Speaker Meaning Research Articles

Politeness inferences in Jesus’ Discourse with his Lord: A Dialogic Analysis

The current research presents the manifestations of politeness phenomena in a ‘talk-in-interaction’ between Prophet Iesa the son of Mary (Jesus), and his Al-Mighty Lord. The study embraces Leech’s (1983) ‘politeness principle’ model. Moreover, it infers what speakers mean from what they say which is essential in highlighting politeness phenomena as crucial basis for interaction. Consequently, findings affirm the fact that Jesus has manipulated the best linguistic utterances that have marked his politeness with his Lord.

Что есть значение? Ответ Пола Грайса

The present paper discusses the ideas presented in Paul Grice’s groundbreaking paper ‘Meaning’ published in 1957. The ideas are examined in the perspective of Grice’s ma­ture, complete and elaborate approach to language. The following tenets are indicated as the main features of that approach: (1) though meaning and use are closely connected, they should not be identified; (2) the theory of meaning and language as a whole must be systematic and explanatory; (3) the meaning of linguistic expressions is explicated in terms of psychological states, first of all, in terms of intentions; (4) three kinds of meaning are distinguished: the meaning of a sentence, the uttered content (what is said), and speaker (utterer’s) meaning; (5) conversation is treated as a rational activity submit­ted to some general principles: to recognize the speaker intentions the audience makes a special kind of inference – implicatures; (6) natural languages has no special informal logic; (7) semantic and pragmatic aspects of language has no clear-cut boundary, they in­teract with each other. In discussing Grice’s article ‘Meaning’ a special attention is paid to three points: the difference between natural and non-natural meaning, the applied proce­dure of conceptual analysis (through identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for attributing non-natural (or speaker) meaning and the nature (reflexive or iterative) of speaker intentions which later were called ‘communicative’. Though Grice is commonly regarded to be a philosopher of ordinary language, his views on the character of meaning and conversation testify to the effect that he rejects some important principles of that philosophical school.

Cognitive pragmatics of American presidential debates: a case for economic metaphors

This article focuses on cognitive-pragmatic properties of conceptual metaphors of ECONOMY in the 21st century American presidential campaigns. In this paper, we aim to elaborate the models of metaphoric conceptualization of ECONOMY, state their functions in terms of discourse strategies, and describe their impact on the opponents and the audience. This research is underpinned by conceptual metaphor theories and ideas of cognitive pragmatics, which postulates the unity of cognitive and communicative aspects of discourse. The benefits of this integrative cognitive-pragmatic approach are in the fact that it can consequently explicate the meaning of speaker’s message and the expected impact of their discourse on the audience. For this aim, we stress the persuasive and manipulative nature of American presidential debates as a mass-media mediated genre of political discourse. Adopting a cognitive-pragmatic perspective on presidential debates, we claim that conceptual metaphors of economy constitute time and ideology specific conceptual models; their dominant functions are persuasive, informative, and manipulative. In the discourse of the 21st century presidential debates, we distinguish seven leading models of conceptual metaphors of economy, common for both republican and democratic candidates. The choice of discourse strategies of debate participants depends upon the candidates’ intentions while their impact on the opponent and the audience is influenced by meta-communicative issues of candidates’ communicative behavior and (im)politeness strategies in particular. The 21st century presidential debates are characterized by the abundance of discourse strategies of aggression and impoliteness.

True Threats, Self-Defense, and the Second Amendment.

Does the Second Amendment protect those who threaten others by negligently or recklessly wielding firearms? What line separates constitutionally legitimate gun displays from threatening activities that can be legally proscribed? This article finds guidance in the First Amendment doctrine of true threats, which permits punishment of "statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individual." The Second Amendment, like the First, should not be read to protect those who threaten unlawful violence. And to the degree that the constitution requires a culpable mental state (mens rea) in such circumstances, the appropriate standard should be recklessness.

