Pragmatic Factors Research Articles

Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.

Guiding reinvention of conventional tools of mathematical logic: students’ reasoning about mathematical disjunctions

Motivated by the observation that formal logic answers questions students have not yet asked, we conducted exploratory teaching experiments with undergraduate students intended to guide their reinvention of truth-functional definitions for basic logical connectives. We intend to reframe the relationship between reasoning and logic by showing how logic emerges within students’ mathematical activity. This activity entails reflecting on and systematizing their own language use across diverse semantic content. We present categories of students’ untrained strategies for assessing the truth-values for mathematical disjunctions. Students’ initial reasoning heavily reflected content-specific and pragmatic factors in ways inconsistent with the norms and conventions of mathematical logic. Despite this, all student groups reinvented the standard truth-functional definition for simple disjunctions. We demonstrate how this learning depended upon particular forms of reasoning about logic. We also contrast various strategies for assessing quantified disjunctions and their different affordances in students’ mathematical activity.

A cross-cultural gender analysis of the pragmatic functions of conceptual metaphor in Spanish and English newspapers

Abstract Most gender studies performed from a cognitive perspective focus on the description of metaphors underlying the conceptualization of men and women in different cultures. Little attention has been paid so far to gender-related aspects of the pragmatic uses of conceptual metaphors. This paper analyzes a corpus of opinion columns by two groups of contemporary Spanish and English journalists (male versus female journalists) with a view to identifying the pragmatic functions of the cognitive metaphors found in their discourse. Such metaphors have turned out to act as either mitigating or intensifying devices of the writers’ claims. From a gender perspective, a tendency has been observed for male journalists to use conceptual metaphors in order to intensify axiologically negative opinions or descriptions, while female journalists tend to make use of them for the mitigation of negative descriptions. In both cases, metaphor is also used for the creation of humor, but while male journalists do so by means of downgrading others, female journalists repeatedly play themselves down in an attempt to gain the readers’ sympathy through laughter. These general tendencies have been found to be largely modulated by culture-specific pragmatic factors (i. e. preference for indirectness) and maxims (i. e. Modesty and Approbation).

Whensomethingbecomesa bit

This paper analyzes the mechanisms of syntactic and semantic change involved in the development of the degree modifieralgo“a bit, a little” in Spanish from an indefinite pronoun with inanimate reference meaning “something”. Specifically, it focuses on the distribution of the pronoun in the Medieval and Classical periods of Spanish and its interpretation in partitive and pseudo-partitive constructions. I argue for combination of structural and pragmatic factors in the creation of the degree modifier and relate this change to other diachronic developments of indefinites across languages. I also discuss implications for models of the distribution of degree modifiers crosslinguistically.

Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Linguistic patterns in the judgment and production of mood

Purpose:This study investigates heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands regarding their knowledge of Spanish mood. Previous research has demonstrated that heritage speakers of Spanish in the US have problems with mood, especially subjunctive mood and particularly in contexts where choice of mood is variable and depends on semantic and pragmatic factors. Moreover, heritage speakers are often reported to experience fewer problems with oral production tasks tapping into implicit knowledge than with judgment tasks targeting metalinguistic knowledge. This study aims to investigate whether these patterns can be confirmed for heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands.Methodology:In all, 17 heritage speakers from the Netherlands and 18 monolingual speakers of Spanish completed a contextualized elicited production task. Each item contained a context targeting either indicative or subjunctive mood. Below each context followed the beginning of a sentence which the participants were instructed to complete. Both obligatory and variable uses of mood were included. The results were compared to findings from a contextualized scalar acceptability judgment task described in an earlier study using the same conditions and the same participants.Data and analysis:All responses were coded as felicitous or infelicitous given the accompanying context and were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The results demonstrate that the heritage speakers are less accurate in their choice of mood than monolingual speakers, particularly on subjunctive mood and in variable contexts. Furthermore, heritage speakers deviated more from the monolingual patterns in the production task than in the judgment task.Findings/conclusion:These results confirm several patterns attested for heritage speakers of Spanish in the US, namely the increased vulnerability of subjunctive mood and in contexts where mood is not obligatorily selected. However, in contrast to previous literature, this study reports better performance on a metalinguistic judgment task than on an oral production task. This finding is attributed to differences in societal circumstances between both heritage speaker populations.Implications of the research:This study confirms the heterogeneity of heritage speakers as a population and emphasizes the importance of taking societal circumstances into consideration.

