Speaker Meaning Research Articles

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON THE PROGRAM OF INDONESIANLAWYER CLUB ON TV ONE IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH ( Episode: Difficulty of The Execution of Jendral Susno Duaji)

This article reviews a criqlltical discourse analysis implementing Norman Fairclough perspective as the basis of analysis. There are three kinds of dimensions to analyze according to Fairclough, they are sentence structure, lexicon, and meaning. This article is a small report on a small CDA research by analyzing a television talk show, Indonesian Lawyer Club on TV One. The data are utterances recorded from the intercollutors in the event consisiting of nine parts of recording. They are Karni Ilyas, the host of the event, attorneys, Susno Duaji and his lawyer, and experts invited to the event. The research implemented critical discourse analysis especially based on Norman faiclough to uncover the implied meaning of the speaker. It was found that there were implicatures giving pragmatic force which were found in each recording which enabled watchers to understand the speaker meaning easily

Significado y comunicación

<p class='p1'>Grice puso de manifiesto la estrecha relación que hay entresignificado y comunicación. No obstante, en la bibliografía posterior que ha tratado ambas nociones encontramos que la relación ha sido trazada de manera confusa. En este artículo analizamos uno de los mejores intentos de superar esta confusión: la teoría de la relevancia de Sperber y Wilson. Aunque revelador, este intento no supone una solución adecuada ya que no consigue eliminar la confusión. Esto los hace asumir una propuesta del significado que supone un retroceso con respecto a la propuesta griceana, ya que se construye a partir de una serie de críticas injustificadas a la definición de significado del hablante, las cuales se diluyen al aclarar la relación entre las nociones tal y como las establece Grice. Asimismo, se señalará que si debemos entender la comunicación como un proceso racional, podría ser deseable apoyarnos en las mejores herramientas disponibles, esto es, hacer uso del aparato teórico que nos proporciona la teoría de la decisión racional.</p>

Speech Acts in Jokowi’s Campaign Speeches

The objectives of this study are to describe the types of speech acts used in Jokowi’s campaign speeches, to elaborate the realization of Jokowi used illocutionary act in campaign speeches, to know the reason of using illocutionary act. This study was conducted by descriptive qualitative research. The data of the research are the utterances of Jokowi’s speeches. The source of the data was Jokowi’s campaign speeches. The technique for collecting data is documentary technique. The technique of data analysis was interactive model by using Miles and Huberman. The findings show all types of speech acts were used in Jokowi’s campaign speeches, namely: locutionary act, illocutionary act can be classified into five parts; there were assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarative and the last types was perlocutionary act. The realization of illocutionary act used in Jokowi’s campaign speeches, the directive speech act was used in form of warning, commanding, promising, offering, questioning, requesting. The reasons of using illocutionary act in Jokowi’s campaign speeches are to point out or to identify what the speaker mean from his utterance, which influence of meaning and information of the speech and to get information clearly from Jokowi’s campaign speeches. Keywords: speech acts, campaign, campaign speeches

COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE OF CONVERSATIONS IN VIKRAM SETH’S A SUITABLE BOY: A SOCIO-PRAGMATIC ASSESSMENT OF INFERENTIAL CHAINS OF INTERPRETATION

<p>Grice (1975) provides an interpretative model that explains how we draw inferences from conversation. This theory of Cooperative Principle (CP), based on the philosophical ideas of Grice, relates the text to its contexts, including social context. As Schiffrin (1994) remarks, the application of CP to dialogic conversations leads to a particular view of discourse and its analysis, i.e. discourse as a text whose contexts (including cognitive, social and linguistic contexts) allow the interpretation of real speaker meaning in utterances (p. 227). The approach that Gricean Pragmatics offers to discourse analysis is based on a set of general principles about rationally-oriented communicative conduct that tells speakers and hearers how to organize and use information offered in a text, along with background knowledge of the world (including knowledge of the immediate social context), to convey (and understand) more than what is said– put simply, to communicate. In this paper, I am going to focus on and explore how we understand fictional discourse using pragmatic interpretative strategies to reconstruct inferential chains which lead us to a particular interpretation of conversation. I will discuss various issues of inferences, generated via Grice’s model, in the interpersonal pragmatics involved in the character utterances in Vikram Seth’s <em>A Suitable Boy</em>. The paper attempts to demonstrate how pragmatic interpretative strategies can make an added contribution to the study of literature as well as to the development of pragmatic competence, critical thinking, and better understanding of the use of naturally occurring language, both in literature and language classrooms.</p>

Learning words from speakers with false beliefs.

During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we study young children's ability to successfully acquire a word from a speaker with a false belief; we also assess the same children's success on a traditional false belief attribution task. We show that the ability to consult the epistemic state of a speaker during word learning develops between the ages of three and five. We also show that false belief understanding in word-learning contexts proceeds similarly to standard belief-attribution contexts when the tasks are equated. Our data offer evidence for the development of mind-reading abilities during language acquisition.

