Theory Of Language Use Research Articles

How to Do Things with Literature: Blasphemous Speech Acts, Satanic Intentions, and the Uncommunicativeness of Verses

Literature has at times been theorized in terms of a message passing from author to reader, and this has often been done by reference to general theories of language use: the work is the vehicle of intentions that are realized (or not) in the reader's responses; the work is a “speech act” that operates on the reader and causes his or her responses. Although this article argues that such theorizations mistake the role of communication in literature, it suggests that they nonetheless reflect prevalent ways of talking about literary texts, which should be investigated as tactically useful techniques employed in discourse between readers (and nonreaders) of those texts. Drawing on the work of a range of thinkers, notably Quentin Skinner and Jerome McGann, this article then proposes an alternative application of the concepts of authorial intention and speech act to the genesis of literary works. This is followed by a study of early contributions to the public controversy over The Satanic Verses, in which Lena Jayyusi's analysis of moral action descriptions is used to draw attention to commentators' ideological attempts to structure this novel as a speech-like action carried out by its author Salman Rushdie.

Overhearing Single and Multiple Perspectives

In 2 spontaneous speech experiments, this study found that multiple perspectives improved overhearers' abilities to select abstract shapes from an array, although single-perspective descriptions were more detailed. Prior findings that overhearers performed better when listening in on dialogues (Fox Tree, 1999) can best be understood as an advantage of the multiple-perspective descriptions that arise out of the entrainment process. Results support the collaborative theory of language use and suggest that vicarious learners would do better listening in on talk containing multiple perspectives than talk containing a single perspective.

Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Conversation

Technologies that electronically mediate conversation, such as text-based chat or desktop video conferencing, draw on theories of human−human interaction to make predictions about the effects of design decisions. This lecture reviews the theory that has been most influential in this area: Clark's theory of language use. The key concept in Clark's theory is that of common ground. Language is viewed as a collaborative activity that uses existing common ground to develop further common ground and, hence, to communicate efficiently. The theory (a) defines different kinds of common ground, (b) formalizes the notion of collaborative activity as a “joint action,” and (c) describes the processes by which common ground is developed through joint action. Chapter 1 explains why a purely cognitive model of communication is not enough and what is meant by the phrase “collaborative activity.” Chapter 2 introduces the idea of common ground and how it is used in language through an example of two people conversing over a video link. Chapter 3 indicates where the interested reader can find out about the antecedents to Clark's theory. Chapter 4 sets out the fundamental concepts in Clark's theory. Chapter 5 uses five published case studies of electronically mediated communication to illustrate the value of the theory. These include studies of a computer-supported meeting room (Cognoter), a video tunnel that supports gaze awareness, video conferencing in medical consultation, and text chat.

Conversational semantics sustained by commitments

We propose an operational model that combines message meaning and conversational structure in one comprehensive approach. Our long-term research goal is to lay down principles uniting message meaning and conversational structure while providing an operational foundation that could be implemented in open computer systems. In this paper we explore our advances in one aspect of meaning that in theories of language use is known as "signal meaning", and propose a layered model in which the meaning of messages can be defined according to their fitness to advance the state of joint activities. Messages in our model are defined in terms of social commitments, which have been shown to entice conversational structure.

Frame-Shifting in Humor and Irony

Coulson's (2001) analysis of humor as "frame-shifting" is extended to irony and compared to other current theories of humor and irony, including Giora's (2003) graded salience model. It is argued that the effects of humor and irony often depend on a subversive relation between the initial and alternative frames, which adds to both cognitive and social meaning; understanding these effects requires consideration of the expansion of common ground (Clark, 1996) and relevance effects (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) triggered by the shift from a culturally licensed to a subversive frame. Reanalysis of several examples from recent studies in the light of these approaches shows that humor and irony, like other forms of figurative language, can serve complex communicative, social, and cognitive objectives that justify according them a central place in communication-oriented theories of language use.

Establishing conventional communication systems: Is common knowledge necessary?

AbstractHow do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by‐product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi‐agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system‐level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed.

Establishing conventional communication systems: Is common knowledge necessary?

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by-product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi-agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system-level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed.

Hearing only one side of normal and mobile phone conversations

Mobile (cell) phone conversations are commonly perceived as annoying when conducted in a public space. An experiment is described that demonstrates one factor contributing to this phenomenon: hearing only one side of a conversation makes it more noticeable and intrusive. Two actors repeatedly staged the same conversation under three conditions: cell phone; normal, co-present both audible, and co-present only one audible. After the staged conversation, which took place on a train, a third person obtained verbal ratings from members of the travelling public. As in a previous experiment published in this journal, the cell phone conversation was rated as more noticeable and intrusive than the normal co-present both audible conversation. Critically, a new experimental condition, co-present one-audible, in which both actors were present but only one side of the conversation was heard, produced ratings equivalent to the cell phone condition. This ‘need-to-listen’ effect is discussed with regard to implications for design and theories of language use.