La versatilidad del pronombre uno para expresar posicionamiento frente a lo enunciado en el español de Barranquilla, Colombia

<p>Los estudios comunicativo–funcionales han considerado los mecanismos de impersonalización como una brecha en la deixis, o como desfocalizadores del centro deíctico. Sin embargo, este trabajo se inspira en planteamientos previos sobre la impersonalidad como extensión de la deixis. Consiste en un estudio variacionista de los diferentes grados de generalidad expresados mediante uno en la variedad caribeña de Barranquilla, Colombia. Con base en los conceptos de deíxis textual, discursiva y social, incorpora factores lingüísticos asociados con los grados de impersonalización (interpretación referencial, tipo de discurso y clase semántica del verbo), y factores pragmáticos afines con las relaciones de poder y solidaridad (polaridad, tipo de interacción, formas de tratamiento y relaciones entre los interactuantes). Los resultados proporcionan evidencia estadística acerca de un uso personal de uno con las funciones deícticas de yo: predomina cuando el hablante expresa su posicionamiento frente a lo enunciado, es decir, su centro deíctico, sus experiencias personales, conocimientos, evaluaciones y sentimientos.</p>

El predominio de <i>uno</i> en Bogotá, Colombia: ¿estrategia para desfocalizar o para subjetivizar?

Este artículo analiza los factores semántico-pragmáticos que influyen en el uso del pronombre uno en el habla de Bogotá. Mediante un enfoque variacionista y con base en los resultados del programa estadístico Goldvarb, se advierte una reducción de la característica impersonal de uno, pues se utiliza principalmente como marcador de la postura del hablante (subjetivización del discurso) más que como mecanismo para disminuir su protagonismo. Los resultados de las variables de clase semántica del verbo, tipo de discurso y clase de entrevista aportan evidencia acerca de la utilización de uno casi con las mismas funciones referenciales de yo con verbos emotivos, mentales y estativos, en narraciones y situaciones hipotéticas, y en interacciones informales y espontáneas. Estos resultados apuntan a la pérdida de la antigua connotación socio-pragmática de un sobreuso característico de los individuos con menor nivel económico y educativo.

Pragmatic Aspects of Metalinguistic Utterances

Verbal communication is an extremely many-faceted and complex phenomenon, and should be seen as a process which, besides sending and receiving messages about the object world, can also be focused on the use of the code through which the verbal interaction is taking place. Such spheres as teaching, translation, scientific discourse, court procedures, psychological treatment, to say nothing of verbal art, are obviously metalinguistically-oriented. However, in everyday interaction as well the discussion of metalinguistic issues by the interlocutors is almost as common as a talk about extralinguistic reality. The aim of the present study is to examine the interrelation of metalinguistic and pragmatic characteristics of utterances in everyday speech. We will try to show that only if a certain utterance of metalinguistic nature is perceived as such by the speaker and hearer, can communication be pragmatically successful. Conversely, provided that the interlocutors take into account certain pragmatic factors, the utterance can be actualized and realized as a metalinguistic one, the result being the interlocutors’ mutual understanding.

Gender, interaction and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London

In this paper, I examine the different conversational and interactional functions that High Rising Terminals (HRT) fulfil among young, White, middle‐class speakers of London English. Data are drawn from sixteen small‐group interviews with forty‐two individuals (28 women and 14 men) aged 18–25. From this corpus, 7351 declarative Intonation Phrases were extracted, and auditorily coded for the presence/absence ofHRTas well as for a variety of social, interactional and pragmatic factors. I combine quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate that while all of the speakers investigated useHRTto accomplish relational work in conversation, the specific interactional strategies that the feature is recruited to perform differ markedly across genders. I consider the ramifications of this finding for our understanding of ‘politeness’ as a gendered practice, and illustrate the importance of examining a variable likeHRTin its discourse‐functional context.

Relative clauses: why children have difficulties to comprehend them?

