Time Of Utterance Research Articles

English fronting constructions as a window to the semantics of tense: the case of belief reports

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) de se tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a de re interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant.

Speech patterns during memory recall relates to early tau burden across adulthood.

Early cognitive decline may manifest in subtle differences in speech. We examined 238 cognitively unimpaired adults from the Framingham Heart Study (32-75 years) who completed amyloid and tau PET imaging. Speech patterns during delayed recall of a story memory task were quantified via five speech markers, and their associations with global amyloid status and regional tau signal were examined. Total utterance time, number of between-utterance pauses, speech rate, and percentage of unique words significantly correlated with delayed recall score although the shared variance was low (2%-15%). Delayed recall score was not significantly different between β-amyoid-positive (Aβ+) and -negative (Aβ-) groups and was not associated with regional tau signal. However, longer and more between-utterance pauses, and slower speech rate were associated with increased tau signal across medial temporal and early neocortical regions. Subtle speech changes during memory recall may reflect cognitive impairment associated with early Alzheimer's disease pathology. Speech during delayed memory recall relates to tau PET signal across adulthood. Delayed memory recall score was not associated with tau PET signal. Speech shows greater sensitivity to detecting subtle cognitive changes associated with early tau accumulation. Our cohort spans adulthood, while most PET imaging studies focus on older adults.

The semantics of Mandarin futurates

Abstract This paper investigates future interpretations in Mandarin declarative root clauses without overt future modals, i.e., Mandarin futurates. Mandarin futurates require future time adverbs and schedulable eventualities, which denote future readings relative to the utterance time or a context-determined past time. Moreover, Mandarin futurates presuppose the existence of a plan in the context and are incompatible with a single perfective aspect marker le1 . To account for these facts, I argue that a covert future modal m-plan is present in futurates and extend the formal analysis for English simple futurates to Mandarin with necessary modifications.

Multi-robot cooperative behavior for reducing unnaturalness of starting a conversation

In a human–robot conversation, it is difficult for the robot to start the conversation just when the addressee is ready to listen to the robot, due to recognition technology issues. This paper proposes and evaluates a method to reduce the sense of that the timing of starting the conversation is bad. In this method, two robots perform a cooperative behavior during a waiting time from the call for attracting addressee's attention to the main utterance the robot want to deliver. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted an experiment that compared three conversation initiation approaches: early timing and late timing by one robot, and the proposed approach involving two robots. The results revealed that the proposed method mitigates the bad timing of main utterances as perceived by the participants.

Analisis Deiksis Dalam Novel Origami Hati Karya Boy Candra Dan Implikasinya Terhadap Pembelajaran Teks Cerita Pendek di SMP

The aims of this study were (1) to describe the form of persona deixis in Boy Candra's novel Origami Hati, (2) to describe the form of place deixis in Boy Candra's Origami Hati novel, (3) to describe the form of time deixis in Boy Candra's Origami Hati novel, ( 4) to describe the function of persona deixis in the novel Origami Hati by Boy Candra, (5) to describe the function of deixis of place in the novel Origami Hati by Boy Candra, (6) to describe the function of time deixis in the novel Origami Hati by Boy Candra, (7) to describe the implications of deixis in the novel Origami Hati by Boy Candra on learning short story texts in junior high school. The results showed that the deixis contained in the novel Origami Hati by Boy Candra includes first-person deixis, second-person deixis, third-person deixis, place deixis and time deixis and their respective functions. The function of persona deixis in this novel is used to refer to actors or participants who are involved in language events; used as a pointer to belonging; used as a subject; used as an object. The function of place deixis in this novel is used as a description of the place where a language event takes place. The function of time deixis in this novel is used to refer to the time of utterance; used to refer to past or before utterances; used to refer to the time after the utterance. Personal deixis in this novel consists of the form aku, -ku, saya, anda, kami, kita, kamu, -mu, kalian, dia, -ia, mereka. The deixis of time in this novel refers to the past, present and future. The deixis of place in this novel refers to places that are far from the speakers, close to the speakers and somewhat far from the speakers.