Understanding Pragmatics and Pragmatic Competence in ELT Materials

<p>Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with utterance and speaker meaning. With regard to English language teaching (ELT) materials, pragmatics may deal with function in English or language functions—that is what or which language expression commonly used in particular situations. Speaking about function, there are some pragmatic aspects which we should be knowledgeable of. The present paper attempts to discuss what the pragmatic aspects are and their significance in the teaching of language functions through ELT materials. To discuss these pragmatic aspects, a library research was deployed by referring to previous studies on pragmatics and pragmatic competence in language teaching, including the author’s investigation on pragmatics in ELT materials. The results indicate that it is imperative for English language teachers to understand pragmatics in ELT materials as it helps them to teach language functions which are pragmatically effective or functional.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>language functions, sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, meta-pragmatic information, ELT materials</p>

On the Infinite Regress of a Speaker’s Intentions

Intention-based semantics (IBS) serves as the paradigm in the field of speaker meaning analysis. However, it has grappled with a well-known problem: the infinite regress of a speaker’s intentions. Theorists such as Grice, Schiffer, Davis, and Green have tried to remedy the situation; however, no one has found any solutions until now. The present paper claims that the inability of IBS theorists to resolve the regress problem may be attributed to the conflict between two basic assumptions that they espouse: representationalism and the transparency of speaker meaning. When both are adopted alongside each other, as the current paper shows, the regress problem immediately emerges. It follows, then, that it would be prudent to reject IBS to sufficiently analyze speaker meaning.

GIFs in online written interaction: embodied cues and beyond


 
 
 Recent research has characterized GIFs as a means for speakers to reproduce non-linguistic cues such as bodily actions and facial expressions in online written interaction, which is first and foremost text-based. They make it possible to translate in digital interaction what those non-linguistic cues enable to do in face-to-face conversation: express emotion and affect, and elaborate on what is being said. This article explores further the role and functions of GIFs as embodied cues and goes beyond, where GIF use diverges from body language in face-to-face conversation.
 
 

Hologramas semânticos: uma proposta metateórica para a avaliação do significado complexo na linguagem natural

Este trabalho se propõe a avaliar as dimensões da causalidade enquanto fenômeno aquém e além da instância semântica, identificável por meio da aproximação entre significado da sentença e do falante, expressa neste trabalho a partir da relação causa/efeito viabilizada pela modalidade. Assume-se que o fenômeno causal, representando tanto sua pertinência para a cognição humana quanto âmbitos mais amplos da gramática, insere-se na categoria de significado complexo, requerendo auxílio das disciplinas de sintaxe e pragmática para o estudo semiformal de sua natureza e ocorrência no âmbito lógico-linguístico. Posto isso, o artigo está organizado a partir da seguinte estrutura: a) o fenômeno causal e a sua expressão em linguagem natural via modalidade com suas respectivas implicações para i) a comunicação cotidiana; ii) a linguagem científica; e iii) a ontologia das Filosofias da Mente, da Lógica, da Linguagem, da Linguística e da Ciência; b) a constituição da holografia semântica a partir de uma proposta metateórica assentada na interface lógica vs. linguagem natural; e c) a análise do significado complexo a partir do fenômeno causal via modalidade na interface i) sintaxe/semântica e ii) semântica/pragmática enquanto hologramas simétricos.

Utterances without Force

In this paper the author attempts to reconcile two claims recently defended by Mitchell Green. The first is that illocutionary force is part of speaker meaning (Green 2018). The second is that illocutionary force is a product of cultural evolution (Green 2017). Consistent with the second claim, the author argues that some utterances – particularly those produced by infants and great apes – are produced with communicative intent, but without illocutionary force. These utterances lack the normative properties constitutive of force because their utterers have no grasp of the norms that operate on developed speech. If there can be utterances produced with communicative intent that lack force, we must consider how exactly force is a part of speaker meaning. In response the author argues that force is an inessential and acquired part of speaker meaning. As a result we need a conception of communicative intent more basic than illocutionary intent. He spells this out in terms of a ‘perlocutionary’ intention.

MAKSUD PESERTA TUTUR DALAM KONTEKS JAWABAN ANAK-ANAK HAKUNLAH URANG PADA KELUARGA BANJAR

The problems discussed in this study are as follows. 1) What do speakers mean in the context of children's answers to hakunlah urang in the Banjar family? 2) What is meant by partners in the context of children's answers to hakunlah urang in the Banjar family? The objectives of this study are as follows: 1) what the speaker meant in the context of children's answers to hakunlah urang in the Banjar family 2) what is meant by partners talking in the context of children's answers to hakunlah urang in the Banjar family. Type of qualitative descriptive research. Data sources were disclosed by the Banjar community in Kampung Tabah, Banjar Regency. The time of data collection is January 2019 until March 2019. The technique of data collection is recording and recording. This research uses three steps of work, namely (1) providing data; (2) data analysis; and (3) presentation of the results of data analysis. The theory used is speech act. Data analysis results. 1). the purpose of the speaker in this title. Asking to buy something. b. asking to get something c. asking to do something immediately. d. forbid something. e. remind something. Meanwhile the purpose of the partners talking a. accept with pleasure b. accept by force. c. reject firmly. The conclusion is that the purpose of the speaker is to make the couple do something, while the couple's intention is to accept, accept by force, and refuse altogether