The study aims to describe and interpret the results of testing the speech of Lithuanian children in order to find out whether language-specific features of Lithuanian as a highly inflected language help children grasp the complex syntactic relations between the subject and the object in relative clauses. The investigation has been aimed to test the hypothesis to the effect that depending on the language type, object relative clauses are more difficult to acquire than subject relative clauses (Guasti, Cardinaletti 2003; Utzeri 2007; Brandt, Diessel, Tomasello 2008; O’Grady, Kim, Lee et al. 2011; Benţea 2012).The findings of the research support the hypothesis that relative clauses as objects (the OO type) are more difficult to grasp than those that function as subjects (OS). This claim has been statistically confirmed in the group of 3 – 4.5 year-olds, which had a big difficulty in perceiving the difference between relative clauses functioning as subjects or objects. These findings are in line with claims related to other languages, which demonstrate that children in early childhood, distinguishing between OS or OO, misinterpret the OO type more often (Guasti, Stavrakaki, Arosio 2008). However, when an unusual, strange situation is described, or an unfamiliar verb is used, children tend to assign the same syntactic function to the head noun and the relative pronoun; in such cases the OS clause is interpreted as the OO type. This tendency also supports the parallel-function hypothesis advanced by Tavakolian (1981). In later years children already perceive the difference between the OS and OO type relative clauses, but in a pre-school period misinterpretations of the OO type are quite numerous. Children of schooling age, on the other hand, have no difficulty in interpreting this difference correctly. The results of the present study confirm the assertion that older children grasp the functions of relative clauses and interpret complex structures more easily: they gradually realize that there are two different propositions conveyed in the main and the subordinate clause. It is assumed that children understand and start using relative clauses when their language processing skills have improved, and this happens while they are getting older.In addition to language processing skills, it is important to pay due attention to the frequency of usage principle. Our research findings show that subject relative clauses are more frequent in child-directed speech, and they also appear earlier in a spontaneous child language than object clauses; this is exactly what influences an easier perception of subject relative clauses. Semantic and pragmatic factors have to be mentioned as well: while acquiring a language, children master those grammatical structures where a particular form correlates with a particular meaning more easily (Diessel, Tomassello 2000).It might be assumed that an inflectional system of Lithuanian enables children to easier interpret the syntactic relationship between the main and the relative clause (see, e.g. Arnon 2010); however, the findings of this study allow us to claim that the structure of relative clauses is complex and multilayered, encompassing not only morphological but also semantic and pragmatic factors, which should be investigated more thoroughly in the future. It has also to be stressed that while researching child language it is important to evaluate the influence of adult language, which provides the necessary environment for the child to hear and to understand syntactic constructions of different complexity. Moreover, the assumption that a rich morphological system of a language makes it easier to grasp the complex syntactic functions of sentence elements is corroborated only in part – the findings of the study show that it takes time for Lithuanian children to master correct usage of relative clauses.

Прагматический контекст публичных выступлений Б.Х. Обамы

Yailokhanova Alexandra Sergeevna The article highlights the approaches to the definition of «discourse» given in the fundamental works of Western and Russian scientists-linguists. It also discusses the conditions of implementation of pragmatic attitudes in the speeches of public speeches of US President B. Obama. We present the definition of «pragmatic context factor». As the main factors of pragmatic context it is allocated space factor, the time factor, the factor of events, phenomena and factors, recipient factor. The interaction of these factors in specific contexts of speech are to achieve the intended objectives of a politician, an analysis of possible situations that affect the organization of discourse. Examples of linguistic means of expression of these factors in the context of pragmatic speech are given. The result of this study is the analysis of given public speeches on the subject of the content and methods of implementation of a pragmatic context factors. Key words : pragmatics, context, pragmatic context, pragmatic context factor, discourse, political discourse.

On ergativity in Bumthang

This report investigates the uses of the ergative case marker in transitive clauses in Bumthang, a language of Central Bhutan. We discuss the conditions under which the ergative is required and show that a simple analysis involving multiple influences models the data. Previous studies have shown that variable case marking may be determined by syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic factors, but in Bumthang we see that all of these factors play a role in determining the use of the ergative case marker. We hope that our analysis will prove useful for understanding the variable uses of the ergative case marker in Himalayan and other languages as well as providing interesting challenges for formal models of case marking.