The Expression of Time in Amahuaca Switch-Reference Clauses

Many languages of lowland South America mark remoteness distinctions in their TAM systems. In Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru) multiple remoteness distinctions are made in the past and the future. I argue that the temporal remoteness morphemes (TRMs) of Amahuaca can be understood as indications of the remoteness of the event time relative to the utterance time in matrix environments. In dependent clauses, however, the picture is more complicated. By exploring adjunct switch-reference clauses, I show that TRMs in dependent clauses display a previously unreported ambiguity reminiscent of ambiguities found with adjunct tense. Specifically, they can relate the time of the adjunct clause event to the time of the matrix event or to the utterance time. I suggest that this ambiguity may arise from the availability of multiple interpretation sites for adjunct TRMs, with the possible interpretations being constrained by the temporal semantics of switch-reference markers themselves. This work thus contributes to the empirical understanding of how TRMs are interpreted in dependent clauses, suggesting interesting potential parallels to the interpretation of adjunct tense.

The Modal Future

<i>The Modal Future</i>

Deicticthisand speaker containment

This article examines a hitherto unnoticed set of deictic uses of the English proximal demonstrativethis, namely those where the speaker is contained in the referent of the demonstrative NP. The usual case, where the speaker is not contained in the referent, has been extensively studied and the choice between proximal and distal has been argued to be based on a combination of physical (proximity of the referent to the speaker) and psychological/subjective factors. The present article focuses on those cases where the speaker is contained in the referent, arguing that this leads to a categorical choice in deictic uses, with only proximalthisbeing possible. The article further shows that there are four relevant types of containment. First, spatial containment, where the speaker is physically located in the referent (e.g.this room); second, situational containment, where the referent is an event or state and the speaker is a participant in it (e.g.this conversation); third, set containment, where the referent is a group of people of which the speaker is a member (e.g.in this family); and fourth, temporal containment, where the speaker (or more precisely the time of utterance) is contained in the referent (e.g.this week).

Velocidade de fala e inteligibilidade: possíveis influências no inglês como língua franca

Considering the importance of the English language as a lingua franca (ELF) in interactions among different cultures/languages, it is important that Phonetics and Phonology studies pay attention to aspects that may influence its intelligibility. Informants of perception experiments have reported that, among the many factors that negatively affect intelligibility, speech rate seems to play an important role. This article aims at showing the results of research by Gonçalves (2021), relating the measurements of six parameters linked to speech rate with the intelligibility of the English language, according to intelligibility data by Brazilian listeners already collected by Becker (2013) and Becker and Rossini (2017). The six measurement parameters were: speech rate, articulation rate, phones per second, utterance time, pause time and total articulation time. The first two are brought by Barbosa (2019), and the others by Costa, Martins-Reis and Celeste (2016). Based on the descriptive results obtained from the analyzed data - and without inferential statistical analysis, certainly a next step of the research - it was not possible to determine whether or not there is a relationship between speech rate in English and its intelligibility for Brazilian listeners.

한국어 ‘-길래’ 접속문의 통사의미적 합성

In this paper, I make a formal semantic description of Korean conjunctive sentences which are headed by connective ending ‘-killay’. Through a critique of the previous formal semantic analysis of ‘-killay’ by Yeom(2012), I argue that ‘-killay’ has a direct evidential meaning which is interpreted as a kind of epistemic modal meaning, every type of ‘-killay’ conjunctive sentences has presuppositions that the consequent proposition is true and the consequent situation is stage-level, and the time of acquiring direct evidence about the antecedent situation precedes the time of the consequent situation which in turn precedes or overlaps the utterance time. The lexical semantic definition containing all these properties of ‘-killay’ is shown to make complete the semantic composition procedures of ‘-killay’ conjunctive sentences. (Yonsei University).

Extraction and Evaluation of Greeting Speech-Timing and Characteristic Upper Body Motion for Robots to Gain Attention of Older Adults

Greeting is important for socially assistive robot to smoothly initiate conversations with older adults. Because of their decreased cognitive function, older adults may occasionally be unaware of the presence of a robot. The purpose of this study was to investigate and evaluate the characteristic motion and utterance time for greeting older adults in comparison with those for greeting non-older adults. The motion and utterance for greeting a seated target imitating an older adult and greeting a non-older adult were measured. The utterance times of the greeting and motion parameters such as the maximum joint angles were calculated from the measured data. The parameters were compared using statistical methods. According to the results, the hip bending angle in older adults was 36.6° greater than in the non-older adults. The utterance lag for greeting the older adults was 0.7 s longer than that for greeting the non-older adults at this time. The impressions of the robot that greeted the participants based on the extracted motion parameters were compared to verify these parameter differences. Although the greeting styles did not differ significantly, it was verified that the robot’s greeting was more impressive than that of a computer-graphics robot.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN DEVELOPING THE PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE OF ENGLISH STUDENTS

