Speaker Meaning Research Articles

An Analysis of Declarative Speech Act in The Movie My Lawyer, Mr Jo: Pragmatics Approach

Pragmatics is the study of how language is used in communication. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning. This Paper entitle “ An Analysis of Declarative Speech Act in The Movie My Lawyer, Mr Jo” discussed the analysis of speech act especially Declarative based on the Searle (1969). Speech act is a part of pragmatic that studies about utterances. It is defined as action performed via utterances(Yule,1996). Classification of Speech act (Searle:1969) are Assertives; Commisives; Expressives; Directives and Declaration. In this paper the writer focus on Declaration and analysis My Lawyer,Mr Jo. The objectives of this research were first to Undrestanding Speech act and Types of Speech act. Second, to find out of Declarative Speech act in Movie My Lawyer,Mr Jo. This research the writer use descriptive qualitative method. Keywords: Pragmatics;Speech act; Classification of Speech act; Declaration; My Lawyer, Mr Jo.

Constructions as Triads of Form, Function, and Agency: An Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar Study of English Modals

The present article introduces anagentive cognitive construction grammarapproach to the analysis of English central modals. One of the premises of the new theory is that speaker meaning cannot be captured by looking at form-function relations only but through the integration of additional conceptual layers such as agency, embodiment, and argument structure construction. This theoretical turn is supported empirically by a corpus study aimed at identifying specific modal constructions in the 520 million wordCorpus of Contemporary American English. The results show that(i) English modals are reliably identifiable as constructions at a clausal level, and(ii) that, depending on the type of agency (motional or stative), modal constructions can be divided into two main categories, namelymodal agentive constructionsandmodal referential constructions. The results also support the idea that modal constructions are triadic, that is, that they display symbolic form-function relations based on iconic-indexical, and speaker-driven processes (all of which are possible thanks to the conceptualizer’s possession of the concept of objective truth). These constructions provide conceptualizers with the mental schemas necessary to construe meaning across mental spaces.

Formal Argument that Contract Meaning Depends on Linguistic Cooperation

In Pseudo-Contract and Shared Meaning Analysis, Professor Radin and I recently drew on contemporary insights into meaning, pioneered by Paul Grice, to develop a contemporary approach to contract interpretation — “shared meaning analysis” — which is adapted to modern circumstances. Part of our argument for using shared meaning analysis rested on the claim that when interpreting contracts, “the primary search is for a common meaning of the parties” — as the Restatement (Second) of Contracts puts the point. When identifying this common meaning, we argued that courts and parties implicitly rely on presuppositions of linguistic cooperation in ways that often go unrecognized. We suggested that the dependence of contract meaning on linguistic cooperation is pervasive and practically ineliminable. But some tests for contract interpretation, which are repeated more from habit than careful thought, have begun to delink contract meaning from the common meaning of the parties. This brief essay separates out and develops a detailed formal argument for the proposition that contract meaning depends on linguistic cooperation. Following Grice, I define “sentence meaning” as the meaning that a competent speaker of a language would attribute to a sentence independent of any knowledge of its occasion of use. I define “speaker meaning” as the meaning that a speaker intends to convey to another person within an interpersonal conversation, which often depends upon both parties relying on implicit presuppositions of linguistic cooperation. Building on these distinctions (but also departing from both in some ways), Professor Radin and I have offered a contemporary definition of the “shared meaning” of a contract. It is the meaning that the parties produced and actually agreed to based on the presupposition that both were using language cooperatively to contract. The purpose of this essay is to establish just how pervasive and practically ineliminable the presupposition of linguistic cooperation is to derive pervasive and uncontroversial aspects of contract meaning. Neither contemporary “objective” nor long-rejected “subjective” approaches to interpretation are getting contract interpretation perfectly right in some contemporary settings.

Variation in foreign accent identification

ABSTRACTThis study investigates variation in listeners’ accuracy in accent identification of native and non-native speakers of English. Thirty native speakers of New Zealand (NZ) English completed a free identification task with stimuli extracted from naturalistic conversations of several speakers from three native and two non-native English language backgrounds (German, Korean, New Zealand English, Southern British English, and Standard American English). The listeners were found to be generally accurate at identifying native English varieties, most often confusing them with other native accents (average accuracy over 75%). They were much less accurate at identifying the provenance of German first language speakers (mean = 13%) and even less so of Korean ones (mean = 4.7%), despite both of these language groups being two of the largest ones in NZ. This difference is explained through a step-wise process of accent identification whereby the speaker is first categorised as a native or non-native speaker; their broad regional provenance is identified next, with more specific identifications coming last, with potential reliance on both linguistic and social knowledge.