Toward a Taxonomy of a Set of Discourse Markers in Dialog: A Theoretical and Computational Linguistic Account

Discourse markers are verbal and nonverbal devices that mark transition points in communication. They presumably facilitate the construction of a mental representation of the events described by the discourse. A taxonomy of these relational markers is one important beginning in investigations of language use. Although several taxonomies of coherence relations have been proposed for monolog, only a few have been proposed for dialog. This article argues that discourse markers are important in language use because they operate at different levels of the dialog. What these levels are and how markers function is discussed by amalgamating 2 leading theories of language use. Based on this theory, a taxonomy of between-turn coherence relations in dialog is presented and several issues that arise out of constructing such a taxonomy are discussed. By sampling a large number of discourse markers from a corpus and substituting each marker for all other markers, this extensive substitution test could determine whether hyponymous, hypernymous, and synonymous relations existed between the markers from this corpus of dialogs. Evidence is presented for clustering this set of discourse markers into four categories: direction, polarity, acknowledgment, and emphatics.

From Data to Speech. Language Generation in Context

People perform speech acts when they use language. Thus typically when a person employs a language, a central question is what speech act(s) did he or she intend to perform. Those which are illocutionary are particularly informative in answering this question. One reason I will show is that they have the following essential characteristic: a use of language that results in their performance also results in the justified belief that the speaker intended the performance. A theory of language use must explain how an audience arrives at what action(s) a speaker intended to perform. Since illocutionary speech acts have the above characteristic, an analysis of what constitutes this kind of action is a significant component of the theory. My purpose is to contribute to this analysis.

AAC Performance and Usability Issues: The Effect of AAC Technology on the Communicative Process

In this article, Clark's theory of language use is applied to the study of conversations of augmented speakers and their addressees. Discussion focuses on how shared meaning—called common ground—is achieved, the process of grounding utterances under real-time constraints, and how the media characteristics of devices affect the grounding process. A joint action analysis of grounding will be applied to examples of word-board and Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA)-mediated conversations to show how participants organize their talk around specific media constraints to conduct their conversations and solve communication problems. The authors argue that this model of device-mediated communication performance, or some variety of it, has the potential to reconcile many of the individual research findings in this field within a single explanatory framework. If successful, this approach could be used to evaluate future research with an empirically-based model of communication performance.

Performing illocutionary speech acts: an analysis

People perform speech acts when they use language. Thus typically when a person employs a language, a central question is what speech act(s) did he or she intend to perform. Those which are illocutionary are particularly informative in answering this question. One reason I will show is that they have the following essential characteristic: a use of language that results in their performance also results in the justified belief that the speaker intended the performance. A theory of language use must explain how an audience arrives at what action(s) a speaker intended to perform. Since illocutionary speech acts have the above characteristic, an analysis of what constitutes this kind of action is a significant component of the theory. My purpose is to contribute to this analysis.

On relevance again: From philosophy of language across ‘pragmatics and power’ to global relevance

This paper, largely motivated by Harris (1995), revisits the issue of the Cooperative Principle and, in particular, relevance. I would, firstly, like to note that even before the emergence of empirical pragmatics and critical discourse analysis there had been raised, albeit within a philosophical perspective, some questions relating to language and power and the universality across discourses of the CP. Secondly, I would like to draw attention to the pervasive nature of the maxim of relevance, which, however, needs to be seen at a global level as a forceful social parameter governing linguistic communication or ‘transaction’ and as contingent on typifications of social situations described in terms of cognitive knowledge structures. It is claimed that, just as language is firmly placed within structured social domains or events, so too linguistic behaviour within them is structured and largely predictable as enjoined by the structure of those events and domains, represented in our conceptual world. The paper argues for the postulation of a socially determined supermaxim of Global Relevance, embedded within the actional structure of representations of events. As a consequence, a more complete account of what has been called the Cooperative Principle has to lie at the intersection of a cognitive theory and a social theory of language use.

Pragmatics in teacher education for nonnative‐speaking teachers: A consciousness‐raising approach

Despite a heavy emphasis on pragmatics since the advent of communicative language teaching some 20 years ago, trainers of nonnative‐speaking (NNS) language teachers who wish to incorporate pragmatics in their teacher training programmes still find little practical help from existing research. While research in pragmatics offers a number of potential candidates for the construction of theoretical frameworks for language use and the definition of core concepts such as pragmatic competence, we still lack a coherent theory of language use and a comprehensive and reliable account of what constitutes pragmatic competence. The result of this is that the prevailing approach to developing pragmatic competence in the classroom is based largely on native‐speaker (NS) intuitions concerning their own language use. Given this state of affairs, of particular interest in the teaching of language use is the education of NNS teachers. This paper reviews some of the problems relevant to the teaching of language use and discusses pragmatic consciousness‐raising (FCR) as one alternative in teacher education for dealing with pragmatics in the classroom.

