Speaker's Goals Research Articles

Causal role of frontocentral beta oscillation in comprehending linguistic communicative functions

Linguistic communication is often considered as an action serving the function of conveying the speaker's goal to the addressee. Although neuroimaging studies have suggested a role of the motor system in comprehending communicative functions, the underlying mechanism is yet to be specified. Here, by two EEG experiments and a tACS experiment, we demonstrate that the frontocentral beta oscillation, which represents action states, plays a crucial part in linguistic communication understanding. Participants read scripts involving two interlocutors and rated the interlocutors’ attitudes. Each script included a critical sentence said by the speaker expressing a context-dependent function of either promise, request, or reply to the addressee's query. These functions were behaviorally discriminated, with higher addressee's will rating for the promise than for the reply and higher speaker's will rating for the request than for the reply. EEG multivariate analyses showed that different communicative functions were represented by different patterns of the frontocentral beta activity but not by patterns of alpha activity. Further tACS results showed that, relative to alpha tACS and sham stimulation, beta tACS improved the predictability of communicative functions of request or reply, as measured by the speaker's will rating. These results convergently suggest a causal role of the frontocentral beta activities in comprehending linguistic communications.

STUDYING STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE INTEREST IN TEXT FROM A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

This work will focus on text-based interest, which may be found in this article using a linguistics method. The principles of linguistics of emotions, which integrate the findings of language and psychology studies, provide the groundwork for this strategy. The paper delves into the linguistic methods of text-based interest analysis and how they relate to interest's function in interactive instructional discourse. One definition of active, emotion-evoking discourse is the communicative scenario in which an informative text piques the reader's curiosity. The speaker's goal in adopting interest-evoking rhetorical tactics—that is, strategies for generating texts to evoke the audience's attention—is to "evoke the recipient's interest" in this particular discourse. Applying techniques from communicative-functional linguistics, we may analyze these systems. First, we can pinpoint specific tactics with the use of these methods. The essay uses two such systems—text dialogization and contextualization—in Russian textbooks as an example. Second, to implement these tactics, the communicative-functional approaches show the most important ways of using language and producing finished content. We think these methods are what people mean when discussing the concretization of text content, developing text emotiveness, and forming text dialogicity.

Pragmalinguistic and cognitive markers of oral speech: correlation with the psychotype of the speaker

This article provides information on the important role of pragmalinguistic and cognitive features of oral speech in the formation of effective communication and the fact that pragmalinguistic features include various elements of language use under the influence of the context and the speaker's communicative goals

An Analysis of Illocutionary Acts in Taylor Swift’s Speech at NYU's 2022 Commencement

This present study offers a comprehensive analysis of the illocutionary acts in Taylor Swift's commencement speech delivered at New York University (NYU) in 2022. Illocutionary acts, a crucial component of speech acts theory, encompass the speaker's intended communicative functions, such as asserting, commanding, questioning, or expressing emotions. Taylor Swift's speech is examined in the context of illocutionary acts to uncover the underlying intentions and rhetorical strategies used in the address. Illocutionary acts refer to speech acts aimed at achieving specific communicative functions or goals. Pragmatics plays a helpful role in comprehending how speakers employ language to accomplish their communication objectives and how listeners interpret these utterances within the given context. It involves considering how speakers organize their intentions based on the individuals they are communicating with, the location, timing, and circumstances. This study analyzes the illocutionary acts performed by Taylor Swift in her Commencement speech at New York University (NYU). This study aims to identify and describe the meaning of the utterances used by Swift in her speech using qualitative methods. The results indicate that Swift utilized 94 utterances of illocutionary acts in her speech, including representative 33 utterances, expressive 32 utterances, declarative 13 utterances, directive 9 utterances, and commissive 7 utterances. Analyzing speech acts helped advance our understanding of the speaker's intentions and communicative goals. Without this understanding, communication can be hindered by misinterpretations and misunderstandings.