PARADIGMA ANALISIS WACANA DALAM MEMAHAMI TEKS DAN KONTEKS UNTUK MENINGKATKAN KEMAMPUAN MEMBACA PEMAHAMAN

Understanding the contents of the reading is achieved when appropriate paradigm of discourse analysis is used. Therefore, the mastery of the discourse analysis paradigm is very important to be mastered by the reader in order to understand the text and context of the discourse. Basically, there are three paradigms in discourse analysis, namely positivism-empirical (commonly called positivism), constructivism, and critical paradigm. Description about the discourse analysis paradigm is expected to be useful for students and teachers / lecturers who conduct study discourse analysis so that it can facilitate them in conducting discourse analysis by departing from one of these paradigms. Based on the view of the formalist (positivism-empirical paradigm), it is understandable that examining a discourse in principle is to examine the potential relationship between one sentence and another in relation to the syntax and semantics. From the functionalist's point of view (constructivism paradigm), discourse analysis is attempted as an analysis to uncover the meaning and meaning behind the discourse. Discourse analysis is an effort to reveal the hidden intent of the subject which expresses a statement by placing itself in the speaker's position with an interpretation that follows the structure of the speaker's meaning. Meanwhile, according to the critical paradigm, discourse is not understood solely as a study of language, although in the end, discourse analysis does use the language in the text to be analyzed. However, the language analyzed according to the paradigm of dialectical analysis is somewhat different from the study of language in the traditional linguistic sense. The language analyzed is not merely a description of the language aspect, but also relates it to the context. Keywords: paradigm, discourse analysis, text and context, reading

Speaker meaning, utterance meaning and radical interpretation in Davidson’s ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’

Speaker meaning, utterance meaning and radical interpretation in Davidson’s ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’

Utterance content, speaker’s intentions and linguistic liability

According to contextualists, communication has to do with pragmatically adjusted content, not with conventional meaning. This pragmatic content is sometimes identified with speaker meaning or with the thought the speaker intends to express. I will argue that given the sociolinguistic role of utterance content—the fact it provides reasons for action, liabilities and entitlements—locutionary content should not be modelled as a variety of speaker meaning.

The Formal and the Relevant: modal underspecification and pragmatic disambiguation

The aim of this work is to propose and illustrate a semantic-pragmatic approach to symbouletic modality. To do so, Kratzer’s (1981, 1991, 2012) framework of analysis for natural language modality is adopted, in which a modal is doubly relative to contextual information via a modal base and an ordering source. Yanovich’s (2013a, 2013b) symbouletic modality is the object of analysis, due to its inherently performative nature and, considering it is quite new, still widely uncharted territory. Unlike Russian, Brazilian Portuguese does not seem to have a modal auxiliary that is exclusively symbouletic, thus the underspecification of ‘ dever ’ (roughly, ‘must’ or sometimes ‘should’) must be dealt with in order to obtain a successful final symbouletic reading, ranking weaker than directives yet stronger than assertions in terms of its performative force. The same modal verb ‘ dever ’ seems to be able to be standardly symbouletic when uttered with unmarked prosody, but when uttered with marked prosody, it appears to collapse with directives, changing the performative force and yielding ORDER instead of ADVICE. In order to explain how context determine the final modal reading, we assume Sperber and Wilson's (1986/1995, 2003) relevance theory, which aims to explain how the hearer process an utterance in order to understand the speaker's meaning. The conceptual-procedural distinction, the relevant-theoretic comprehension procedure and the constructions of ad hoc concepts are explored in order to explain why prosodic inputs change the performative force. In this account, prosody encodes a procedural meaning which will constrain the proposition expressed, narrowing the performative force and rendering an ad hoc concept. Keywords: Modality; Semantics; Pragmatics.

Seeking Speaker Meaning in the Archaeological Record

Communication in archaeological artifacts is usually understood in terms of signs or signals, fleshed out under many guises. The notions of signs or signals that archaeologists employ often draw from Saussurean or Peircean semiotic theories from philosophy and linguistics. In this article I consider the consequences of whether we understand archaeological signals in terms of the Saussurean or Peircean framework, and highlight the fact that archaeologists have not always been precise in their use of relevant philosophical machinery. I will argue further that interpretation of archaeological artifacts should be supplemented by a notion of meaning that goes beyond signals and leads us to understand meaning in terms of a specific creator’s communicative intention—which may deviate from how some signal was ordinarily used. This is what I call speaker meaning, drawing from philosophy of language. I then present specific examples from Egypt circa 1300 BC and 3500 BC and from France circa 12,000 BC that I argue are best treated with the proposed notion of speaker meaning. In the course of this discussion I consider questions that arise for current accounts of signals and metaphor in archaeology. Finally, I conclude by considering how my proposal relates to our understanding of decoration and style, humor, the advent of spoken language, and the nature of art.

