Pragmatic Inferences Research Articles

Metapragmatic conventions and integrative context: Introducing Sībawayhian pragmatics

Abstract The aim of this paper is to shed light on theories of discourse meaning from the Arabic, namely Sībawayhian, linguistics tradition, that are novel in the contemporary pragmatics space and prompts us to rethink and reshape the Anglo-American, namely Gricean and post-Gricean, lens through which current theories are predominantly defined. The Arabic linguistics tradition was founded by Sībawayhi more than ten centuries ago, yet it is severely underrepresented and under-researched in modern (Western) linguistics. Sībawayhi posited a discourse-oriented, pragmatics-centric, and intuition-driven model of language and communication, providing unique insights into how intentions and conventions figure in meaning representation. Despite his monumental contribution, Sībawayhian theory has hitherto been missing from the present-day field of pragmatics. Instead, pragmatics as a line of study is usually attributed to Grice and subsequent post-Gricean developments, where theory construction has been limited to intra-theoretical analyses and falls short of cross-cultural epistemological perspectives. Many of these analyses are as such reinventions of what can be found in Sībawayhian and post-Sībawayhian pragmatics. And there are many more components of Arabic pragmatic thought that remain to be (re)discovered, with the potential to further current thinking in pragmatics and open a new orientation of contemporary pragmatic study. In this paper, I attempt to address all of the above by closely examining selected sections of Sībawayhi’s monumental al-Kitāb. I particularly introduce two main conceptions Sībawayhi relies on in his theory of meaning – metapragmatic conventions (conventionsmp) and integrative context (contexti) – and investigate their role in shaping major areas of pragmatic theorization, namely syntax, discourse compositionality, and inference.

Old age between normality and pathology Clinical meeting and anatomical insight

To understand the itineraries of medical thought, to show the theoretical nodes where scientific explanation intersects with pragmatic intention and evaluative inference, to indicate the directions of influence that link the culture of an era with its therapeutic strategies, in short, to try to unravel the complexity of an act that is supposed to be liberating, all this should attempt a metamedic reconnaissance.

Variability of theory of mind versus pragmatic ability in typical and atypical development

IntroductionNumerous studies have linked deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) with language problems. We aimed to explore the similarities and differences between children's patterns of performance on a ToM task that requires minimal linguistic skill and a pragmatic inference task that relies on both ToM and language. We assessed variability in pragmatic inference skills and ToM across populations of children (8–14 years) displaying varying cognitive profiles. We further compared the sensitivity of ToM versus pragmatic ability to core language skills, memory and executive functioning (EF). MethodToM was tested using the Social Attribution Task (SAT-MC-II). Pragmatic ability was assessed in an implicature comprehension task. Receptive vocabulary, grammar comprehension, short-term and working memory (STM and WM) capacity and EF were measured using Hungarian adaptations of standard tasks and tests developed by the authors’ lab. In addition to typically developing (TD) children (n = 33), we included children with neurodevelopmental disorders where ToM and/or language abilities are vulnerable: autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 26), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, n = 25) and developmental language disorder (DLD, n = 18). ResultsResults revealed a significant but only moderate positive correlation between pragmatic inference and ToM indicating that the two abilities are related but distinct. The ASD group showed impairments in both ToM and pragmatic inference ability but no significant deficit was observed in ADHD or DLD relative to TD children in either skill. However, while SAT-MC-II results were only affected by verbal WM and vocabulary measures, pragmatic performance was associated with STM, verbal WM, EF, grammatical skills and vocabulary. ConclusionOur findings indicate that disentangling the contributions of different cognitive skills to ToM tasks may help clarify the role of ToM in language skills and identify distinct patterns of ToM and pragmatic skills in developmental disorders.

