Speaker Meaning Research Articles

What we mean as what we said or would have said

We usually mean what we say, but sometimes we do not. When I ironically utter ‘What lovely weather’ on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter ‘Jim is a barn door’ instead of ‘Jim is a darn bore’, I say one thing and mean another. However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of ‘There is wine in the fridge’ or ‘I really like nachos’ where we mean what we say. And since we usually mean what we say, the following simple thesis will usually be correct. (N) S meant that p by uttering e iff S said that p by uttering e. The simplicity of (N) raises the question of whether it can be refined in order to also cover situations where we do not mean what we say. In this paper we defend a modal version of (N): an analysis where speaker meaning in most situations is identified with what is actually said, and in other situations with what the speaker would have said in certain counterfactual situations. The analysis constitutes a radical, but welcome, break with Gricean orthodoxy, where linguistic meaning, rather than speaker meaning, is ultimately used to explain other semantic notions.

Complaints Speech Acts between Customer and Staff at Western Cafe

A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction about an act, omission, decision, or service that expects of the feedback given by the user. This study focuses on an interaction between customer and server: Western Café In Canggu strongly conveys the interaction using speech act categories. The objective of this study is to ascertain the many classifications of speech acts employed within the context of interactions between restaurant customers and servers. The method and technique used to capture data for this study were qualitative analysis and note-taking. Furthermore, the data were analyzed by using theory: Searle’s theory of speech act (1969) and Austin (1962) is used to define and classify the categories of speech act used by the server and customer. The findings show from every interaction that guest and server made and expressing of directive and expressive. Directive point is the most common illocutionary act used in conversation that how make easier the hearer to understand what the speaker mean.

Conceptual Engineering and the Philosophical Fallacies of Language

AbstractConceptual Engineering, the practice of stipulating a change in the meaning of a word in order to improve it in some fashion, for some end, has proved a popular topic among philosophers of language in recent times. Deutsch (Philos Stud 177:3935–3957, 2020) has argued that it has received an undue degree of interest since its implementation falls onto one of the horns of a dilemma: either the change to be effected is in the global semantic meaning of the given word/concept, in which case it is infeasible, or it is merely in the local speaker-meaning, in which case it is largely trivial. I suggest, however, that there is a deeper, more troubling, objection to Conceptual Engineering. My criticism does not strictly take the form of a dilemma, since some cases may fall upon both horns at once and others may be able to squeeze through the gap, but it does involve highlighting two potential weaknesses of the project: one of those, as with Deutsch, is the danger of triviality, although it is not concerned only with the division between semantic and speaker meaning. It seems clear that there are cases where a particular authority or legislature has the capacity to alter a word’s legal meaning; others where certain groups may discuss the best way to use a technical term, each putting forward their preferred suggestions; and individual speakers are at liberty to choose to use a word with a particular intention. None of this is new, nor controversial, and, thus, is largely trivial. In all cases, but particularly where meanings are manipulated without due authority, inexplicitly, or in order to further a particular theoretical conception, however, there is a strong chance that the engineer will be led to commit one of the fallacies of language to which philosophy is particularly vulnerable (Hinton Evaluating the language of argument, Springer, Cham, 2021). These include fallacies of vagueness, equivocation, and persuasive definition. In this paper, I use examples to illustrate the likely fallaciousness of conceptual redefinitions and highlight in particular the ‘Philosophical Fallacy’, outlined by Nelson (A theory of philosophical fallacies.Translated by Leal F, Carus D. Springer, Cham 2016). I conclude that, as a method for philosophers, Conceptual Engineering is, in broad terms, either trivial or fallacious.

