Speaker's Belief Research Articles

An Appraisal Analysis of Attitude in Joko Widodo's ASEAN Summit Speeches

This study employs Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal Framework to analyze the attitude subsystem within President Joko Widodo's speeches at the 2023 ASEAN Summit in Jakarta. The research focuses on uncovering the speaker's expressed attitudes by closely examining his language choices. Data was drawn from English translation scripts of speeches delivered on September 5-7, 2023, and selected using purposive sampling. Analysis of the 43rd ASEAN Summit reveals a significant emphasis on Affect, particularly Inclination, and expressions of Happiness and Satisfaction. Judgments of Veracity, Normality, and Capacity, though less frequent, were also present. The Appreciation category showcased a greater frequency of Reaction and Valuation, indicating the speaker's responsiveness to current challenges and articulation of long-term goals. Interestingly, the 26th ASEAN-Japan Summit speech exhibited a shift in emphasis. While the effect was still prominent, Judgment (precisely Capacity) and Appreciation became more pronounced. This suggests a heightened focus on highlighting expertise and shared values within the ASEAN-Japan context. Overall, this study offers insights into President Widodo's strategic use of language to convey attitudes, build consensus, and address regional issues. These findings have potential educational applications, demonstrating how language can reflect a speaker's beliefs and intentions.

Sharing Pain: A Hybrid Expressivist Account

ABSTRACT When one communicates that they are in pain, it is often assumed that the speaker is providing an assertion or report. Call this the cognitivist stance of pain utterances. Nevertheless, many sentential pain utterances seem to have both assertive and imperatival communicative content in virtue of expressing both the speaker's pain belief and the pain experience, respectively. I call this view hybrid expressivism about pain. In this paper, I take the imperativist idea of pain seriously and show that, via an expression relation, pain utterances inherit the imperative and motivational force of the pain. A hybrid expressivist stance better explains why pain utterances often have the perlocutionary effect of eliciting care from others, and it can provide a new understanding of what it means to silence one's pain.

Is it pathological to believe conspiracy theories?

According to a naturalist conception of what counts as a disorder, conspiracy beliefs are pathological beliefs if they are the outcome of a cognitive dysfunction. In this article, I take issue with the view that it is pathological to believe a conspiracy theory. After reviewing several approaches to the aetiology of conspiracy beliefs, I find that no approach compels us to view conspiracy beliefs as the outcome of a dysfunction: a speaker's conspiracy beliefs can appear as implausible and unshakeable to an interpreter, but in a naturalist framework it is not pathological for the speaker to adopt and maintain such beliefs.

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC CASE STUDY: ILLOCUTIONARY SPEECH ACTS ANALYSIS ON BIMA YUDHO SAPUTRO’S CRITICISM OF LAMPUNG GOVERNMENT

This research focused on the types of illocutionary acts as the part of speech act use in criticism, specifically on Bima Yudho Saputro’s Criticism of Lampung Government that recently gone viral in Indonesia. The objective of this research is to find out the illocutionary acts used by Bima on his criticism. The methodology applied in this research is qualitative research with case study as the research design, and documentation as the research technique. There are 15 illocutionary speech acts in the criticism found, with 60% of representative utterance, 20% directive utterance, and 20% of expressive utterance. The result show the most frequent illocutionary speech act found in the data is representative. The researchers found the criticism indicates that Bima, the critic, mostly used his words to affirm the truth of a claim he made about something in his criticism. Cutting (2002: 17) provided evidence to support this conclusion when he said that representative speech or utterance are performances in which the speaker's beliefs are expressed through the use of language.

Expressing belief with evidentials: A case study with Cuzco Quechua on the dispensability of illocutionary explanation

Evidentials indicate a source of evidence for a content, and sometimes do more. Depending on the language, they also express the speaker's belief in that content or its possibility. This paper is about how to explain the expression of belief. It argues that semantic explanations are better than illocutionary explanations in two ways. First, a general argument is provided that a semantic explanation is preferable. Second, a case study is given to the evidentials of Cuzco Quechua to argue that a semantic explanation is preferable to the illocutionary explanation that has been proposed in great detail by Faller (2002, 2012, 2014). The upshot is that illocutionary explanations of how belief is expressed are dispensable for at least some languages with grammaticalized evidentials.