EFL Learners' Pragmatic Tolerance of Quantity Maxim Violation

The current study embarks on investigating Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic tolerance of quantity maxim violations. Additionally, it seeks to shed light on Iraqi EFL learners' pragmatic abilities in deriving pragmatic inferences from utterances that contain violations of quantity maxim. The experimental work in the current study utilized two types of sentence judgment tasks. Binary sentence judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic tolerance, and ternary judgment task for investigating learners' pragmatic competence. The study included two groups of participants. The first group included 50 participants from 2nd-year students, and the second included 50 from 4th-year students at the Department of English for the academic year 2023-2024; both groups judged underinformative scalar implicature utterances. The results with binary task data indicate that Iraqi EFL learners exhibit tolerance toward quantity maxim violations. However, the ternary judgment task results indicate that Iraqi learners are not competent enough to derive a pragmatic inference. Hence, the current study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of EFL learners' pragmatic abilities to derive implied meanings.

Meaning as mentalization

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

Modal tense: if and wish

This paper is concerned with uses of certain morphemes, most notably the past, to represent meanings of distance from reality in modal expressions. This class of morphology has been identified with the names subjunctive, fake tense, fake past, modal past and is referred to here as X-marking, after von Fintel and Iatridou (Linguist Philos, 2020). X-marking has been most studied in the context of English conditionals however, it is well-known that the morphology is observed in many non-English languages and can appear in various other types of constructions, including counterfactual desire expressions. I motivate two desiderata for theories of X-marking in pursuit of an analysis that unifies the phenomenon across expression types and languages. I then develop a novel, formally explicit analysis of X-marking which I show to satisfy these desiderata while providing greater empirical coverage of well-known cases compared to existing accounts. The proposed analysis makes use of modal presupposition projection together with pragmatic inference via Maximize Presupposition to provide a unified treatment of X-marking in English conditionals and counterfactual desires expressions of English featuring wish. I show how previous proposals for X-marking cannot satisfy these desiderata, making them insufficient for a unified account. Lastly, I introduce a hypothesis that all varieties of morphology that can be used as X-marking cross-linguistically-including past, imperfective, plural and habitual-are vacuous in both their X-marked and ordinary uses.

Games, Norms, and Utterances

AbstractA body of work proposes that social-norm change can be explained in terms of game theory. These game theoretic models, however, don't fully account for how and why utterances are used to change social norms. This paper describes the problem and some of the solution elements. There are three existing, relevant, game-based models. The first is a game theoretic model of social norm change (Bicchieri, 2005, 2016). This accounts for how individuals make decisions to adhere to or violate norms, based on empirical expectations of how others will behave. The second is the idea of a conversational game (Lewis, 1979) and its extensions. This posits that speech acts are accommodated in a conversation to make what is said correct play. This feature can explain how some speech acts, such as slurring utterances, change the dynamics of a conversation. The third is a theory of pragmatic inference, known as Rational Speech Act theory (Goodman and Frank, 2016). This is a computational theory of pragmatics, of how listeners interpret utterances and how speakers construct utterances that can be understood. This paper proposes, without setting out the full formal model, that elements of these three theories need to be incorporated together into a game theoretic model of how utterances change long-term social norms.

Wipe the table clean – German speakers construe telicity differently in adjectival resultatives and transitives

Change of state expressions involving weak-endstate verbs such as wipe and drink exhibit variation in telicity. The present study is the first to experimentally investigate change of state expressions referred to as adjectival control resultatives (e.g., wipe the table clean) and the corresponding simple transitives (e.g., wipe the table) regarding their telicity readings. Based on their semantic properties, we ask whether German speakers interpret adjectival resultatives as telic and simple transitives as fluctuating between telic and atelic. Following an event-structural approach to telicity, we also seek to contribute to the issue of which event-semantic properties adjectival resultatives and simple transitives share: if it is the adjective that evokes a telic interpretation, then the possible telic interpretation of simple transitives must arise by different means, suggesting a non-uniform construal of telicity. Twenty-one adults participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that varied Structure (resultative/transitive) and Event type (complete/incomplete). Generalized mixed effects logistic regression revealed a significant interaction between Event type and Structure. For complete events, acceptance was at ceiling for both structures. For incomplete events, acceptance was significantly lower for resultatives than for simple transitives. These results indicate that in adjectival resultatives telicity is construed semantically – via entailment – and in the corresponding simple transitives via a pragmatic inference, which is not computed very often. We propose that this type of simple transitives designates process events, exactly like their intransitive variant. Resultatives designate a transition event: the adjective and the main verb form a complex predicate; adjectives with closed scales like clean encode the prominent endstate subevent and the verb encodes the process subevent.