A comparison of human and GPT-4 use of probabilistic phrases in a coordination game

English speakers use probabilistic phrases such as likely to communicate information about the probability or likelihood of events. Communication is successful to the extent that the listener grasps what the speaker means to convey and, if communication is successful, individuals can potentially coordinate their actions based on shared knowledge about uncertainty. We first assessed human ability to estimate the probability and the ambiguity (imprecision) of twenty-three probabilistic phrases in a coordination game in two different contexts, investment advice and medical advice. We then had GPT-4 (OpenAI), a Large Language Model, complete the same tasks as the human participants. We found that GPT-4’s estimates of probability both in the Investment and Medical Contexts were as close or closer to that of the human participants as the human participants’ estimates were to one another. However, further analyses of residuals disclosed small but significant differences between human and GPT-4 performance. Human probability estimates were compressed relative to those of GPT-4. Estimates of probability for both the human participants and GPT-4 were little affected by context. We propose that evaluation methods based on coordination games provide a systematic way to assess what GPT-4 and similar programs can and cannot do.

Meta-semantic practices in social interaction

Abstract In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to convey generalizable lexical meanings of mostly technical terms. These terms are either unknown to requesters, or, in pedagogical contexts, requesters ask in order to check the addressee’s knowledge. Specifications, in contrast, clarify aspects of local speaker meanings of ordinary expressions (e.g., reference, participants in an event, standards applied to scalar expressions). Both definitions and specifications are recipient-designed with respect to the (presumed) knowledge of the addressee and tailored to the topical and practical relevancies of the current interaction. Both practices attest to the flexibility and situatedness of speakers’ semantic understandings and to the systematicity of using meta-semantic practices differentially for different kinds of semantic problems. Data are come from mundane and institutional interaction in German from the public corpus FOLK.

Incoherent Meanings

Stojnić holds the radical view that coherence relations determine the reference of context-sensitive language. I argue against this from the theoretical perspective presented in Overlooking Conventions (2021). Theoretical interest in language comes from an interest in thoughts and their communication. A language is a system of symbols, constituted by a set of governing rules, used (inter alia) to communicate the meanings (contents) of thoughts. Thought meanings, hence speaker meanings, are explanatorily prior to semantic meanings. So, we start our consideration of the theoretical place of coherence by considering the bearing of coherence on thought meanings. The paper argues that a person can have any thought at all, however incoherent. So, a thought’s meaning is independent of its coherence. Any thought can be expressed in an utterance. The semantic meaning of any utterance governed by the linguistic rules will be the meaning of the thought it expresses. So, the utterance’s meaning is independent of its coherence. The paper concludes that coherence has no place in the theory of meaning or reference. Nonetheless, it has a place in the theory of communication. I suspect that the error exemplifi es the widespread confusion of the metaphysics of meaning with the epistemology of interpretation.

Collective Communicative Intentions in Context

What are the objects of speaker meaning? The traditional answer is: propositions. The traditional answer faces an important challenge: if propositions are the objects of speaker meaning then there must be specific propositions that speakers intend their audiences to recover. Yet, speakers typically exhibit a degree of indifference regarding how they are interpreted, and cannot rationally intend for their audiences to recover specific propositions. Therefore, propositions are not the objects of speaker meaning (Buchanan 2010; MacFarlane 2020a; 2020b; and Abreu Zavaleta 2021). In this paper I do two things. Firstly, I outline a collective analogue of this challenge that undermines the most prominent responses to the original challenge. Secondly, I provide a new solution: typical utterances are backed by a cluster of partial communicative intentions. This response resolves both individual and collective variants of the problem and allows us to retain the traditional propositional view of speaker meaning.

Co-Text and Implicature in Bi. Msafwari’s Topical Discussions

Decoding meaning in communication depends on semantic properties assigned by grammar and the speaker's intended meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to infer the intended meaning from the cues the speaker provides in the utterance. In such a case, context bridges the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and the speaker's meaning. Context is fundamental for language comprehension because meaning is dependent on it. This implies that context makes clear the intended meaning of any communicative act. This study sought to demonstrate the role of co-text in adding additional meaning. The study focused on Bi. Msafwari’s topical discussions. Data was collected through content analysis. It was analyzed through the interpretive method. The findings reveal that grammatical linguistic levels can be used to communicate indirectly through a shift in the motive of the sentence. The findings highlight the use of co-text in communicating indirectly. The study will also contribute literature to the critical discourse analysis of African languages.