Quantitative Parsimony: Probably for the Better

Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory choice. Our strategy allows us to avoid worries that other considerations, such as pragmatic factors of computational tractability and so on, could be the driving ones in the historical cases under consideration.

Improving the network scalability of Erlang

As the number of cores grows in commodity architectures so does the likelihood of failures. A distributed actor model potentially facilitates the development of reliable and scalable software on these architectures. Key components include lightweight processes which ‘share nothing’ and hence can fail independently. Erlang is not only increasingly widely used, but the underlying actor model has been a beacon for programming language design, influencing for example Scala, Clojure and Cloud Haskell.While the Erlang distributed actor model is inherently scalable, we demonstrate that it is limited by some pragmatic factors. We address two network scalability issues here: globally registered process names must be updated on every node (virtual machine) in the system, and any Erlang nodes that communicate maintain an active connection. That is, there is a fully connected O(n2) network of n nodes.We present the design, implementation, and initial evaluation of a conservative extension of Erlang — Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang. SD Erlang partitions the global namespace and connection network using s_groups. An s_group is a set of nodes with its own process namespace and with a fully connected network within the s_group, but only individual connections outside it. As a node may belong to more than one s_group it is possible to construct arbitrary connection topologies like trees or rings.We present an operational semantics for the s_group functions, and outline the validation of conformance between the implementation and the semantics using the QuickCheck automatic testing tool. Our preliminary evaluation in comparison with distributed Erlang shows that SD Erlang dramatically improves network scalability even if the number of global operations is tiny (0.01%). Moreover, even in the absence of global operations the reduced connection maintenance overheads mean that SD Erlang scales better beyond 80 nodes (1920 cores).

Adult Regularization of Inconsistent Input Depends on Pragmatic Factors

ABSTRACTIn a variety of domains, adults who are given input that is only partially consistent do not discard the inconsistent portion (regularize) but rather maintain the probability of consistent and inconsistent portions in their behavior (probability match). This research investigates the possibility that adults probability match, at least in part, because of two pragmatic assumptions they bring to the learning problem: (a) that the variation they see is predictable rather than random and (b) that their goal is to correctly learn that variation. Evidence from two experiments demonstrates that when either assumption is eliminated, people probability match less and therefore regularize more. These results are discussed with respect to age and domain differences in regularization.

The Influence of Semantic and Pragmatic Factors in Wason’s Selection Task: State of the Art

One of the cognitive processes, which has generated more research within the framework of the Psychology of thinking, is human reasoning. Throughout the history of the Psychology of reasoning, one of the experimental tasks most frequently used to study how subjects reason, and why they make mistakes, is the Wason’s selection task or the four card problem (Wason, 1966, 1968). This work presents the current state of the experimental research on this task, using as a common thread the empirical studies which have highlighted the plasticity of reasoning towards semantic and pragmatic factors.

Pragmatic accommodation as a catalyst for the development of (non-)finiteness

AbstractA morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological shape of a negation element is dependent on the finiteness of the verb it negates. Pragmatic factors are identified that could motivate the development of this shared asymmetry, using evidence from the grammar of a Dravidian-influenced contact language. I will show that contrastive finiteness marking (finite and non-finite morphology) can facilitate the development of pragmatically-motivated linear reordering of affirmative clauses and negated clauses in order to accommodate new information structure conventions, extending the contrast to negated verbs by expanding the functional range of a negative imperative marker.Radical contact languages resulting from collective adult second language acquisition in naturalistic social contexts are typically presumed to feature reduced functional morphology, in which only highly salient contrasts, such as temporal contrasts, are formally instantiated. If a formal finiteness contrast and other relatively marked properties (“complexity”) could develop in a highly analytic contact language that did not previously have them, this suggests that such a sequence of changes is in fact as plausible among genetically-unrelated languages in a sprachbund as it is over longer periods of time in genetically-related languages. We can observe this by examining grammatical change in a language that previously lacked both a finiteness contrast and a corresponding negation asymmetry, but which developed both the contrast and the asymmetry as a result of contact with a genetically-unrelated language that has analogous properties.Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) has undergone grammatical change due to contact with Dravidian (primarily Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil). Several of these changes involve verb morphology and syntax, and are plausibly motivated by discourse-pragmatic triggers. Consideration of tense and (non-)finiteness phenomena, as well as their reflexes in SLM negation, suggests a discourse-pragmatic motivation for these changes. Two discourse processes could conspire to motivate the development of the new morphology in SLM. The first is a clausal asymmetry, in which the predicate representing the most recent event is ordinarily in focus, indicated by tense morphology and position of the clause relative to clauses referring to subsequent events. The second is the communicative need to reassign focus in certain contexts to a temporally non-primary clause, one referring to an event that did not take place first. In spite of a constraint in Dravidian languages blocking the marking of functional contrasts under negation (so that only a negation morpheme can be prefixed to the verb), negation morphology encodes an obligatory finiteness contrast, optimally supporting these information-structuring processes. The clause describing the most recent event in a sentence remains visibly finite under negation, when a temporally secondary clause is focused.