The Illusory Transparency of Intention: Linguistic Perspective Taking in Text

Subjects read scenarios where a speaker made a comment that, depending on information that was privileged to the subjects, could have been interpreted as sarcastic or not sarcastic. Their task was to take the perspective of an uninformed addressee and determine whether he or she would perceive sarcasm. Overall, when subjects believed that the speaker was actually being sarcastic they were more likely to attribute the perception of sarcasm to the addressee - even when the message was conveyed in writing and could not have involved disambiguating cues such as intonation. Data from four different experiments suggest that readers do use information that is perspective-irrelevant and thus pose a problem for theories of language use that assume readers only use "relevant" information.

Synoptic and dynamic analyses of classroom discourse

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between teachers’ theories of language and learning and the nature of classroom discourse. Through analysis of data collected from two year 3 classes, it is argued that there are three components functioning simultaneously in all lessons. These are the interpersonal, the content and the metalanguage components. The focus of the paper is on how the content and the metalanguage components are realized in the classroom discourse, and on the educational implications of the metalanguage component in particular. It is suggested that the quality of the metalanguage component has an impact on the overall quality of the language education program and that this impact derives from an appropriate theory of language use.

Language and psychotherapy

A rationale is presented for taking our knowledge of language use as a source of “technologies” for investigating the process of psychotherapy. This rationale involves showing that specific aspects of the philosophical turn toward language as a new methodology for understanding subjectivity and sociality are integral to understanding key functions of language in psychotherapy. A top-down model of methodological decisions/tasks facing researchers who adopt this “linguistic turn” in process investigations is sketched. The model is intended to stress that (a) all descriptions and/or interpretations of language in psychotherapy are theory-laden; (b) the choice of scoring units, classification categories, data descriptions, and explanatory formalisms should be derived from the rationale linking theories of process to theories of language use; and (c) that such methodological choices structure and thus partly create the language phenomena subsequently explained. The top-down model of process investigations is used to review the extant studies of language in psychotherapy. It is concluded that little progress has been made in addressing the key theoretical and methodological issues in this area of research.

What makes some indirect speech acts conventional?

Indirect requests can be made using a variety of sentence forms, such as I would like …, Can you … ?, Will you … ?, May I … ?, etc. Previous research has shown that these sentence forms are not equally appropriate for all social situations. The purpose of this paper is to show exactly what it is about a particular social context that makes some indirect requests conventional and others not. The hypothesis explored was that speakers formulate their requests to anticipate the potential obstacles (e.g., ability, willingness, possession of the object desired, etc.) which hinder addresses in complying with requests, and that comprehension for these requests depend on how well speakers do this. The results of the first two studies indicated that subjects strongly prefer to state their requests in different situations to best specify the obstacles present for the addressees. Experiment 3 showed that specifying the potential obstacle to compliance in indirect requests influences the speed with which people interpret these utterances. The implications of these findings for theories of language use and interpretation are discussed.

The spontaneity of media interviews

The aimof this study is to show that, for effective communication in interviews, media professionals sometimes speak spontaneously instead of reading their questions. The research question arises from the incompatibility of ideal delivery, on the one hand, and the concept of spontaneity as hesitant and therefore defective, on the other. In a 2×2(speakersxtasks) within-subject design, readings and interviews of prominent American TV network anchormen (W. Cronkite and D. Rather) are compared in terms of temporal and hesitation variables. The results indicate differences between the two types of speaking in pause duration, variance of articulation rate per phrase-length unit, occurrence of pauses at various syntactic positions, the relationship between pause duration and pause position, and occurrence of vocal hesitations (filled pauses, repeats, and false starts). The findings are interpreted in terms of a neglected but basic concept required for any theory of language use—communicative intent.

On the psychological reality of pragmatics

A major way of putting a theory of language use to a test is to see whether it is compatible with some background, relatively established psychological theory of language. In the present paper we investigate the compatibility of Fodor's framework, as presented in his ‘The Modularity of Mind’, with theories of deixis, presupposition, force, performatives, implicatures and politeness principles. Within each of these areas some insights are gained, by the study of compatibility, difficulties are discovered and suggestions are made for obviating them. Some light is shed on the very nature of pragmatics as a unified field of study.