On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an adjective predicts the degree to which participants strengthen the negated adjective's meaning, but only if the adjective under consideration has an evaluatively-positive meaning. This finding indicates that speakers may intentionally use negation to leave themselves the option to retract the implicated face-threatening meaning if openly challenged.

Frustratives in St’át’imcets vs. Kimaragang: parameters of variation

Markers of the FRUSTRATIVE (non-realization of an expected outcome) often have a variety of uses. The Kimaragang frustrative dara also marks various related functions such as “discontinuous past”, “action narrowly averted”, frustrated intention or desire, and counterfactual conditionals. Davis & Matthewson (2022) describe a similar but not identical range of uses for the frustrative marker séna7 in St’át’imcets, and propose that the core meaning of this marker involves a type of epistemic modality. They further propose that their analysis can be extended to Kimaragang dara, suggesting that observed differences of usage may be due to differences in the tense-aspect systems of the two languages.This paper argues that the Kimaragang frustrative is different from séna7 in two respects: (1) the nature of the “frustrated expectation” inference, and (2) type of modality (epistemic vs. circumstantial). Frustrated expectation is lexically entailed in St’át’imcets, but Kimaragang dara entails only that the expected outcome cannot be asserted to be true at the time of speaking, with frustrated expectation arising as a pragmatic inference in contexts where it is reasonable to expect the speaker to know the actual outcome. Davis & Matthewson show that séna7 is purely epistemic in nature: it marks an unexpected correlation between two propositions, which need not belong to a single chain of events. Kimaragang dara is circumstantial in nature: it marks an initial situation whose expected outcome within the normal course of events is so far unrealized. It can be used to describe counterfactual situations, which are not epistemically accessible.

No evidence for adult smartphone use affecting attribution of communicative intention in toddlers: Online imitation study using the Sock Ball Task.

Adults infer others' communicative intentions, or lack thereof, from various types of information. Young children may be initially limited to attributions based on a small set of ostensive signals. It is unknown when richer pragmatic inferences about communicative intentions emerge in development. We sought novel type of evidence for such inferences in 17-to-19-month-olds. We hypothesized that toddlers recognize adults' smartphone use in face-to-face interactions as incongruous with ostension and would rely on this interpretation when inferring the communicative intention of a model in a new imitation task conducted entirely online, dubbed the Sock Ball Task. In Experiment 1 with a between-subject design, we tested the hypothesis by assessing toddlers' (N = 48) imitation of sub-efficient means and the goal-outcome presented by a model, who interrupted her ostensive demonstration either by using a smartphone or by fiddling with her wristwatch, depending on the condition. We expected toddlers to imitate the sub-efficient means more faithfully in the wristwatch condition than in the smartphone condition. But there was no significant effect of condition on imitation of neither means nor goal. Thus, our hypothesis was not borne out by the results. In Experiment 2, using a within-subject design, we first assessed toddlers' (N = 24) performance in a no-demonstration baseline and then again after a no-disruption ostensive demonstration. In all three conditions with ostensive demonstration (Experiment 1: smartphone, wristwatch; Experiment 2: no-disruption), toddlers produced the demonstrated sub-efficient means significantly above the baseline level. In the no-disruption condition, goals were also imitated significantly above the baseline level. We conclude that the Sock Ball Task is a valid research tool for studying toddler imitation of novel means actions with objects. We end by discussing suggestions for improving the task in future studies.