It's a Full Moon Tonight: Speaker Meaning and the Interpretation and Construction of Executive Orders (with Related Reflections on Legislative Speaker Meaning)

This Article explores the interpretation and construction of executive orders using as examples President Trump’s two executive orders captioned “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” (the “Two Executive Orders”). President Trump issued the Two Executive Orders in the context of (among other things) Candidate Trump’s statements such as: “Islam hates us,” and “[W]e can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred.” President Trump subsequently provided further context including his tweet about the second of his Two Executive Orders: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call [the second of the Two Executive Orders] whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” Although President Trump replaced the first of the Two Executive Orders with the second one and although the Supreme Court by orders dated October 10, 2017 and October 24, 2017, vacated and remanded litigation involving the second order on grounds of mootness, the Two Executive Orders remain highly instructive for those who would understand the interpretation and construction of executive orders. This article therefore examines in detail the original speaker's (i.e., President Trump's) intended meaning and effect of the Two Executive Orders. It performs such examination using insights from the semiotic subfield of pragmatics, a semiotic subfield which explores how real-world people actually use, interpret, and construe language in various real-world contexts (including contexts where the issuer of the Two Executive Orders himself has claimed that “Islam hates us” and has tweeted “TRAVEL BAN!”). Using such insights of pragmatics, this Article also explores why reasonable judges thoroughly versed in legal theory, legal practice, and pragmatics should conclude that President Trump unlawfully targeted Muslims in the Two Executive Orders. This Article, among other things, also questions the sensibility of such notions as “facial legitimacy” to the extent such notions suggest text has meaning apart from context.

The interaction of the Maxim of Quality and face concerns: An experimental approach using the vignette technique

Face (Goffman, 1955, 1959, 1967), the public self-image that individuals project in interaction, has been proposed (Brown and Levinson, 1978/1987) as a social psychological principle that motivates the departure from rational (Gricean) communication and conversational maxims. Although experimental research has provided evidence in favor of this explanation (e.g., Holtgraves, 1986, 1992, 1994, 1998; Holtgraves and Yang, 1990, 1992; Bonnefon and Villejoubert, 2006; Bonnefon et al., 2009), more recent critiques (Tracy and Baratz, 1994; Spencer-Oatey, 2009) have pointed toward a more nuanced understanding of face by arguing that face concerns can be relativized. Taking on board these critiques, the present study sought to examine flouts of the Maxim of Quality and relativized face concerns, and their effect on speaker meaning. Results of the experiment reported here revealed that flouts of Quality produced inferences in the predicted direction (friendly, teasing readings) but perception of aspects of speaker meaning was also affected as a function of (strong or minimal) face sensitivities. This study has implications for the ways that the construction of affiliative inferences may occur. It is also suggested that the inferential process by which speaker meaning is arrived at may be mediated by reasoning about emotional consequences on the listener. Potential implications for social psychology and research on irony are also discussed.

But seriously: On conversational humour and (un)truthfulness

This paper addresses a thorny theoretical problem concerning the workings of conversational humour, which is frequently seen as a special mode/frame of communication but, simultaneously, as a vehicle for communicating meanings outside this frame. The first aim is to tease out the different terms prevalent in humour studies that attempt to capture this distinction (such as playfulness, jocularity, or non-seriousness). Second, a proposal is made in favour of the concept of (un)truthfulness, approached from a neo-Gricean perspective, as a notion that can help elucidate this twofold problem better, giving a full spectrum of humour manifestations without causing any terminological contradictions. Grice's first maxim of Quality is thus invoked to account for the main categories of humour distinguished here: autotelic humour (which resides in opting out of this maxim) and speaker-meaning-telic humour (which communicates truthful or covertly untruthful speaker meaning by means of fulfilment, flouting or violation of this maxim and the other ones as well). Speaker meaning may arise as what is said (as a result of maxim fulfilment) and/or implicature (as a consequence of maxim flouting), and both levels of meaning may recruit maxim violations, which lead to deception. This article contributes to the debate on the position of humour in the Gricean framework.