The meaning of speaker according kmal aldeen den ali al- behrany

المستخلص :
 يهدف هذا البحث إلى تأمّل الآليَّات والوسائل التي اعتمدها الشيخ مَيثم البحرانيّ في كتابه (شرح نهج البلاغة) للكشف عن مقاصد الإمام عليّ (عليه السلام) والاستدلال عليها، ومقاربة تلك الاستدلالات مع ما أنتجه مشروع الفيلسوف الأمريكيّ (بول غرايس) وهو أحد أهم المساهمين في دراسة المعنى في الدرس الغربيّ الحديث، وسيتمُّ التركيز على مفهوم (معنى المتكلّم) وما يتعلقُّ به لا سيما مبدأ التعاون والقواعد التي تحكم الحوار والمعاني التي تتولد حينما تُخرقُ تلك القواعد. وفي اعتقادي أنَّ هذه المقاربة وأمثالها تُسهم في تقديم قراءة جديدة لتراثنا اللغويّ، فضلاً عن أنّها تمكننا من الوقوف على قيمة ذلك التراث الذي يتضمَّن جذوراً لأغلب النظريَّات اللُّغويّة الحديثة.
 الكلمات المفتاحيَّة: معنى، المتكلّم، الحواري، ميثم، البحرانيّ، غرايس.

EXPRESSIVE ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS TOWORDS AGUS YUDHOYONO’S NEWS IN JAKARTA GLOBE AND THE JAKARTA POTS’S NEWSPAPERS

Understanding the function of socially and culturally aspects play an important role in language learning. People will use a different language in a different context and situation. They will find out with whom, where, when, and in what stages they are talking. Therefore, the context cannot be separated to comprehend an utterance. According to Yule (1996) states that context is the situation surrounding the production of utterance. Furthermore, Leech (1983: 13) in Citraresmana (2015) states that “context is any background of knowledge assumed to be shared by speaker and hearer which contributes to the interpretation of what speaker means by given utterance.” Therefore, this present paper is aimed to find out the expressive illocutionary acts in newspapers from Jakarta Globe and the Jakarta Post about the current issue of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s son which is Agus Yudhoyono who decided to take part in Jakarta gubernatorial election. The newspaper from Jakarta Globe entitled “There's Logic behind Sacrificing Agus Yudhoyono’s Military Career: Former House Speaker” which published on Saturday, September 24, 2016. Besides, the newspaper from The Jakarta Post entitled “SBY’s son’s decision to enter politics regretted: TNI” which published on September 29, 2016. The research objectives are to find the types of expressive illocutionary acts that used in the utterance and to find the similarities of expressive illocutionary acts in both newspaper. Further, this research employs a qualitative approach as suggested by Creswell (2014) and find 14 utterances as the data. The finding of the research showed that there were two types of expressive illocutionary acts that found in the article, protesting and praising. Moreover, both types of the illocutionary acts are found in Jakarta Globe and Jakarta Post

Study on the Origin and Evolution of Xiehouyu

Chinese Xiehouyu is a two-part allegorical saying, which is a language with a unique structure and a special way of expressing. It has a humorous style and uses more flexible idioms to express the speaker's meaning. The origin of Chinese Xiehouyu can be traced back thousands of years ago. With the development of society, the content and form of Chinese Xiehouyu have also undergone tremendous changes.

A STUDY OF PARTICULARIZED CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES IN POSTER

The social circumstances of the conversations are significant. When chatting, the speakers must always make reference to those circumstances. Moreover, talks contain meanings that go beyond the utterances as well as literal meanings. This study explored the conversational implicatures in poster posted on the Facebook walls and websites. The data were analyzed using the social context and conversational implicature theories by Gricean typology of speaker meaning (Mey, 2009, p.365). In this investigation, various conversational implicatures were discovered. They include intentional disregard for the maxims, particularized conversational implicature, generalized conversational implicature, and standard implicature with the highest emergence. This study comes to the conclusion that the social circumstances of the participants, such as age, power or social standing, and social distance, have a significant impact on the usage of conversational implicature represented in the poster.