The ways of representing hidden meanings in English-language fiction discourse

The article attempts to justify the expediency of linguistic research’ direction that reveals the pragmatic qualities and cognitive basis of different types of implicit speech in English-language fiction discourse. Latent meanings in fiction text/discourse have repeatedly been the subject of research. The totality of implicit speech’ types and researched on the means that actualize it is identified. Referring the methods of cognitive linguistics, the pragmatic potential of speech means for the expression of the hidden meaning is illustrated by the prose English-language texts. The aim of this article was to identify the totality of the types of implicit speech and research on the means that actualize it in English-language fiction discourse. In this researching work, we analyzed such speech means of expressing implicit meanings as: a specific use of idioms, i.e., hints, additional nuances of meaning. Observing how innuendo is used can provide some insight into the speaker's goal when he or she chooses that discourse strategy. In conclusion, it is noticed that the hidden meaning, e.g., in the presence of an additional metaphorical transfer, may require a great deal of cognitive effort from the reader. We proved that the hint is characterized by a wealth of implicit potential.

Конструктивные и деструктивные стратегии и тактики протестантского дискурса

The purpose of the research paper is to find out the linguistic means of expressing communicative strategies and tactics of protestant discourse. The communicative strategy is defined as speech behavior focus to achieve speaker's goals and the communicative tactic is determined as a specific way of realizing the chosen strategy. The main strategies of protestant communication such as self-presentation, alienation, manipulation and convention are described. The typical tactics of constructive communication are advice, cooperation and integration and the representative tactics of destructive communication are the tactics of threat, guilt denial, offense, accusation and distancing. The characteristic of communicative strategies and tactics realized in multi-genre nonritual texts of protestant discourse on the material of the Russian language constitutes the scientific novelty of this work. The other types of institutional discourse were the object of previous researches. As a result, the typical range of means for expressing constructive and destructive tactics of communicative impact in protestant discourse are revealed.

Representing linguistic communicative functions in the premotor cortex.

Linguistic communication is often regarded as an action that serves a function to convey the speaker's goal to the addressee. Here, with an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study and a lesion study, we demonstrated that communicative functions are represented in the human premotor cortex. Participants read scripts involving 2 interlocutors. Each script contained a critical sentence said by the speaker with a communicative function of either making a Promise, a Request, or a Reply to the addressee's query. With various preceding contexts, the critical sentences were supposed to induce neural activities associated with communicative functions rather than specific actions literally described by these sentences. The fMRI results showed that the premotor cortex contained more information, as revealed by multivariate analyses, on communicative functions and relevant interlocutors' attitudes than the perisylvian language regions. The lesion study results showed that, relative to healthy controls, the understanding of communicative functions was impaired in patients with lesions in the premotor cortex, whereas no reliable difference was observed between the healthy controls and patients with lesions in other brain regions. These findings convergently suggest the crucial role of the premotor cortex in representing the functions of linguistic communications, supporting that linguistic communication can be seen as an action.

Acknowledging coparticipant's contribution to one's interactional goal: The multiple saying duì duì duì in Mandarin Chinese conversations

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of an interactional practice in Mandarin – the multiple saying duì duì duì (right right right). Contributing to extant researches on multiple sayings and responsive tokens, it shows that, this multiple saying is not simply an upgrade on the single duì. When using it as a third-position response, the speaker not only confirms the propositional content of the recipient's turn in the second position, but also acknowledges its contribution to the speaker's interactional goal in the first position. In terms of the contribution, the recipient has either co-completed the speaker's prior incomplete TCU by proffering exactly what the speaker has meant, or has more accurately and adequately conveyed the speaker's prior complete turn by alternatively formulating it. Simultaneously, the speaker indicates that (potential) delivery trouble in his/her prior turn has been solved, mutual understanding has been achieved and their talk can now be progressed further. This practice affords us an access into how interlocutors negotiate and sustain intersubjectivity cooperatively in conversations. It also sheds a light on how co-completions and formulations are differently responded to in Mandarin conversations, and what different implications these responses may engender.