Neural correlates of fine-grained meaning distinctions: An fMRI investigation of scalar quantifiers.

Communication involves successfully deriving a speaker's meaning beyond the literal expression. Using fMRI, it was investigated how the listener's brain realizes distinctions between enrichment-based meanings and literal semantic meanings. The neural patterns of the Mandarin scalar quantifier you-de (similar to some in English) which implies the meanings not all and not most via scalar enrichment, with the specific quantifier shao-shu-de (similar to less than half in English) which lexico-semantically encodes the meanings not all and not most, were compared. Listeners heard sentences using either quantifier, paired with pictures in which either less than half, more than half, or all of the people depicted in the picture were doing the described activity; thus, the conditions included both implicature-based and semantics-based picture-sentence mismatches. Imaging results showed bilateral ventral IFG was activated for both kinds of mismatch, whereas basal ganglia and left dorsal IFG were activated uniquely for implicature-based mismatch. These findings suggest that resolving conflicts involving inferential aspects of meaning employs different neural mechanisms than the processing based on literal semantic meaning, and that the dorsal prefrontal/basal ganglia pathway makes a contribution to implicature-based interpretation. Furthermore, within the implicature-based conditions, different neural generators were implicated in the processing of strong implicature mismatch (you-de in the context of a picture in which "all" would have been true) and weak implicature mismatch (you-de in the context of a picture in which "most" would have been true), which may have important implications for theories of pragmatic comprehension. Hum Brain Mapp 38:3848-3864, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Irony as a Way of Life?Truth and Irony: Philosophical Meditations on Erasmus, Terence J.Martin, Catholic University of America Press, 2015 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐2809‐9), xii + 259 pp., hb $65A Case for Irony, JonathanLear, Harvard University Press, 2011 (ISBN 978‐0‐6744‐1688‐8), xiv + 210 pp., pb £15.95

AbstractAs a figure of speech for which a speaker's meaning is taken to be the opposite of what she says, irony may not ordinarily be linked to truthfulness. Two recent books by Terence J. Martin and Jonathan Lear nonetheless mount convincing cases for a more complex, philosophical understanding of irony as non‐cynical, and as having a constructive role to play in the truthful and well‐lived life. Taking Erasmus, and Socrates and Kierkegaard as their main sources respectively, both authors argue that the experience of irony allows for a specific form of truthfulness to emerge about who we are as finite beings. This review essay leads with an analysis of the argument developed in defence of this point in Martin's book on Erasmus, before bringing Lear into the conversation in order to reveal shortcomings in Martin's theorisation of irony. This is followed by a critical response to Lear's own account, which allows for further reflection on the relation between irony, religion, and theology in his and Martin's main sources.

THE EFFECTS OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION ON THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH FRICATIVE CONSONANTS OF INDONESIAN EFL LEARNERS

INTRODUCTION:(Gimson, 1985a) reveals that each of us uses infinitive number of different speech sounds when we speak English. Gimson therefore argues that it is true to say that it is difficult to produce two sounds which are precisely identical from the point of view of instrumental measurement: two utterances by the same person of the word 'cat' may well show quite marked differences when measured instrumentally.(Weda, 1998) states that as a foreign language, English presents great difficulties with regard to its pronunciation. The pronunciation of English poses many problems of a different kind from those which we face when we learn our mother tongue (first language). (Gimson A. , 1987) points out that, before we try to produce sounds which we are new to us, it is therefore essential that we should perceive the differences between the sounds in the new language, and between the new sounds and those of our own languages with which we have become so familiar. (Weda, 2009) reports from his study that Indonesian university students had difficulties in identifying the stress for 3 to 7 syllable words under the umbrella of phonology. (Weda, 2005) focused on studying stress because Indonesian speakers of English tend to stress words randomly and this phenomenon tends to produce incorrect pronunciation which will give negative effect in maintaing communication with others, especially for the native speakers of English. (Weda, 2014) emphasizes that stress studies under the umbrella of phonology needs serious attention, because there can be unsuitable stress used in communication that may lead to misunderstanding or miscommunication. Weda adds that the accuracy of acceptability of stress in utterances will give a clear signal to the listeners, and improve the quality of speakers' utterances.The study by (Brown, 2000) sought to experimentaly investigate how the grammars of Japanese speakers, Korean speakers, and Mandarin Chinese speakers affect their acquisition of English contrasts and whether, given the necessary conditions, novel segmental representations can be constructed. Brown found that the acquisition of a second language (L2) is clearly somehow different from that of a first language (L1): adult second language learners rarely (if ever) achieve the same native competence that children do learning their first language and, conversely, children never experience the degree of that L2 learners do.Language is unique, because the speaker of language A sometimes meets difficulties in uttering the sounds of Language B but the speaker of language B can produce the sounds of language A easily. This is because, the speaker B is familiar with the sound in his mother tongue, as an example is Indonesian speakers of English can produce [ņ] sound at the beginning of a word easily, because this sound can occur at the beginning of Indonesian language, for example at the word 'yambek and iyilu' while in English 'ņ' sound is absent at the beginning of a word and the English speaker find difficulties to pronoun the sound in at the beginning of a word. (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2007) gave good example in keeping with this statement. They examplify that a sound such [ņ] is difficult for an English speaker to pronounce at the beginning of a word but easy for a Vietnamese speaker means that there is no general notion of difficulty of articulation that can explain all of the sound patterns of particular language. For some Buginese speakers in pronouncing plosive /p/, they tend to pronounce labiodental /f/, either in pronouncing Indonesian words, English words, and other languages.Second language (L2) or Foreign Langauge (FL) leaners sometimes meet difficulties in pronouncing new words in an L2 or FL. In adult language learning, the attempt to master the phonological subtleties of another language can become the source of great for teacher and student alike when the reality of a learner's target language production does not meet established goals (Reeder, 1997). …