Disentangling Metaphor from Context: An ERP Study.

A large body of electrophysiological literature showed that metaphor comprehension elicits two different event-related brain potential responses, namely the so-called N400 and P600 components. Yet most of these studies test metaphor in isolation while in natural conversation metaphors do not come out of the blue but embedded in linguistic and extra-linguistic context. This study aimed at assessing the role of context in the metaphor comprehension process. We recorded EEG activity while participants were presented with metaphors and equivalent literal expressions in a minimal context (Experiment 1) and in a supportive context where the word expressing the ground between the metaphor's topic and vehicle was made explicit (Experiment 2). The N400 effect was visible only in minimal context, whereas the P600 was visible both in the absence and in the presence of contextual cues. These findings suggest that the N400 observed for metaphor is related to contextual aspects, possibly indexing contextual expectations on upcoming words that guide lexical access and retrieval, while the P600 seems to reflect truly pragmatic interpretative processes needed to make sense of a metaphor and derive the speaker's meaning, also in the presence of contextual cues. In sum, previous information in the linguistic context biases toward a metaphorical interpretation but does not suppress interpretative pragmatic mechanisms to establish the intended meaning.

Two-year-olds interpret novel phonological neighbors as familiar words.

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a vowel or consonant. Under these conditions children almost always chose the familiar object, though examination of eye movements showed that children did detect the tested phonological distinctions. Thus, children discounted perceptible phonological variations when doing so permitted a resolution of the speaker's meaning without postulating a new word. Children with larger vocabularies made novel-word interpretations more often than children with smaller vocabularies did. The results suggest that although young children do interpret speech in terms of a learned phonological system, this does not mean that children assume that phonological distinctions imply lexical distinctions. (PsycINFO Database Record

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON TV PROGRAM OF INDONESIAN LAWYER CLUB IN PERSPECTIVE OF NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH (Execution of General Susno Duaji)

This article reviews a critical discourse analysis implementing Norman Fairclough perspective as the basis of analysis. There are three kinds of dimensions to analyze according to Fairclough, they are sentence structure, lexicon, and meaning. This article is a report on a small CDA research by analyzing a television talk show, Indonesian Lawyer Club on TV One. The data are utterances recorded from the intercollutors in the event consisiting of nine parts of recording: Karni Ilyas, the host of the event, attorneys, Susno Duaji and his lawyer, and experts invited to the event. It was found that there were implicatures giving pragmatic force which were found in each recording which enabled watchers to understand the speaker meaning easily.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON TV PROGRAM OF INDONESIAN LAWYER CLUB IN PERSPECTIVE OF NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH (Execution of General Susno Duaji)

This article reviews a critical discourse analysis implementing Norman Fairclough perspective as the basis of analysis. There are three kinds of dimensions to analyze according to Fairclough, they are sentence structure, lexicon, and meaning. This article is a report on a small CDA research by analyzing a television talk show, Indonesian Lawyer Club on TV One. The data are utterances recorded from the intercollutors in the event consisiting of nine parts of recording: Karni Ilyas, the host of the event, attorneys, Susno Duaji and his lawyer, and experts invited to the event. It was found that there were implicatures giving pragmatic force which were found in each recording which enabled watchers to understand the speaker meaning easily.

Killing Two Birds with One Deceit

This paper explores the workings of deception performed in multi-party interactions, a topic hitherto hardly ever examined by deception philosophers. Deception is here discussed in the light of a neo-Goffmanian classification of (un)ratified hearers and a neo-Gricean version of speaker meaning, anchored in non-reflexive intentionality and accountability, which is shown to operate beyond the speaker-hearer dyad. An utterance, it is argued, may carry different meanings, judged according to their (lack of) intentionality and (non)deceptiveness, towards the individuals performing different hearer roles. The complex mechanisms of deception with regard to different hearers are illustrated with examples culled from the American television series “House.” Deception in fictional interactions is illustrative of real-life manifestations of deception, yet it brings into focus also those rare ones, which are in the centre of philosophical attention.

Imagery, expression, and metaphor

Metaphorical utterances are construed as falling into two broad categories, in one of which are cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors, and contrast them with image-demanding metaphors (IDM’s) comprising a second category and whose understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, I suggest, is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically marked sensu Damasio. IDM’s are characteristically used in service of self-expression, and thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM’s may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.