This study aims to investigate the access and use of social networks by students majoring in English Studies with a high-quality program in developing pragmatic competence. The quantitative research was carried out at Can Tho University (CTU), one of the most prestigious universities in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The participants were 90 English-majored students of the Department of English Studies (courses 44 to 47) who studied Pragmatics. The questionnaire was used to measure students' use of social networks during class and self-study of students majoring in the English Language – a high-quality program for developing pragmatic competence. The findings showed that most participants use social networks to improve and develop their pragmatic abilities. The most commonly used social networks for improving pragmatics were Facebook and Youtube. They also pointed out that the most common pragmatics knowledge on social networks was about conversational implication, speech acts, and politeness. The results of this study were suggested to help English language students understand the context of utterances, convey exactly what they want to say to their listeners, and overcome the barrier of ambiguity based on the manner, position, and time of utterance.&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt; Article visualizations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0220/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Variation in Aspect Usage in General-Factual Contexts: New Quantitative Data from Polish, Czech, and Russian

This study aims to account for the variation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish, Czech, and Russian. A series of online questionnaires were conducted wherein the native speakers of the tested languages were asked to fill in the missing verbs for two types of existential contexts (neutral and resultative) and four types of presuppositional factual contexts (weakly and strongly resultative with a focus on the initiator or the result state of the past event). We show that neutral existential factual contexts generally elicited significantly more imperfective choices than resultative existential factual contexts. Additionally, there was a trend towards a higher usage of imperfective in weakly resultative presuppositional contexts as compared to strongly resultative presuppositional contexts, suggesting that the less emphasis is placed on the result state the more likely the choice of imperfective aspect is for the expression of the temporal indefiniteness of factual contexts. Russian showed a significantly higher proportion of imperfective uses than Polish and Czech, with Czech being intermediate. We argue that these observations result from the fact that in all types of factual contexts (both existential and presuppositional) there is an interaction between two types of TEMPORAL (IN)DEFINITENESS of the past event: (i) temporal (in)definiteness at the micro-level (first phase syntax-vP) (depending on the position of the time variable within the temporal event of the past complex event) and (ii) (in)definiteness of the past event at the macro-level (second phase syntax–AspP and TP) (related to the position of the past event relative to the utterance time). We show that both discourse-level information and verb-level information interact in determining these two types of (in)definiteness, and they do it differently in Polish, Czech, and Russian.

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.

Tempos do passado e tempos do futuro em confronto: diferenças e paralelismos

This paper deals with the main similarities and differences that arise between past and future tenses. In particular, we argue that, while the propositions associated with past tenses are completely settled and their truth-value can be evaluated at the speech time, the propositions described by future tenses cannot be seen as true or false at the utterance time since these linguistic forms are ramifying, in that they typically point to a variety of inertia histories or inertia worlds. Nevertheless, if we consider more closely some particular tenses in European Portuguese – namely the Pretérito Imperfeito (Imperfect) and the Pretérito Perfeito do Indicativo (simple past), as representatives of the past tenses, and the Futuro Simples (simple future) and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, as representatives of the future ones, we conclude that there are also some important parallels across the two temporal domains. We claim that both the Imperfeito and the Futuro Simples merely locate the situations in a past or future interval, respectively, and that the final interpretation of the sentences in which they occur is the result of the interaction of their temporal characteristics with aspectual and modal features. The Pretérito Perfeito and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, on the other hand, share the common property of imposing an additional temporal boundary beyond which the eventualities cannot take place; as a result, aspectual effects and modal readings are much more conditioned and pure temporal interpretations – both in the past and in the future – become greatly predominant.