Address of implicatures in dramatic discourse

The article analyses utterances with implicatures in the character speech in German dramatic discourse based on the play “The Money is in the Bank” by German dramatist Curth Flatow, which presents the situational type of dramatic dialogue and imitation of colloquial speech. Address of implicatures is the direction of the speaker's perlocutionary goal to convey the implicature to the addressee, depending on the level of communication. The speaker's orientation to the addressee in intending implicatures correlates with two levels of communication in dramatic discourse outside of its stage implementation: horizontal (communication of characters) and vertical (communication between the author and the reader). Depending on the communicative attitude of the speaker and the level of communication, the address of implicatures demonstrates five types. The first two types relate to horizontal communication, the third to vertical, the fourth and fifth suggest double intending of the implicature at two levels. The first type of address is the most frequent: in his or her utterance, character 1 (the speaker) conveys the implicature to the addressee / group of addressees (character 2 / characters 1, 2, 3 ...). The second type of address concerns indirect verbal communication at the level of horizontal communication: in his or her utterance, character 1 (the speaker) conveys the implicature not to the direct addressee (character 2), but to the indirect (character 3). The third type of address involves only vertical communication: the author conveys the implicature to the reader in the utterance of character 1, directed at character 2; there may be several target characters. In the case of the fourth type of addressing, a double intending of implicature occurs: character 1 (the speaker) conveys the implicature to character 2 (addressee) in his or her utterance, and at the same time the author conveys the implicature to the reader in the same utterance. The fifth type of address is also a double intending of the implicature, but with the involvement of the indirect addressee: in his or her utterance, character 1 (the speaker) conveys the implicature not to the direct addressee (character 2), but to the indirect (character 3), and at the same time the author conveys the implicature to the reader in the same utterance.

Sanctifying Microstructure in the Qur’anic Discourse: A Contextual Study

This research is an analytical analysis of Surat Al-Baqarah Verse No. 214, with an explanation of its situational context. This study aims to demonstrate the aspects of contextual analysis and its continuous horizons that are provided not only by the macro-structure of discourse, which is represented by default rules and semantics of rhetorical terms, but also by the micro-structure of discourse, which is represented by default rules and semantics of rhetorical terms. We recognize the perspectives, distinctions, and elements that are employed in lighting the discourse to impair the speaker's goals in order to achieve the eloquence of persuasion, communication, and comprehension through the micro-structure of discourse.

HÀNH VI NGÔN NGỮ TRÁCH TRONG TIẾNG VIỆT

A speech act may be used in the direct or indirect form depending on the speaker's goal and intention. Indirect speech acts can be flexibly used according to user's intentions. Some indirect speech acts are more polite than the direct ones. These are the advantages of indirect speech acts. Indirect implementation of each speech act has its own way, expressing its own meaning and values. It is also different from other speech acts, so it needs to be studied to be able to assess accurately. This study investigated 647 Vietnamese trach speech acts, including 448 indirect speech acts trach, which was found from three data sources: literary works, daily notetaking conversations, and school-lessons recording conversations. On that basis the indirect speech acts trach are classified, indicated indirect types, as well as their effects and meanings in expressing the content of trach and the attitude of user. The results of this study are expected to contribute practically to the study of Vietnamese speech acts. The data source for research and learning and are useful suggestions that can be applied in communication of the community.

Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Markers in Sign Language Imperatives.

In signed and spoken language sentences, imperative mood and the corresponding speech acts such as for instance, command, permission or advice, can be distinguished by morphosyntactic structures, but also solely by prosodic cues, which are the focus of this paper. These cues can express paralinguistic mental states or grammatical meaning, and we show that in American Sign Language (ASL), they also exhibit the function, scope, and alignment of prosodic, linguistic elements of sign languages. The production and comprehension of prosodic facial expressions and temporal patterns therefore can shed light on how cues are grammaticalized in sign languages. They can also be informative about the formal semantic and pragmatic properties of imperative types not only in ASL, but also more broadly. This paper includes three studies: one of production (Study 1) and two of comprehension (Studies 2 and 3). In Study 1, six prosodic cues are analyzed in production: temporal cues of sign and hold duration, and non-manual cues including tilts of the head, head nods, widening of the eyes, and presence of mouthings. Results of Study 1 show that neutral sentences and commands are well distinguished from each other and from other imperative speech acts via these prosodic cues alone; there is more limited differentiation among explanation, permission, and advice. The comprehension of these five speech acts is investigated in Deaf ASL signers in Study 2, and in three additional groups in Study 3: Deaf signers of German Sign Language (DGS), hearing non-signers from the United States, and hearing non-signers from Germany. Results of Studies 2 and 3 show that the ASL group performs significantly better than the other 3 groups and that all groups perform above chance for all meaning types in comprehension. Language-specific knowledge, therefore, has a significant effect on identifying imperatives based on targeted cues. Command has the most cues associated with it and is the most accurately identified imperative type across groups—indicating, we suggest, its special status as the strongest imperative in terms of addressing the speaker's goals. Our findings support the view that the cues are accessible in their content across groups, but that their language-particular combinatorial possibilities and distribution within sentences provide an advantage to ASL signers in comprehension and attest to their prosodic status.