Law's 'Way of Words': Pragmatics and Textualist Error

Lawyers and judges cannot adequately address the nature of text, meaning, or interpretation without reference to the insights provided by linguists and philosophers of language. Exploring some of those insights, this article focuses upon what linguists and philosophers of language call “pragmatics.” Pragmatics examines the relations between words and users rather than the relations of words to words (syntax) or the relations of words to the world (semantics). In other words, pragmatics studies how language users actually use and interpret words and other signs in communication. Pragmatics recognizes that speaker meaning can differ from (and even contradict) linguistic meaning, including the literal meaning of text. In its proper context, for example, “Bob is indeed a good lawyer” can ironically mean just the opposite. Pragmatics also recognizes that relevant text is not a thing-in-itself that is simply given. Good lawyers look at such things as purpose and cohesion when determining relevant text. They do not simply take their opponent’s (or even their client’s) assertions of relevance. Pragmatics also provides lawyers with a number of specific concepts and tools which are helpful in determining speaker meaning. For user convenience, this article attempts to set out in one place a number of such concepts and tools. These include: (1) types of cohesion that help determine relevant text, (2) types of context that help determine meaning, (3) pragmatic principles of construction such as principles of relevance and politeness, and (4) important pragmatic notions or devices such as anaphora, cataphora, ellipsis, deixis, presupposition, unstated premises, entailment, and implementives.Finally, as a recurring example (among others) of pragmatics in action, this article examines from multiple perspectives textual issues raised in King v. Burwell, 576 U.S. __ (2015).

Neuromagnetic brain activities associated with perceptual categorization and sound-content incongruency: a comparison between monosyllabic words and pitch names.

In human cultures, the perceptual categorization of musical pitches relies on pitch-naming systems. A sung pitch name concurrently holds the information of fundamental frequency and pitch name. These two aspects may be either congruent or incongruent with regard to pitch categorization. The present study aimed to compare the neuromagnetic responses to musical and verbal stimuli for congruency judgments, for example a congruent pair for the pitch C4 sung with the pitch name do in a C-major context (the pitch-semantic task) or for the meaning of a word to match the speaker’s identity (the voice-semantic task). Both the behavioral data and neuromagnetic data showed that congruency detection of the speaker’s identity and word meaning was slower than that of the pitch and pitch name. Congruency effects of musical stimuli revealed that pitch categorization and semantic processing of pitch information were associated with P2m and N400m, respectively. For verbal stimuli, P2m and N400m did not show any congruency effect. In both the pitch-semantic task and the voice-semantic task, we found that incongruent stimuli evoked stronger slow waves with the latency of 500–600 ms than congruent stimuli. These findings shed new light on the neural mechanisms underlying pitch-naming processes.

When diplomacy fails: difficulty understanding hints following severe traumatic brain injury

Background: In the absence of aphasia, many people with severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) have difficulty with communication. In particular, they have difficulty understanding conversational inference. Poor social cognition is also prevalent following TBI.Aims: This study aimed to examine the role of social cognition in the ability to recognise conversational inference in the form of hints.Methods and procedures: 31 adults (22 men: mean age 45 years) with chronic (mean time since injury = 15.12 years) and severe TBI (mean post traumatic amnesia (PTA) of 32.74 days) and 24 adults (14 men: mean age 46.1 years) from the community participated. They were compared for their comprehension of two kinds of video vignettes in which professional actors made progressively more explicit hints. In one version, the conversational tone was neutral, in the other emotional. They were also assessed on an independent measure of social cognition (TASIT).Outcomes & results: The adults with TBI recognised neutral hints at a normal rate but, unlike the community controls, were not facilitated by overtly emotional hints. Social cognition performance was related to performance on both types of hint. Improved performance on the emotional hints was not uniquely predicted by social cognition but, rather, by processing speed and possibly also stress in the group with TBI.Conclusions: People with TBI appear to have difficulty using emotional cues to infer speaker meaning. This may reflect cognitive slowing and also anxiety and stress. This has implications for both remediation of such deficits and for educating others who interact with people with TBI.

Imagem mental e metáfora

This paper focuses on the nature of mental imagery as a component of human cognition. Imagery has been considered as mere epiphenomena and unable to alter belief. However, recent evidence in neuroscience and psycholinguistics suggest that the mental image can be accessed and interact with higher order processes of cognition in the determination of speaker meaning. If this is true, then mental imagery can play a role during the comprehension procedure for metaphoric utterances. To understand the reasons why mental images have been discarded from linguistic theories of utterance comprehension, past philosophical ideas about the mental image are discussed. Many have questioned the existence of the image, stating that they are, in fact, constituted by propositional components. These perspectives fit within a theory of the mind that conforms to an amodal symbol system in which the relation between perceptual input and mental representation is an arbitrary one. This paper is suggesting that the mind follows a perceptual symbol system, and that the relation is an analogous one. Therefore, through an extension of relevance theory, it is possible to flesh out the meaning of metaphors by incorporating this embodied view of the mind.