Study on pairwise LDA for x‐vector‐based speaker recognition

In typical x-vector-based speaker recognition systems, standard linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is used to transform the x-vector space with the aim of maximising the between-speaker discriminant information while minimising the within-speaker variability. For LDA, it is customary to use all the available speakers in the speaker recognition development dataset. In this study, the authors investigate if it would be more beneficial to estimate the between-speaker discriminant information and the within-speaker variability using the most confusing samples and the most distant samples (from the target speaker mean), respectively, in the LDA-based channel compensation. The between-speaker variance is estimated using a pairwise approach where the most confusing non-target speaker samples are found based on the Euclidean distance between the speaker mean and adjacent speaker's samples. The within-speaker variance is estimated using the mean of each speaker and the furthermost samples in the speaker sessions. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed LDA approach for an x-vector-based speaker recognition system achieves over 17% relative improvement on equal error rate over standard LDA-based x-vector speaker recognition systems on the NIST2010 corext-corext condition.

Meaning, reasoning, and common knowledge

Abstract“Pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of ‘ampliative‘ inference—induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some special application of general principles special to communication, as conceived by Grice … —but in any case a sort of reasoning” (Korta, Kepa & John Perry. 2015. Pragmatics. In The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Metaphysics research lab, Stanford, CA: Stanford University:1). Pragmatics assumes that one’s competence as speaker is sufficient to allow one to construct, in range of significant cases, plausible accounts of how speakers and audiences reason. The question is that are those who attribute reasoning to speakers and audiences suffering a “curious mental derangement” that prevents them from seeing that reasoning is rare? I consider four responses. (1) Speakers and audiences do reason to the extent pragmatic explanations require; they just typically do not do so consciously. (2) The second reply concedes that speakers and audiences often do not reason even unconsciously in any relevant detail, but it insists that attributions of reasoning can nonetheless be, and often are, explanatory. (3) The third reply is a response to objections to the second. It identifies reasoning with information processing steps. (4) The fourth view is that a speaker’s utterance provides an audience evidence for what the speaker means, but the audience typically does not reason to a conclusion about what the speaker means. I reject the first three replies and embrace the fourth, but I argue that attributions of reasoning in pragmatics can still play a significant explanatory role.

Exclamatives, exclamations, miratives and speaker’s meaning

Abstract Exclamations, exclamatives and miratives are utterances that do not merely convey some informative content, but are designed to express the emotional attitude of surprise. In this paper I argue that analysing what it means to express surprise must be based on three main ideas: (1) the idea that exclamatives are instances of metarepresentational use; (2) the idea that what is communicated in exclamatives and exclamations are what relevance theorists call impressions, rather than definite propositions, where impressions are communicated by slightly increasing the manifestness of a whole range of propositions; and (3) the idea that utterances may not only communicate by conveying Gricean meaning, but also by showing, i.e. by providing direct evidence for certain thoughts. Thus, what is communicated in exclamatives and exclamations is typically not reducible to Gricean speaker meanings. I outline the implications of my approach by comparing it to some recent semantic accounts.

How to put yourself in someone else’s shoes: The role of point-of-view in the interpretation of mixed messages

AbstractDoes having a communicative role other than the speaker’s make a difference to the way pragmatic meaning is construed? Standard paradigms in interpersonal pragmatics have implicitly assumed a speaker-centric perspective over the years, however modern approaches have re-considered the role of listener evaluations. In the present study, I examine whether assuming different communicative roles (speaker, listener, observer) results in varying interpretations. A web-based experiment revealed that participants who took the perspective of different characters in short stories differed in the way they interpreted what the speaker meant. In most cases, participants in the role of the listener interpreted speaker meaning in more negative ways than participants in the other roles. The present study suggests that the directionality of the difference (negative inferences under the listener’s perspective) could be explained by taking into account affective factors.

Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional’ effects

Although some utterances communicate a determinate speaker's meaning which can be duplicated in the minds of speaker and hearer, others communicate – either alongside or instead of a speaker's meaning – something much less determinate, often described as a ‘non-propositional effect’. Creative metaphors, for instance, are seen as conveying loose impressions, perhaps interspersed with images, which vary from one addressee to another, and typically activate perceptual, emotional or sensorimotor mechanisms. After illustrating the notion of a non-propositional effect and outlining some of the challenges these interpretive effects present for current linguistic approaches to pragmatics, we consider how they might be dealt with in more cognitively oriented approaches such as relevance theory, and what role mental imagery might play in metaphor interpretation in particular.

JAPANESE ADVERTISEMENT FOR IMPROVING STUDENTS READING ABILITY

Advertising is a form of communication that discloses information or messages and promotes the speaker's intent to his or her opponent. The language used in advertising is a language that is easy to understand and persuasive so that the opponent can speak as the speaker means. From advertisements in magazines, used for student learning in Dokkai 5. Dokkai or reading is a very important course for students to welcome the office work normally done by Japanese language graduates. In the office when working related Japanese often read documents and translate documents. In this research, using advertising media because it is usually written in large and striking letters.To make the reading japanese learning more interesting Therefore, they needs to be approach that has never been done before with reading japanese advertisement from japanese magazine. Reading Japanese language is usually difficult because it consists of three figures namely Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. So that become easier for students to reading through the selected advertising media. This research is qualitative descriptive, and object of our study are students learning Japanese Language Education and Japanese Literature Brawijaya University who have passed JLPT N3 and already received materials about Dokkai 3 and Dokkai 4. Techniques data by purposive sampling and random sampling by using random numbers as much as 10% of the total population. In addition the results of this study will also describe motivation for students to improve their ability of reading. Therefore 指導 ポ イ ン ト (teaching points) as an effort to help the lecture to explain and possibility to use teach for higher education.

The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference

AbstractDominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on speaker meaning that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalization of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on speaker meanings in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavor of complex inferential work.

Diverse Interpretations on Nativeness but Unanimous Subscription to Native-speakerism : Identity of Future Non-native English Teachers in Taiwan

In the current body of knowledge about the influence of native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) on the professional identity of non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs), the fundamental question of ‘What exactly do native English speakers (NESs) mean to NNESTs?’ has been left unanswered and the voices of preservice NNESTs are largely absent. This study examined the influence of NESTs as ‘significant others’ in the English language teaching profession on preservice NNESTs’ identity by looking into how preservice NNESTs interpret the term native English speakers, accept native speaker norms, and respond to the active recruitment of NESTs through the national policy in Taiwan. Survey and interview data were collected from 258 preservice English teachers. The findings show that although the participants held diverse views on who constitute NESs, they shared a unanimous subscribingto native-speakerism. The participants gave conditional support to the policy of recruiting NESTs while highlighting their opposition to uncertified NESTs and differentiated payment. Implications to teacher education and policy decisions are provided.

On Gibbard’s Defence of the Dispositional Theory of Meaning

According to the dispositional theory of meaning and content, what a speaker means by an expression is determined by her dispositions to use it. The literature contains two well-known objections against this theory: the problem of finitude and the problem of error. In his bookMeaning and Normativity, Allan Gibbard propounds a novel defence against these objections. In this paper, I argue that Gibbard’s suggestions fail to save the dispositional theory. Moreover, I argue that Gibbard’s deflationary view about facts prevents him from saying anything about the property of meaning that would hold any interest for a naturalist.

Integrated Speaker and Speech Recognition for Wheel Chair Movement Using Artificial Intelligence

A speech signal is a result of the constrictions of vocal tract and different sounds can be generated by different vocal tract constrictions. A speech signal carries two things i.e. speaker's identity and meaning. For a specific applications of speaker and speech recognition like voice operated wheel chair, both the speaker and speech is to be recognized for movement of wheel chair. Automation in wheelchair is, today's requirement as the numbers of people are increasing with disabilities like injuries in spine, amputation, impairments in hands etc. They need assistance for moving their wheel chair. Voice operated wheel chair is one of the solution. The intention of this study is to use a speaker and speech dependent system to control the wheelchair and minimize the risk of unwanted accident. We have proposed a system in which speaker (patient) as well as speech (commands) is recognized based upon the acoustic features like Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). Optimization of the features using Artificial Bee Algorithm (ABC) is done to gain good accuracy with artificial intelligence technique as a classifier. We have tested our system on standard dataset (TIDIGITS) and our own prepared dataset. Also, validation of proposed work is done by generating control signal to actuate the wheel chair in real time scenario.