“Rhetoric Teaching” is necessary for all of the university students?

“Rhetoric Teaching” is necessary for all of the university students?

Formulaic Sequences as a Regulatory Mechanism for Cognitive Perturbations During the Achievement of Social Goals.

This paper explores two questions central to understanding the nature of formulaic sequences: (1) What are they for? and (2) What determines how many there are? The "Communicative Impact" model draws into a single account how language is shaped by cognitive processing on the one hand and socio-interactional function on the other: Formulaic sequences play a range of coordinated roles in neutralizing unanticipated perturbations in the cognitive management of language, so the speaker's socio-interactional goals can still be achieved. One role involves compensatory actions to sustain fluency. However, these actions are themselves context-sensitive, so the balance of types of formulaic sequence will vary according to situation. The model applies equally to temporary cognitive pressure and chronic problems such as dementia and limited linguistic competency in a foreign language.

Studying ideological worldviews in political Discourse Space: Critical-cognitive advances in the analysis of conflict and coercion

My paper discusses the current nexus between spatial cognition and critical discourse analysis (CDA), assessing its strengths, limitations, and prospects in the area of political/ideological discourse studies. In the first part, I review the models of spatial cognition that have made the most significant contribution to CDA. Discussing Deictic Space Theory and Text World Theory, among others, I argue that cognitive models reveal further theoretical potential which has not been exploited yet. Focusing on how representations and ideologically charged worldviews are established, they fail to provide a pragmatic explanation of how addressees are made to establish a worldview, in the service of speaker's goals. The second part of the paper outlines Proximization Theory, a discursive model of crisis and conflict construction in political discourse. I argue that, unlike the other models, it fully captures the complex ideological positioning in political discourse space and, crucially, the dynamics of conflict between the opposing ideologies of the space.

On Tenor and its Prosodic Markers in Rhetorical Discourse

In rhetorical discourse, tenors can be formed intentionally and used as rhetorical strategies to implement the speaker's goals. The article reports on a study of the contextual category 'tenor' and its prosodic realisation in rhetorical discourse. The paper examines rhetorical, auditory and acoustic features in the samples of English academic presentations (lectures). The author argues that tenors can reflect both the relationships of the participants of a particular speech event and the relationships associated with a broader sociocultural context. Analysing tenor as a sociocultural phenomenon the author demonstrates its correlations with some specific features of British speech culture. Special attetnion is given to the role of prosody in conveying and identifying tenors. The article contains an overview of the prosodic markers of tenor: tone of voice, pitch parameters, temporal characteristics. The study of tenor and its prosodic markers contributes to a fuller understanding of the influence of contextual factors on the prosodic realisation of discourse. The observations made in the paper may be useful to develop cross-cultural communication competence and rhetorical competence of EFL students.

The TTS-driven affective embodied conversational agent EVA, based on a novel conversational-behavior generation algorithm

As a result of the convergence of different services delivered over the internet protocol, internet protocol television (IPTV) may be regarded as the one of the most widespread user interfaces accepted by a highly diverse user domain. Every generation, from children to the elderly, can use IPTV for recreation, as well as for gaining social contact and stimulating the mind. However, technological advances in digital platforms go hand in hand with the complexity of their user interfaces, and thus induce technological disinterest and technological exclusion. Therefore, interactivity and affective content presentations are, from the perspective of advanced user interfaces, two key factors in any application incorporating human-computer interaction (HCI). Furthermore, the perception and understanding of the information (meaning) conveyed is closely interlinked with visual cues and non-verbal elements that speakers generate throughout human-human dialogues. In this regard, co-verbal behavior provides information to the communicative act. It supports the speaker's communicative goal and allows for a variety of other information to be added to his/her messages, including (but not limited to) psychological states, attitudes, and personality. In the present paper, we address complexity and technological disinterest through the integration of natural, human-like multimodal output that incorporates a novel combined data- and rule-driven co-verbal behavior generator that is able to extract features from unannotated, general text. The core of the paper discusses the processes that model and synchronize non-verbal features with verbal features even when dealing with unknown context and/or limited contextual information. In addition, the proposed algorithm incorporates data-driven (speech prosody, repository of motor skills) and rule-based concepts (grammar, gesticon). The algorithm firstly classifies the communicative intent, then plans the co-verbal cues and their form within the gesture unit, generates temporally synchronized co-verbal cues, and finally realizes them in the form of human-like co-verbal movements. In this way, the information can be represented in the form of both meaningfully and temporally synchronized co-verbal cues with accompanying synthesized speech, using communication channels to which people are most accustomed.