We need to talk about Hearer's Meaning!

Mainstream theories of meaning in communication have traditionally centered the speaker's communicative intention. The centrality of Speaker's Meaning has, however, also been subjected to a great deal of criticism. We argue that it is time to take much more seriously the notion of Hearer's Meaning as distinct from Speaker's Meaning, even where the latter is conceived of as interactionally negotiated. Our principal contention is that, in terms of real-world effects, synchronically but also diachronically, Hearer's Meaning is, in fact, criterial. We propose a model of Hearer's Meaning as derived from seven sources – H's framing(s) of (different parts of) the speech event; H's assumptions about the conventional meanings of words and phrases; the sequential placement of the utterance; H's perception of S's identities; H's social relationship with S; H's social relationships with third parties; and finally, H's assumptions regarding S's intentions (if any) – and exemplify its application with the help of an extended Twitter thread. The contribution of each of these seven sources to Hearer's meaning is not necessarily fixed at the start of a given interactional episode and may vary according to the context of utterance. Moreover, the assessment of each of the sources may not be the same for all participants. As a result, meanings derived by different interactants need not be (near-)identical for them to judge a communicative exchange as having been successful. In other words, multiple parallel meanings are possible.

Intentionality Principles of Speakers’ Meaning: Evidence From Requesting in Balinese

The purpose of this study is to examine the intentionality principles in culture-specific Balinese language that can be contextually used on the levels of utterance meaning(s) and force. The data for the study were collected by using a participatory observation method, a questionnaire, and a Focused Group Discussion (FGD). The closed-question survey was conducted only to observe Balinese people’s perception of expressing requests. It was then reviewed comprehensively in an FGD involving 40 participants that included academicians, Balinese language instructors, and Balinese culture activists. They were given a set of stimuli in the form of declarative and interrogative utterances focusing on the intentionality of the requests. They were asked to give a response to such a request accordingly. The collected data were then analyzed using a descriptive-qualitative method based on pragmatics theory, regarding intentionality and levels of meaning involved based upon the context of tradition and discourse. The results of the study show that the intentionality of the speaker's meaning of requesting in culture-specific of Balinese language might fall in both levels of utterance meaning(s) and force which can be expressed in two levels of complexity. The first level concerns the indirectness in the context of a situation, such as asking, providing certainty with tag questions, giving information, offering, greeting, and inviting. The second level relates to the indirectness in the contexts of tradition and discourse, such as giving advice, giving alternative points, complaining, and expressing satire.

Morphological and acoustic modeling of the vocal tract

In speech production, the anatomical morphology forms the substrate on which the speakers build their articulatory strategy to reach specific articulatory-acoustic goals. The aim of this study is to characterize morphological inter-speaker variability by building a shape model of the full vocal tract including hard and soft structures. Static magnetic resonance imaging data from 41 speakers articulating altogether 1947 phonemes were considered, and the midsagittal articulator contours were manually outlined. A phoneme-independent average-articulation representative of morphology was calculated as the speaker mean articulation. A principal component analysis-driven shape model was derived from average-articulations, leading to five morphological components, which explained 87% of the variance. Almost three-quarters of the variance was related to independent variations of the horizontal oral and vertical pharyngeal lengths, the latter capturing male-female differences. The three additional components captured shape variations related to head tilt and palate shape. Plane wave propagation acoustic simulations were run to characterize morphological components. A lengthening of 1 cm of the vocal tract in the vertical or horizontal directions led to a decrease in formant values of 7%-8%. Further analyses are required to analyze three-dimensional variability and to understand the morphological-acoustic relationships per phoneme. Average-articulations and model code are publicly available (https://github.com/tonioser/VTMorphologicalModel).

How to Express Implicit Attitudes

Abstract I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result, which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this is a robust basis on which to make an inference, with a fair degree of confidence, about the relationship between expression and implicit attitudes.