Ambiguity Under Scrutiny: Moral Judgment of Microaggressions

Microaggressions are subtle, offensive comments that are directed at minority group members and are characteristically ambiguous in meaning. In two studies, we explored how observers interpreted such ambiguous statements by comparing microaggressions to faux pas, offenses caused by the speaker having an incidental false belief. In Experiment 1, we compared third-party observers’ blame and intentionality judgments of microaggressions with those for social faux pas. Despite judging neither microaggressions nor social faux pas to be definitively intentional, participants judged microaggressions as more blameworthy. In Experiment 2, microaggressions without explicit mental state information elicited a similar profile of judgments to those accompanied by explicit prejudiced or ignorant beliefs. Although they were, like faux pas, judged not to cause harm intentionally, microaggressive comments appeared to be judged more blameworthy on account of enduring prejudice thought to be lurking behind a speaker's false beliefs. Our current research demonstrates a distinctive profile of moral judgment for microaggressions.

A neo-Gricean speaker-belief-based analysis of Chinese evaluatives

This paper examines evaluatives in Modern Standard Chinese, a small group of rarely studied linguistic expressions like xingyundeshi ‘fortunately’ and buxing(de) ‘unfortunately’ that represent the speaker's value judgments or emotions with regard to the proposition to which they are attached. Also examined is the Gricean notion of conventional implicature in terms of speaker belief. It is argued that the semantics of Chinese evaluatives is better explained within a revised neo-Gricean framework of conventional implicature, built on the central idea that conventional implicature involves the speaker's exhibitive expression of her subjective beliefs. By so doing, this article provides implications for a better interpretation of Grice's theory of speaker meaning and a better understanding of evaluatives in Chinese and other languages.

Face threatening and speaker presuppositions: The case of feminine polite particles in Thai

This paper offers a new account of the operations of Thai feminine polite particles khá and khâ. These particles are compatible with sentences of different characteristics and thus cannot be used interchangeably. By investigating the occurrences of these two feminine polite particles in everyday Thai, this paper claims that, first, khá and khâ behave in the same fashion as discourse markers. Their appearance in sentences depends on the speaker's assumptions regarding the state of the information in the common ground. Following Kaufmann (2010), the paper proposes that the compatibility of the two polite particles in a sentence is designated via strong and weak speaker presuppositions. With the culmination of the utterance time and the time of the update, khá(φ) in this account reflects a strong speaker presupposition that reflects the belief that φ is commonly believed at the time of the utterance. In contrast, khâ(φ) suggests a weak speaker presupposition, representing the speaker's belief that φ will be commonly known at the time of the update. Incorporating Brown and Levinson's (1987) face threatening into the analyses, both khá and khâ activate the D and P factors while the R factor is activated only in the case of khá.

Mawlawi's techniques for persuading the audience in the story of nakhjiran

Audience persuasion, as a process used to change the audience attitude and associate him with the speaker's beliefs, is one of the main objectives of the educational mystics texts including the spiritual Mathnawi (Masnavii Ma’navi) of Jalalu'ddin Rumi, Mawlana. Mawlawi all over the Mathnawi has tried to convey the mystical and religious concepts to the audience by resorting different ways of influencing the audience and has benefited from several verbal and nonverbal or mystical and non-mystical tools for this purpose. One of Mawlawi's ways of achieving this goal is to benefiting from the storytelling ways and expressing the under considering concepts in the form of conversation and debate among the characters of the story. Among the beautiful stories of Masnavi that clearly illustrates this theme is the story of Nakhjiran and Lion. Rumi promotes this story in a conversational way and from the language of each of the debate parties using specific methods to satisfy the opposite party, deals with the expression of common beliefs and faiths in the context of strive and trust.

Post-traumatic Growth, Belief in a Just World, and Psalm 137:9

The historical background of Psalm 137, the traumatic event of the exile, makes it appropriate to read this psalm from the post-traumatic perspective. Most of the time, a trauma may negatively harm the mental health of its victim(s), but sometimes it may positively contribute to the mental development of the victim(s). Post-traumatic growth defines the positive psychological changes that result from a traumatic event, and the possession of belief in a just world is an indicator of post-traumatic growth. The textual evidence shows that the speaker of Psalm 137 is in the process of post-traumatic growth and that the speaker's belief in a just world, which is reflected in the text of Psalm 137:9, is at the core of this growth. The concept of post-traumatic growth and the belief in a just world work together to make sense of the language of violence in Psalm 137:9.