Coordinating Meaning: Contractual Promises, Common Knowledge, and Coordination in Speaker Meaning

I begin with Contract Law’s objective intent test for interpretation: a person’s words and actions constitute a promise do to something if a reasonable person in the circumstances would interpret them as a promise to do that thing. The test finds promises where, outside the legal context, we would not. What justifies proceeding this way? The answer I offer combines three ideas. The first is a Gricean analysis of speaker meaning. For simplicity, I focus entirely on meaning, not on promising (or other types of speech act), so I fall short of explaining the Objective Intent Test’s attribution of promises, but it is easy to extend the analysis to do so. The second idea concerns coordination. Suppose a speaker S means that p for an audience A. S and A typically seek to coordinate their actions so that A realizes that that S means that p, as I will argue below. I will model this coordination using a well-known game from game theory, the assurance game. The third idea is that common knowledge plays a key role in facilitating coordination. Common knowledge is “the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. As Thomas Kyle et al. observe in their seminal study, “The Psychology of Common Knowledge,” “[a]ctors coordinate when they have evidence for common knowledge, and refrain from coordinating when they do not.” In the case of speaker meaning, the relevant, coordination-facilitating common knowledge is the common knowledge between S and A that S means that P. This approach provides a satisfying perspective on the Objective Intent Test. It does by developing a general model of speaking meaning. That model illuminates pragmatics both inside and outside legal contexts. Pragmatics is a diverse and complex field offering a variety of proposals and approaches, but they exhibit common, recurring themes — among them: coordination, common knowledge, and speaker meaning. I offer the assurance game model as a potentially useful perspective that can reveal commonalities in otherwise diverse research programs and suggest new and fruitful lines of inquiry.

A Minimal Parsimonious Model of Pragmatic Comprehension

Computational accounts of how we infer what a speaker means by what she says have recently spurred significant progress in our understanding of linguistic pragmatics. These models, motivated by general assumptions about human cognition, have been shown to account for a wide range of phenomena in pragmatic comprehension. Despite their successes, these models incorporate a number of structures and assumptions that diminish their parsimony as well as their consistency with the complex cognitive features of human communication. In this paper, I demonstrate these weaknesses through a number of empirical test cases and theoretical arguments. I then propose an alternative computational modeling approach, derived from the popular Rational Speech Act (RSA) theory, that makes fewer and simpler assumptions about pragmatic comprehension and accounts for a wide range of pragmatic phenomena without requiring ad hoc modifications or theoretically unmotivated assumptions. This Speaker Centric Inference Model of Pragmatic Interpretation (SCIMPI) not only provides the basis for a simple and parsimonious account of human pragmatic inference, but suggests that formal linguistic pragmatics should be practiced by incrementally constructing theory through the introduction of minimal and motivated components.