How selective are 3-year-olds in imitating novel linguistic material?

In 3 studies we explored when 3-year-olds would imitate novel words in utterances produced by adult speakers. Child and experimenter took turns in requesting objects from a game master. The experimenter always went first and always preceded the object's familiar name with a novel adjective (e.g., "the dilsige duck"). In the first 2 experiments, we found that children were more likely to reproduce the adjective when there were 2 different instances of the same object present in the situation than when there was only 1 or when there were 2 objects of different types present. Thus, children seemed to be sensitive to the descriptive and contrastive function of the adjectives in determining which parts of the utterances to reproduce. Nonetheless, replication of even redundant material was over 50%, suggesting a strategy of somewhat blind copying. In the 3rd experiment, we found that children were less likely to reproduce a redundant adjective when the speaker indicated gesturally that he did not intend to produce it than when he clearly produced it intentionally. We distinguish insightful imitation (the copying of a speaker's goal and means when motivated by insight into why those particular means were chosen) and blind imitation (the copying of a speaker's goal and means with no awareness of why those specific means were chosen) from mimicry. We explore the roles that these modes of imitation might play in language development.

Information status relates to production, distribution, and comprehension

MacDonald's (2013) paper makes two strong contributions to the psycholinguistics literature, in my opinion. First, it calls for a serious consideration of how cognitive pressures affect production processing, which is a necessary step for the development of mechanistic theories of language use. A second major contribution of the PDC is that it provides a theoretical explanation for the body of evidence showing that language comprehension is affected by the user's experience, for example where frequent structures and words are processed more easily than less frequent structures and words. The boldest portion of this proposal is that processing constraints on production are the primary source of typological distributions, which in turn affect comprehension biases. This is exactly the kind of theoretical claim that helps the field move forward, by being clear, simple, and far-reaching. At the same time, I argue that the PDC would benefit from greater consideration of information status. Language production is not primarily the retrieval of words and structures. Instead, these activities serve the speaker's goal, which is to communicate a meaning to the addressee. Likewise, linguistic meanings consist of more than identifying who did what. An important part of communication involves linking the utterance to information in the world and the linguistic context. Information varies across dimensions such as given vs. new, and topic vs. focus (for a review see Arnold et al., 2013). Information status is critical to understanding the PDC's proposed mechanisms, for two reasons. First, it is intimately related to the memory/attention cognitive mechanisms that are central to the reasoning behind the PDC. Second, these correlations highlight an important challenge for the PDC, which is to specify the distributional patterns that comprehenders use. I will illustrate these points with evidence of how information status is related to both (1) acoustic prominence and disfluency, and (2) syntactic structure and animacy.

Influence of perspective and goals on reference production in conversation

We examined the extent to which speakers take into consideration the addressee's perspective in language production. Previous research on this process had revealed clear deficits (Horton & Keysar, Cognition 59:91-117, 1996; Wardlow Lane & Ferreira, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 34:1466-1481, 2008). Here, we evaluated a new hypothesis--that the relevance of the addressee's perspective depends on the speaker's goals. In two experiments, Korean speakers described a target object in situations in which the perspective status of a competitor object (e.g., a large plate when describing a smaller plate) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, we examined whether speakers would use scalar-modified expressions even when the competitor was hidden from the addressee. The results demonstrated that information from both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives influenced production. In Experiment 2, we examined whether utterance goals modulate this process. The results indicated that when a speaker makes a request, the addressee's perspective has a stronger influence than it does when the speaker informs the addressee. These results suggest that privileged knowledge does shape language use, but crucially, that the degree to which the addressee's perspective is considered is shaped by the relevance of the addressee's perspective to the utterance goals.