Foreign language learning and identity reconstruction: understanding of interaction of the self

This study focuses on the processes & relationships between foreign language learner's identity and interaction foreign language proficiency associated with learning English in private language institutes in Iranian context, especially, participants' beliefs about languages & participants' views about the language question are analyzed. This analysis integrates the speaker's practices and beliefs to issues of identity construction and negotiation that are observable in two contexts. Some English as a foreign language learners from 3 language institute in Tehran were picked to participate in the study, based on stratified sampling. The instrument were a 30-item likert-scale questionnaire on motivation types & social responsibility, individual development, information medium, ... 24 likert-scale questionnaire on self-identity changes, such as, self‌-confidence change, subtractive change, productive change, results reveal that how language practices in human interaction display and construct identity and correlation analysis indicated that motivation types of self-identity changes and signal participant's negotiations of their own identities of these or others. Instrumental orientations related with learner's self-confidence change.

Teaching sarcasm: Evaluating metapragmatic training for typically developing children.

Sarcasm is a common form of social language but one that can be challenging for children to understand. We investigated whether training can enhance children's ability to understand sarcasm. Participants were 111 five- to six- year-olds, assigned to either the training or control condition. In both conditions, children were first shown a series of puppet shows. Each puppet show ended with a sarcastic or literal remark. After each show children were asked about speaker belief, intent, and humour. Children's responses were used to estimate their pretraining sarcasm understanding. In the training condition, children were taught what sarcasm was and what cues to look for as they interacted with the researcher over a set of stories where characters made either sarcastic or literal remarks. In the control condition children read a nonsarcastic storybook with the researcher. Children's understanding of sarcasm was then reassessed using another series of puppet shows. For children who were not already proficient in sarcasm understanding, training was associated with more accurate speaker belief and intent responses and more accurate sarcasm detection. Training was not related to children's speaker humour responses. Thus, the findings of the present study provide evidence that aspects of children's sarcasm understanding can be enhanced through training. The training paradigm could be developed further to test its effectiveness in other populations who struggle with sarcasm understanding, and to help refine theories of irony development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How obligatory irrelevance, symmetric alternatives, and dense scales conspire: The case of modified numerals and ignorance

Buccola & Haida (2019) explore the consequences of a semantic-pragmatic theory in which relevance is closed under speaker belief. A primary consequence of this closure condition, they show, is that the Maxim of Quantity commits speakers to expressing their epistemic state about every relevant proposition. We argue that this commitment, dubbed Strong Epistemic Transparency, explains the contrast in ignorance inferences exhibited by non-strict comparative expressions like at least vs. strict ones like more than (hence the class A/B distinction of Nouwen 2010). We also discuss how our analysis might be extended to account for the observations of Cummins, Sauerland & Solt (2012) and Enguehard (2018) that the modifier more than does not block scalar inferences of round numerals.

КОНЦЕПЦИИ «РЕАЛЬНОСТИ» И «УТВЕРЖДЕНИЯ» В АНАЛИЗЕ МОДАЛЬНОГО ЧЕРЕДОВАНИЯ В ОТНОСИТЕЛЬНЫХ ПРИДАТОЧНЫХ ПРЕДЛОЖЕНИЯХ ИСПАНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The article analyzes theoretical works that raise the problem of analyzing the use of the subjunctive mood in subordinate relatives in Spanish based on the concept of «reality». This topic is relevant and widely discussed among Spanish researchers. Earlier, the author has already attempted to study a different concept – the concept of «statement». This concept, based on the hidden semantics of the whole sentence, is applicable to the analysis of subordinate object sentences. The aim of the study is to determine the features of the subjunctive mood use in subordinate relative sentences in the Spanish language, based on the semantic features of the concepts of «statement» and «reality». This article attempts to implement the concept of «statement» in the analysis of subordinate relative clauses. The author concludes that this concept is not always applicable to the analysis of this type of subordinate clauses. However, we cannot completely exclude it from the analysis. The concept of «reality», which is in its own way a consequence of the concept of «statement», helps to explain the modal alternation in subordinate relative clauses. The subjunctive mood indicates the abstractness of the antecedent or the speaker's doubts about the existence of the antecedent in reality. The indicative mood, on the contrary, indicates the reality of the object or the speaker's belief in its existence. The materials of this study raise questions related to the application of concepts within other types of subordinate clauses and in other closely related languages (French).

THE COMMUNICATION FUNCTION COVERED IN GAN KIM YONG’S SPEECH ON RESPONSE TO CORONA VIRUS

This research deals with how the language used in communication, especially in the form of speech. It addresses to describe the criteria and categories within utterances as well as the communication function of speech. The speech acts theory used in this research is from Searle (1976). The data source of research is an English speech text addressed by Singapore Health Minister Gan Kim Yong delivered in parliament on the government's response to the coronavirus on February 3rd 2020. This research finds the representatives with 199 utterances (73%) as the most common speech acts which are followed by the other categories; directives in 21 utterances (13%), commissives in 19 utterances (12%) and expressive in 4 utterances (2%). The analysis finds the speaker has the intention to provide sufficient information about the 2019 novel coronavirus based on the preponderance of representatives which are indicated by the use of claiming, stating, reporting, asserting, and defining utterances that provide evidence about the real circumstances happened such as data, reasons, rationale, and explanation. Thus, the belief of speaker within utterances guides the listeners for being aware of the current conditions relates to the coronavirus.