Motor-Learning-Based Adjustment of Ambulatory Feedback on Vocal Loudness for Patients With Parkinson's Disease

To investigate how the direct biofeedback on vocal loudness administered with a portable voice accumulator (VoxLog) should be configured, to facilitate an optimal learning outcome for individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), on the basis of principles of motor learning. Methodologic development in an experimental study. The portable voice accumulator VoxLog was worn by 20 participants with PD during habitual speech during semistructured conversations. Six different biofeedback configurations were used, in random order, to study which configuration resulted in a feedback frequency closest to 20% as recommended on the basis of previous studies. Activation of feedback when the wearer speaks below a threshold level of 3dB below the speaker's mean voice sound level in habitual speech combined with an activation time of 500ms resulted in a mean feedback frequency of 21.2%. Settings regarding threshold and activation time based on the results from this study are recommended to achieve an optimal learning outcome when administering biofeedback on vocal loudness for individuals with PD using portable voice accumulators.

Wittgenstein as a Gricean Intentionalist

According to the dominant view, the later Wittgenstein identified the meaning of an expression with its use in the language and vehemently rejected any kind of mentalism or intentionalism about linguistic meaning. I argue that the dominant view is wrong. The textual evidence, which has either been misunderstood or overlooked, indicates that at least since the Blue Book Wittgenstein thought speaker's intentions determine the contents of linguistic utterances. His remarks on use are only intended to emphasize the heterogeneity of natural language. Taking into account remarks written after he finished the Investigations, I show how Wittgenstein anticipated the basic tenets of Gricean intention-based semantics. These are, in particular, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning and the distinction between what a speaker means by an utterance and what the expression uttered means in the speaker's natural language. Importantly, Wittgenstein also believed that only the meaning of the speaker determined the content of ambiguous expressions, such as ‘bank’, on a particular occasion of utterance

Testimony and the epistemic uncertainty of interpretation

In the epistemology of testimony it is often assumed that audiences are able to reliably recover asserted contents. In the philosophy of language this claim is contentious. This paper outlines one problem concerning the recovery of asserted contents (the ‘recovery problem’), and argues that it prevents audiences from gaining testimonial knowledge in a range of cases (even when the speaker is both sincere and a reliable belief former). The recovery problem, in essence, is simply that due to the collective epistemic limitations of the speaker and audience speakers will, in certain cases, be insensitive to the ways in which they may be misinterpreted. As a result audiences’ beliefs will often fail the safety and sensitivity conditions on knowledge. Once the problem has been outlined and distinguished from several related problems in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of testimony, a series of responses are considered. The first response holds that audiences possess defeaters in recovery problem cases, and thus wouldn’t form beliefs. The second response holds that the beliefs audiences form are very coarse grained, meaning they are not very vulnerable to failures of safety and sensitivity. The final response holds that the objects of speaker meaning are not propositional. All three responses are found to be unsatisfactory.

On how the brain decodes vocal cues about speaker confidence

In speech communication, listeners must accurately decode vocal cues that refer to the speaker's mental state, such as their confidence or ‘feeling of knowing’. However, the time course and neural mechanisms associated with online inferences about speaker confidence are unclear. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the temporal neural dynamics underlying a listener's ability to infer speaker confidence from vocal cues during speech processing. We recorded listeners' real-time brain responses while they evaluated statements wherein the speaker's tone of voice conveyed one of three levels of confidence (confident, close-to-confident, unconfident) or were spoken in a neutral manner. Neural responses time-locked to event onset show that the perceived level of speaker confidence could be differentiated at distinct time points during speech processing: unconfident expressions elicited a weaker P2 than all other expressions of confidence (or neutral-intending utterances), whereas close-to-confident expressions elicited a reduced negative response in the 330–500 msec and 550–740 msec time window. Neutral-intending expressions, which were also perceived as relatively confident, elicited a more delayed, larger sustained positivity than all other expressions in the 980–1270 msec window for this task. These findings provide the first piece of evidence of how quickly the brain responds to vocal cues signifying the extent of a speaker's confidence during online speech comprehension; first, a rough dissociation between unconfident and confident voices occurs as early as 200 msec after speech onset. At a later stage, further differentiation of the exact level of speaker confidence (i.e., close-to-confident, very confident) is evaluated via an inferential system to determine the speaker's meaning under current task settings. These findings extend three-stage models of how vocal emotion cues are processed in speech comprehension (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) by revealing how a speaker's mental state (i.e., feeling of knowing) is simultaneously inferred from vocal expressions.

Exploring the role of conventionality in children's interpretation of ironic remarks.

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to determine their understanding of the components of irony: speaker meaning, speaker attitude, and speaker intent. It was hypothesized that conventional remarks would be easier to comprehend than novel/situation-specific remarks because they are more likely to be familiar to the children. Results indicated that children demonstrated better comprehension of speaker meaning for conventional remarks than for novel/situation-specific remarks but no significant differences were found for inferring speaker attitude or speaker intent.