Mood alternation in Mexican Spanish in Georgia

Abstract The current study analyzes mood alternation in Spanish spoken in Georgia among first-generation Mexican immigrants. Using sociolinguistic interview data, tokens of the subjunctive and indicative in dependent clauses were examined, particularly in the following syntactic contexts: depender, aunque, me gusta que, no porque, quizás, tal vez, and no sé si/ cómo/dónde/qué. We argue that mood selection in the contexts under study is determined by the evaluation of the proposition in the dependent clause. We then use this data to inform theories of possible world semantics (i.e., Anand and Hacquard 2013; Giannakidou and Mari 2021; Villalta 2008) to better understand mood alternation. Moreover, while many U.S. Spanish varieties may demonstrate what Silva-Corvalán (1994, 91) refers to as “a reduced system that made it more difficult to distinguish between more or less possible situations in a hypothetical world,” we show that cases of alternation in the present data still differentiate speaker meaning and evaluation.

Collaboration under uncertainty in unscripted conversations: The role of hedges.

The present study examined the role of hedges in a referential communication task. Pairs of participants received an identical set of cards, each card displaying a geometric configuration (a "tangram"). One participant, the director, instructed their partner, the matcher, to reproduce a series of predetermined tangram sequences using their own cards. Directors sometimes included a hedge in their description of a tangram (e.g., "looks kinda like an eagle"), and more so the first time than on subsequent mentions. The present study tested the hypothesis that, by revealing their uncertainty regarding the adequacy of their description in conveying the intended meaning, directors signal a possible difficulty in establishing reference. This in turn prompts their addressee to display, rather than merely assert, their understanding (by presenting a description for the tangram the matcher believes the director is referring to, for the director to evaluate). Analyses of matchers' responses to descriptions that directors had hedged or not confirmed the hypothesis. This finding supports the view that conversational partners work together to reach the mutual belief that they have coordinated what the speaker means and what their addressee takes them to mean. Conversational partners expend more joint effort when they deem the risk of misunderstanding to be high than when it is perceived to be low. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Non-Observance Maxims in Banyumasan Humor Speech

Humorous utterances can cause humor because listeners, readers and audiences find unexpected utterances, attitudes or things, language games and deviations in speech conveyed by a speaker or comedian due to a discrepancy between the concept and the actual situation and exaggerated and unreasonable expressions, so it can cause laughter. In a conversation, what the speaker means often goes beyond what is said. Other implied meanings can be inferred and predicted based on the context. Implicature can occur due to a violation of the principle of conversation. The violation of the cooperative principle has the aim of creating humor in the conversation. There is another basic theory of cooperative principle, namely the non-observance of the conversational maxims theory proposed by Grice (1975). It is one of the pragmatic studies in determining the implied meaning of utterances that contain humor. This study aims to analyze the non-observance maxims found in Banyumasan humorous utterances on youtube. The data collection technique in this study was to use a purposive sampling technique, namely by looking for videos that match the research object. The methods used in this research were observation, documentation and transcription. The data analysis technique in this study used descriptive qualitative data analysis techniques and was carried out through three stages according to the data analysis model of Miles and Huberman (1984), namely data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. The results of the study showed that in Banyumasan humorous utterances there are several non-observance maxims, including flouting the maxims, violating the maxims and infringing the maxims. From these data, the most common is the flouting of quality maxims. This is because in humorous utterances there are non-observance of maxims that aim to create a funny impression.

Students' Comprehension of Types of English Presuppositions in Higher Education

A pragmatic viewpoint holds that a sentence's presuppositions govern the types of settings in which it may be felicitously stated (Karttunen, 1974). The purposes of the research were to identify the students’ utterance errors in the understanding of the uses of the types of presupposition and to assess the quantitative numbers of the students’ utterance errors in using presupposition. The data in this research were collected by giving presupposition tests to the students. This research was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. There were 25 students were taken as a sample of research. The findings showed that the studen’s ability in uttering presupposition was 51%. (inadequate). The student's ability in classifying the types of presupposition was 67% (Fair). In conclusion, the students found it difficult to comprehend the speaker's meaning of presupposition.