Obligatory Irrelevance and the Computation of Ignorance Inferences

AbstractIn recent work, Fox (2016) has argued, on the basis of both empirical and conceptual considerations, that relevance (the set of propositions relevant in an utterance context) is closed under speaker belief: if $\phi $ is relevant, then it’s also relevant whether the speaker believes $\phi $. We provide a formally explicit implementation of this idea and explore its theoretical consequences and empirical predictions. As Fox (2016) already observes, one consequence is that ignorance inferences (and scalar implicatures) can only be derived in grammar, via a covert belief operator of the sort proposed by Meyer (2013). We show, further, that the maxim of quantity no longer enriches the meaning of an utterance, per se, but rather acts as a filter on what can be relevant in an utterance context. In particular, certain alternatives (of certain utterances) are shown to be incapable of being relevant in any context where the maxim of quantity is active — a property we dub obligatory irrelevance. We show that the resulting system predicts a quite restricted range of interpretations for sentences with the scalar item some, as compared to both neo-Gricean (Geurts, 2010; Horn, 1972; Sauerland, 2004) and grammatical (Chierchia et al., 2012; Fox, 2007; Meyer, 2013) theories of scalar implicature, and we argue that these predictions seem largely on the right track.

Do They Really Mean It? Children's Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender.

Interpreting other people's intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children's understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children's responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.

From pitch to purpose: The prosodic–pragmatic mapping of [I + verb] belief constructions in English and Mandarin

Prosody has often been considered a universal cue of prominence across languages. This paper presents the results of a study that aimed to provide congruent data on the question of universality vs. cross-linguistic variability of pragmatic–prosodic mappings (prosodic variation as a cue to pragmatic interpretation) in a specific linguistic construction, namely, [I+verb] belief constructs before an opinion. Specifically, this study presents a perception test implemented to investigate the phenomenon of cross-linguistic pragmatic-prosodic mapping in [I+verb] belief constructs. Since opinions carry inherent notions of speaker belief, these constructions may initially appear superfluous. However, [I+verb] forms may actually fulfill various pragmatic functions depending on prosodic variation. Usage of various pragmatic functions of this construct was analyzed and compared between native Mandarin and English speakers using the most common belief verb, “think” (‘juede’ in Mandarin). Results illustrated that confidence rating of prosodic–syntactic [I+verb] variations were linked to pragmatic implicatures generated via alternative semantics theory. Furthermore, the same confidence rating trends appeared across both Mandarin and English, exhibiting a similar pragmatic-prosodic mapping for [I+verb] across these typologically different languages. This study thereby provides validity of prosody as a cross-linguistic pragmatic tool to express speaker attitude.

"That's really clever!" Ironic hyperbole understanding in children.

Hyperbole supports irony comprehension in adults by heightening the contrast between what is said and the actual situation. Because young children do not perceive the communication situation as a whole, but rather give precedence to either the utterance or the context, we predicted that hyperbole would reduce irony comprehension in six-year-olds (n = 40) by overemphasizing what was said. By contrast, ten-year-olds (n = 40) would benefit from hyperbole in the way that adults do, as they would perceive the utterance and context as a whole, highlighted by the speaker's ironic intent. Short animated cartoons featuring ironic criticisms were shown to participants. We assessed comprehension of the speaker's belief and speaker's intent. Results supported our predictions. The development of mentalization during school years and its impact on the development of irony comprehension is discussed.

Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments

Different polar question forms (e.g., Do you / Do you not / Don’t you / Really? Do you... have a car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which combinations of original speaker belief and contextual evidence influence the choice of question type in English and German. Our results show that both kinds of bias interact: in both languages, positive polar questions are typically selected when there is no original speaker belief and positive or non-informative contextual evidence; low negation questions (Do you not...?) are most frequently chosen when no original belief meets negative contextual evidence; high negation questions (Don’t you...?) are prompted when positive original speaker belief is followed by negative or non-informative contextual evidence; positive questions with really are produced most frequently when a negative original bias is combined with positive contextual evidence. In string-identical forms, there are prosodic differences across crucial conditions.