r = .50) and friendship intimacy scales (r = .40), where test-retest reliability was low. However, several of the MDI scales had ceiling effects, particularly for girls and younger students (10–11 years old), which may present challenges when using these scales for population monitoring, program and policy evaluations. Pragmatic factors for education systems and governments to consider in selecting social and emotional wellbeing tools are discussed.

El criterio de empirical grounding en el Estructuralismo Empirista

Van Fraassen’s Empiricist Structuralism has been threatened by what is known as the loss of reality objection: the pre-eminence of pragmatic factors in the scientific representation of phenomena seems to neglect the role of the world itself in the adequacy of theories. One of van Fraassen’s weapons for addressing to this objection is a set of methodological rules he calls criterion of empirical grounding. In the present work we question the effectiveness of this criterion (and the methodological strategy in general) to avoid objections such as the loss of reality.

Influences on Parents’ Child Care Choices: A Comparative Analysis of Preschool and Long Day Care Users

This paper investigates Australian parents’ child care decision-making, including the motivational and influential factors that they attribute to their choice. Research demonstrates that child care decision making is multifaceted, involving a combination of child-related, personal, familial and contextual considerations. Existing research has tended to compare centre-based child care users with those using family-based options, and has not examined differences in the decision-making of parents who using different centre-based options. This study compared the characteristics and child care choices of parents using long day care (LDC) with those using preschool services to determine (1) whether they differ demographically and (2) if their reported child care decision-making motivations and influences diverge. Participants were 1418 parents who completed a nationally-distributed survey in which they provided demographic information, specified their reasons for choosing to use child care, and rated the importance of factors that influenced their child care choice. LDC parents had, on average, younger children, worked longer hours and resided in areas with lower socioeconomic resources than preschool parents. When compared with preschool parents, those using LDC were more likely to nominate pragmatic factors as influencing their child care decision making. External pressures, mainly related to educational outcomes, were more salient for preschool than LDC parents. However, both groups of parents similarly rated child-centred factors as the most important overall influence. Our findings add complexity to current understandings of parents’ child care decision making by showing that parents should not be treated as a homogenous group by policy makers, providers, and researchers.

Quantity judgment studies in Yudja (Tupi): Acquisition and interpretation of nouns

This paper explores the acquisition path and interpretation of substance and object nouns in Yudja, a Brazilian indigenous language. Based on quantity judgment tasks (Barner & Snedeker 2005), we show that children accept both cardinal and non-cardinal interpretations for all nouns (object and substance denoting nouns), while adults strongly favor a cardinal interpretation for all nouns, including substance nouns. We will use the results from these studies to support three theoretical claims from the literature. First, that the pattern observed for adults corroborates previous analyses of Yudja according to which maximal self-connected concrete portions of a kind can be considered as atoms and can be counted (Lima 2014). Second, that counting does not require natural atomicity (cf. Rothstein 2010). Third, that the definition of atoms for counting is the result of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic factors and does not depend solely on the lexical meaning of a noun (cf. Srinivasan & Barner 2016).

Abstract 146: Efficacy of a Nurse-Led Risk Factor Modification Program in Achieving Weight Loss in Obese Atrial Fibrillation Patients

Objective: Weight loss (WL) can improve arrhythmia outcomes in obese patients (pts) with atrial fibrillation (AF). Although WL in this population has been achieved by strict dietary and lifestyle modification in physician-led research protocols, these resource intensive strategies have limited real-life applicability. We report the efficacy of a pragmatic outpatient based nurse-led risk factor modification (RFM) program that utilizes a high-touch, single point of care approach for achieving WL in AF pts at a tertiary care arrhythmia program. Methods: All new AF pts with obesity (defined as body mass index (BMI) ≥30kg/m 2 ) were offered enrollment. The pragmatic approach to WL focused on patient engagement and education, motivational interviewing, development of individualized lifestyle modification goals to improve dietary and exercise habits, and longitudinal telephonic care management to reinforce these changes. WL and compliance with established goals were assessed during ongoing biweekly (initial 2 months) then monthly follow-up support calls for up to 12 months. Continuing participation in RFM program was on a voluntary basis. Pts unable to achieve ≥3% WL by 3 months were referred for escalated care to a WL physician specialist. Pts who declined participation served as controls. Student t-test and chi-square tests were used to compare continuous and dichotomous variables. Results: Between 11/1/16 to 10/31/17, 189 pts (BMI 36.3±6) enrolled in RFM program, and 115 pts (BMI 35.5±5.4; P=NS) declined participation. The majority of enrolled pts (72%, n=136 of 189) had failed ≥1 previous WL attempts. Follow-up WL data (5.5±4.1 months for enrolled; 5.2±2.9 months for declined; P=NS) was available and compared in 162 enrolled (86%, n=162 of 189) and 59 declined (51%, n=59 of 115) pts. Pts enrolled in RFM program achieved significantly greater WL than declined pts (2.7±3.8% vs. 0.3±3.5%, respectively; p<0.05). See table for details. Conclusions: A pragmatic nurse-led risk factor modification strategy focusing on lifestyle changes reinforced by frequent patient follow-up can be effective in achieving weight loss in obese atrial fibrillation patients. This single point of care approach is a potentially sustainable model for maintaining weight loss in this population.

Towards a comprehensive account of English -erdeverbal synthetic compounds in Functional Discourse Grammar

This article puts forward an analysis of productive combinations of agentive -er nouns and compounding within the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) model, trying to account for the different kinds of lexico-semantic input to the process and discussing the relevance of Aktionsart and other semantic and pragmatic factors to constrain noun incorporation in synthetic compounding. It is here argued that the FDG theory can account for the compositional approach to predicate-argument formations such as truckdriver, while also allowing for a non-compositional use of these and other less predictable formations such as painkiller, where analogy is assumed to play a role.