Conceptual Domains of KAU Revisited with Comments on Some Chinese KAU Researches

Firstly we briefly review the three conceptual domains of Sweetser (1990/2002), “content domain”, “epistemic domain”, and “speech-act domain” (Sweetserian trichotomy), and Shen (2003), the corresponding A(cting), K(nowing), U(ttering) (Shenian trichotomy)—our KAU, finding that they and their followers ignored largely the necessity to distinguish between these three domains in terms of the speaker, the listener and the other. Then, we clarify this issue and on this basis, analyze disadvantages of the study of three conceptual domains at the lexical level, thinking that previous studies failed to highlight the importance of syntactic and pragmatic factors to lexical level and thus did not rise to the pragma-syntactic level. On account of this, we put forward the “Lexico-Pragma-Syntactic Hypothesis” on the three conceptual domains, holding that the three of them should be studied by encompassing the three linguistic levels with pragmatics playing a prevailing role.

Darai verb agreement

Darai, an Indo-Aryan language of Nepal, displays interactions of person, number, gender, honorifics, and case in its verb agreement system. Darai verbs not only agree with the subject in person, number, gender and case but also with the subject and objects simultaneously in transitive and ditransitive verbs. Moreover, like some other Indo-Aryan languages, such as Maithili (Yadav 1997 [1996]; Yadava 1999), and Rajbanshi (Wilde 2008), Darai shows agreement with the genitive modifier rather than the head noun. Furthermore, the verbs also agree with the dative subject. In addition to the above patterns, verb agreement is complex and is also controlled by the pragmatic status of information. Thus, the selection of agreement markers is triggered not only by certain syntactic constructions but also by pragmatic factors. Darai shares a number of agreement patterns with its Indo-Aryan neighbours, whereas other patterns are specific to Darai. The agreement patterns discussed in this article will be useful in analyses of agreement in other Indo-Aryan languages.

Translation theories in “the other Europe”

Since the mid-1950s much research has been carried out in the field of translation theories in Poland. Although the results that emerged were often of considerable interest, Polish translation theories are often ignored by experts in the West. This article investigates the Polish contribution to theoretical discussions of translation. Early contributions to the debate, in 1955, characterized by a “linguistic” approach, warned against theories limiting the “unit of translation” to single words, thus neglecting the “text.” Linguist O. A. Wojtasiewicz stressed the semiotic, psychological, and cultural nature of translation. Around the mid-1960s a group of scholars from the “Poznań School” focused on literary translation. They saw literary translation as a semiotic process and produced a theoretical and descriptive research that could be defined as “target-oriented.” Their methods are typified by the particular attention given to diachronic and reception perspectives. Since the mid-1970s, in marked opposition to the “predominant role of literary texts” in Polish translation studies, F. Grucza and scholars from Warsaw University (“Warsaw School”) favored other areas of research, such as oral translation and specialized translation and interpreting. From the research carried out in Warsaw, a new perspective opened up within the linguistic approach, resulting in a new definition of the equivalence based on cognitive and pragmatic factors. This line of research also involved cognitive linguistics, as of the 1990s the most noteworthy innovation in Polish translation studies. Since 1990 the research field has become more varied: there are now more translation study centers (Cracow, Łódź, Lublin, Gdańsk…), and the field of investigation has broadened, now following on the heels of Western debate, with which there is now more contact.