The Neocolonial Structural Model Re-Foundation and The Pragmatic Inference of Organizational Culture in Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on The Cross (1980)

Through the frame frequency of the imported state and the westernization of the African political order, the social construction of the African bureaucracy appears as a structural device of abstraction, exploitation, and brutality. Then, through the frame of reference with the importation of conceptual juridical coordination and perceptual representative consensus, the African public administration enhances a frameshift transformation and a succession of causality. Therefore, in combinatorial and transactional analysis, the framework of Devil On The Cross progresses in a method of empirical processing decomposition. Within this respect, the elemental and pure imaginary of the African administration proceeds as a functional derivative governmentality and a colonial functional inception power. Subsequently, with its interaction design, processing system, and volume technique, the realm of Devil On The Cross inserts a paradigmatic analysis and a value engineering within which this African administration happens as an characteristic structural formula and an inefficient relational frame theory. Moreover, within the space-time continuum, the configuration management and the linear configuration programming of the African management apparatus, Devil On The Cross becomes a holomorphic function and an analytic continuation that reveal the anachronism nature and the asynchronous system of the African post-colonial administration.

Sports and linguistics pedagogy

The domain of organized sports offers a unique circumstance to explore a wide range of fundamental concepts in linguistics classrooms. We present an overview of a pedagogical model that engages students of linguistics using data from sports oriented settings, with frequent reliance on peer-reviewed literature. The course model incorporates three domains of language behavior: (a) lexis, and the interplay of semantic specialization and sociocultural indexation of specialized sport-oriented vocabulary; (b) sports announcer talk, a spoken broadcast register whose study enables a novel exploration of syntactic nuance; (c) participant interaction with each other and with the media, which demonstrates fundamentals of pragmatic inference in spoken communicative exchanges. Some course topics span more than one of these domains. Nickname creation, for example, is phonologically and phonetically driven, with gradient effects that adhere to constraints of brevity and clarity, yet linked to sociocultural indexicality. While no single textbook serves as an appropriate primary text for such a course, the beneficial outcomes for students are numerous. Aside from the primary goal of applying linguistic concepts to an engaging domain, students probe a variety of published works that examine sports/language interactions, demonstrating a broad sample of research methods and theories.

<i>Not very easy</i>: Towards the unification of scalar implicature and understatement

Modified and unmodified gradable adjectives give rise to two distinct and opposing varieties of pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature and understatement. While earlier work in pragmatics took these to be complementary inferences derived from opposing conversational principles, more recent work in the formal tradition has placed the focus firmly on scalar implicature and related phenomena, with no attempt to also account for understatement. In this paper I argue that there are good reasons to pursue a unified treatment of the two, and outline one possible way of doing so, framed within the commitment approach to assertion, where I take the commitments that come with asserting a proposition to encompass not only liability for its truth but also acceptance of the social consequences of expressing it. I further discuss how this approach can shed light on recent experimental findings regarding the role of lexical semantics in the pragmatic inferences available to gradable adjectives, as well as a puzzle that these findings pose.

A Philosophical Investigation of the Context Sensitivity of Know: Contextualism versus Semantic Minimalism

A common and important question about context sensitivity is its extent in ordinary language. While words such as “I,” “this,” and “now” are known to be contextually sensitive, whether words such as know are context sensitive is debated. Contextualists believe that know is a context-sensitive word, while semantic minimalists insist it is not. The two groups have been engaged in a persistent debate on this issue and have not yet reached a consensus. Centering on this debate, this paper first briefly reviews contextualism and semantic minimalism’s debate over know, and then test whether it is context sensitive. This paper finds that the content of know displays some hierarchy, and to answer the question of whether it is context sensitive, logical inference must be distinguished from pragmatic inference. When expressing logical inference, know describes some state of affairs and factually certifies that the content of know is a fact; therefore, it involves no context sensitivity. While expressing pragmatic inference, however, know causes different pragmatic effects and indicates different levels of context sensitivity.