Expanding to the peripheries: A corpus-based study of the development of the Japanese discourse marker toiuka

Many languages have common or stock phrases that are used when the speaker is unsure about how to say a certain thing, as with such English expressions as how should I put it? and something like X. In conversation, one strategy to avoid turning into a silence is to give a tentative choice with the hope that the addressee will understand the speaker's meaning. The Japanese discourse marker toiuka started as such a parenthetical expression that appears in mid-sentence and indicates the speaker's difficulty in lexical choice. It subsequently shifted to the utterance-initial and -final positions and gained new uses. The present article examines the diachronic development of this expression, using data from the National Diet Minutes Corpus [1], the Ninjobon ‘Love Story Books’ Corpus [2], and the Taiyo ‘Sun Magazine’ Corpus [3]. We keep track of the pragmatic-semantic and syntactic patterns over time quantitatively and show from a usage-based approach how this gradual process occurred.

The Open Mind: A Phenomenology

What does it mean to keep an “open mind”? In casual conversation it’s a popular phrase with enough common sense to negate much need for debate about what the speaker means. Someone with an open mind might be considered considerate, equanimous, empathetic, a good listener, curious, or flexible in opinion. In Western culture an open-minded person might be receptive to new ideas, possibilities, and interpretations, suggesting that they successfully maintain an engaged yet dynamic mental relationship to various subjects or challenges. Yet in science’s nascent study of consciousness, the notion of a mind “opening” is complicated by the field’s inability to clearly articulate what a mind is, let alone how, or into what, it might open. It is the purpose of this research to present the biological significance of “open-mindedness” in order to discuss possible phe-nomenological implications pertaining to neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). In his seminal book The Open Work, Umberto Eco describes “openness” as a phenomenon of conscious organization that “locates the infinite at the very core of the finite,” and “invites us to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility.” Utilizing the methods of MDA analysis, my critical phenomenological inquiry extends Eco’s lens of cultural semiotics into quantum biology to provide key insights for understanding the aesthetic role of field dynamics in qualia physics—as interpretive events (i.e., watching a film, tasting a dessert, or drawing). In particular, pairing Eco’s semiotic analyses of openness with Hameroff and Penrose’s OR Theory concerning cognitive qualia-producing architectures such as microtubules, raises how sensations (i.e., interpretive events) between organisms and the ZPF are—as Antero Alli conceives—absorbed, integrated, and transmitted through quantum SED information states proposed by Joachim Keppler. Therefore, we can say that living systems are those systems that have adapted their material capabilities (including fundamental principles of self-organization and complexity in common cognitive architectures like awareness and attention) to perceive and interpret coherently. That is to say—biology has evolved to make meaning through its very aliveness. Our conscious ability to open our minds in order to interpret and communicate our sensations, thoughts, and complete experiences, therefore reveals a radically multidimensional bio-geometry and biolinguistics based on a phenomenological field dynamics Eco’s work constructs. Via an aesthetic information theory, Eco describes as, “a practical level of poetics that acts as programmatic projects for creation.” The writings of Rumi, Husserl, Dewey, Emerson, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and others confer depth to the emergent mechanics of perception found throughout biotic systems. Eco’s ideas thereby provoke discourse on the role of openness within recent theoretical works by Jeremy England, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Robert Lanza, Deepak Chopra, Ervin Laszlo, Giulio Tononi, Stuart Kauffman, Walter J. Freeman, Robin Carhart-Harris, Mark P. Mattson, Robert R McCrae, Selen Atasoy, Katherine Peil, Terence Deacon, and David Chalmers. Unlike models of consciousness that arise from closed, local computation, I argue that the phenomenon of open mindedness unifies cultural and scientific concepts of consciousness as life’s integrative force.

Explicit and Emergent Mechanisms of Information Status.

It is well established that language production and comprehension are influenced by information status, for example, whether information is given, new, topical, or predictable, and many scholars suggest that an important component of information status is keeping track of what information is in common ground (i.e., what is shared), and what is not. Information status affects both speakers' choices (e.g., word order, pronoun use, prosodic prominence) and how listeners interpret the speaker's meaning (e.g., Chafe, 1994; Prince, 1981). Although there is a wealth of scholarly work on information status (for a review, see Arnold, Kaiser, Kahn, & Kim, 2013), there is no consensus on the mechanisms by which it is used, and in fact relatively little discussion of the underlying representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms. Moreover, a major challenge to understanding information status is that its effects are notoriously variable. This study considers existing proposals about information status, focusing on two questions: (a) how is it represented; and (b) by what mechanisms is it used? I propose that it is important to consider whether representations and mechanisms can be classified as either explicit or emergent. Based on a review of existing evidence, I argue that information status representations are most likely emergent, but the mechanisms by which they are used are both explicit and emergent. This review provides one of the first considerations of information status processing across multiple domains.