Formal properties of now revisited

The traditional view is that now is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time. Yet, despite its initial appeal, the view has faced criticism. A range of data reveal now allows for discourse-bound (i.e., anaphoric) uses, and can occur felicitously with the past tense. The reaction to this has typically been to treat now as akin to a true demonstrative, selecting the prominent time supplied by the non-linguistic context or prior discourse. We argue this is doubly mistaken. The first mistake concerns the semantic value of now which is not a time, but a state --- the consequent state of a prominent event. The second is that now is a pure indexical after all, insofar as its interpretation is determined without recourse to extra-linguistic supplementation. Specifically, we argue that any occurrence of now selects the consequent state of the most prominent event, where event-prominence is linguistically maintained through prominence-affecting updates contributed by coherence relations. Our analysis accounts straightforwardly for a wide range of discourse initial and discourse bound uses of now while giving it a simple indexical meaning. EARLY ACCESS

Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times

The temporal arguments of VPs and adverbs must be locally coindexed with the nearest time abstraction above them (Percus 2000). In contrast, nouns, which also have time arguments, have been noted to have multiple available evaluation times (Enç 1981), often coinciding with the topic time (e.g. Musan 1995, Tonhauser 2002, Keshet 2008) or utterance time (O’Leary 2017, O’Leary &amp; Brasoveanu 2018). I argue that we can explain the possible temporal interpretations of nouns in a way that makes their behavior consistent with that of VPs and adverbs by positing an analogous locality constraint and making a simple appeal to quantifier raising. I additionally propose that the need for a locality constraint on the coindexing of temporal arguments extends to all predicates introducing novel referents.

Embedded presents and the structure of narratives

The orthodox view of tense mandates that the present tense, when embedded under a past attitude predicate, should give rise soley to what is called a "double access" reading (Abusch 1997; Ogihara1996; OgiharaSharvit2012). We consider a class of embedded presents which locate the embedded eventuality neither at the time of utterance nor the time of the attitude. Unlike some other recently identified cases of ill-behaved embedded tenses, we argue that our embedded presents are instances of the historical present, a non-indexical use of the simple present. This assimilation requires abandoning current theories of the historical present, which treat it as a purely pragmatic contextual shift (Schlenker 2004, Anand &amp; Toosarvandani 2017}. Building on Lewis(1978), we introduce an intensional operator sensitive to a salient narrative in the context, which shifts a contextual time coordinate to a temporal vantage point on that narrative. This unifies our cases of embedded presents with their matrix counterparts, in fiction and non-fiction narratives alike.

Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

The exact timing of a conversational turn conveys important information to a listener. Most turns are initiated within 250ms after the previous turn. However, interlocutors take longer to initiate certain types of turns: those that either require more cognitive processing or are socially dispreferred. Many dispreferred turns are also cognitively demanding, so it is difficult to attribute specific conversational delays to social or cognitive mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the relative contribution of cognitive and social variables to the timing of utterances in conversation.&#x0D; We focus on a type of turn that is socially dispreferred, cognitively demanding, and generally delayed: other-initiations of repair (OIRs). OIRs occur when a listener notices and decides to signal a comprehension problem (e.g., "What?"). We analyzed the Floor Transfer Offsets of 456 OIRs, and found that interlocutors initiated OIRs later when trouble sources had weaker discourse context or were shorter, and when the OIR was more face-threatening. Our results suggest that both cognitive and social variables contribute to the timing of delayed utterances in conversation. We discuss how attention, prediction, planning, and social preference manifest in the timing of turns.

On the interpretation of tense in temporal adverbial clauses

Tenses in English temporal adjunct clauses seem to show properties of both matrix and embedded tenses. On the one hand, they are often argued to be interpreted with respect to the time of utterance (Stump 1985; Arregui &amp;amp; Kusumoto 1998; Kubota et al. 2011). On the other hand, they are more constrained than matrix tenses, claimed to be limited to past tense when the matrix tense is past, and present when the matrix tense is future. I present evidence from the English perfect that adjunct clauses are always interpreted relative to the nearest c-commanding temporal operator, which can in principle give rise to both types of behaviors: adjunct tenses are interpreted relative to some temporal operator if within the scope of matrix tense, or they are interpreted relative to the time of utterance if they are outside the scope of matrix tense. What decides between these possibilities in a given clause are syntactic and pragmatic conditions on adjunction and the resulting interaction between the presuppositions introduced by the adjunct clause and the meanings of the temporal connectives. The result is that when the matrix clause is a non-perfect, adjunct tenses are always interpreted relative to the utterance time. When the matrix clause contains a perfect, however, adjunct tenses may be interpreted relative to the matrix tense operator.