The Role of Pragmatic Inferences in Interpreting Implicatures

The Role of Pragmatic Inferences in Interpreting Implicatures

THE PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC NEGATION

This paper is an attempt to give a general explanation of pragmatics of linguistic negation. After a brief survey of classical accounts of negation pragmatic theories (as speech act theory, argumentation theory and polyphony) the main pragmatic uses of negation (illocutionary negation, external negation and majoring negation) are discussed within relevance theory. The question of relevance of negative utterances is raised, and a general inferential schema (based on so-called invited interference) is proposed and tested for the main uses which are discussed in the paper. The analysis proposed in the framework of relevance theory has thus been verified by the main uses of negation. It has the advantage of not making any morphologic or semantic distinctions between the different types of negation and the different uses are explained from different pragmatic processes depending either on the linguistic environment, or on the context, or on both.
 The analysis is both simple and realistic. Simple because no complexification of the linguistic system is necessary. Linguistic negation treatment allows, on that count, interesting confrontations from one language to another. Realistic too, because it comes from the principle, admitted by psycholinguists, that positive information is more quickly treated than negative information. It follows from this principle that pragmatic inferences on negative utterances resort to positive premises.

Human Conditional Reasoning in Answer Set Programming

AbstractGiven a conditional sentence “ ${\varphi}\Rightarrow \psi$ " (if ${\varphi}$ then $\psi$ ) and respective facts, four different types of inferences are observed in human reasoning: Affirming the antecedent (AA) (or modus ponens) reasons $\psi$ from ${\varphi}$ ; affirming the consequent (AC) reasons ${\varphi}$ from $\psi$ ; denying the antecedent (DA) reasons $\neg\psi$ from $\neg{\varphi}$ ; and denying the consequent (DC) (or modus tollens) reasons $\neg{\varphi}$ from $\neg\psi$ . Among them, AA and DC are logically valid, while AC and DA are logically invalid and often called logical fallacies. Nevertheless, humans often perform AC or DA as pragmatic inference in daily life. In this paper, we realize AC, DA and DC inferences in answer set programming. Eight different types of completion are introduced, and their semantics are given by answer sets. We investigate formal properties and characterize human reasoning tasks in cognitive psychology. Those completions are also applied to commonsense reasoning in AI.

Stouni, Doorsovia, Velveti. Masculine virile nominal forms for names of music bands and their meanings on metonymic continuum

Abstract The study deals with the special usage of masculine virile forms to name music bands in Slovak. The names of music bands are usually classified as a special subtype of chrematonyms which name the artistic groups and are labelled as ergonyms in the theoretical works. Masculine virile forms can be used with a heterogenous range of meanings depending on context which can be understood as result of metonymic transpositions. The study focuses on description of units warranted by proper names which arise in two deproprial processes – transonymization and appellativization. The analysed material comes from web corpus Omnia Slovaca IV Maior. Metonymy is understood as a gradient phenomenon with instantiations that form a continuum on a scale depending on the strength of contiguity. Metonymy gives rise to a variety of readings, which are often difficult to capture and whose meaning has to be specified in the course of interpretation by contextual cues and pragmatic inferences. This fact leads to orthographic instability concerning the usage of capital letters.

What makes inferences reliable? The unpredictable relationship between pragmatic inference and truth

One of the main tenets of Gricean pragmatics is the distinction between what is said and what is implicated; that is, between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning. The main contribution of post-Gricean pragmatics was a new definition of what is said as a pragmatic and truth-conditional meaning (Carston, 2002; Recanati, 2010; Moeschler, 2018a). However, implicated meaning (mainly conversational implicature) is still defined as non-truth-conditional because it is cancellable without contradiction. The main consequence is that a speaker can deny having intended her implicature, which results in the hearer having no guarantee of the truthfulness of his inference. This paper explores the relationship between truth and pragmatic implicated meaning and posits that the assessment of a truth value of an inference is a crucial step in the comprehension process. To demonstrate this hypothesis, the paper develops a relevance-based approach to inference, which is coupled with Kahneman's dual cognitive system. I argue that the triggering of an inference is an intuitive and automatic process controlled by System 1, whereas its assessment as a true or false assumption is controlled by System 2. In other words, System 2 is responsible for what is defined in relevance theory as epistemic vigilance.