Communicating Attitudes

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198825968.003.0010 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Andreas Stokke

Keyword(s):

Language Use ◽

Semantics And Pragmatics ◽

Communicative Act ◽

Conscious Intention

This chapter extends the analysis of insincere language use from the last chapter to non-declarative utterances, including imperative, interrogative, and exclamative utterances. It argues that such utterances communicate information about the speaker’s attitudes. The chapter offers an account of insincerity in the non-declarative realm that is shallow. On this view, a non-declarative utterance is insincere when it is made without a conscious intention to avoid communicating information not matching the speaker’s conscious attitudes. A notion of a communicative act is defined, and the chapter argues that only such acts can be evaluated as insincere or not. A framework for understanding the semantics and pragmatics of non-declarative clause types is sketched and the chapter shows how it explains why non-declaratives cannot be used to lie.

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Context

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.15 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Anita Fetzer

Keyword(s):

Scientific Community ◽

Language Use ◽

Psychological Construct ◽

Linguistic Performance ◽

External Constraint ◽

Performance Context ◽

Communicative Act

The concept of context has undergone some fundamental rethinking in the scientific community, where it is no longer seen as an analytic prime. Rather than being looked upon as an external constraint on linguistic performance, context is analysed as a product of language use, as interactionally construed, co-constructed, and negotiated, and as imported and invoked. Context is also considered as a psychological construct, and as a set of antecedent premises, which are required for a communicative act to be felicitous. Context is further conceptualized along the distinction between context as type and context as token, differentiating between more generalized and more particularized variants, and context is conceived of as dynamic and relational, more or less (un)bounded, subjective and individual, and social and institutional.

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On (in)definite articles: implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction

Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s0022226700012731 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 405-442 ◽

Cited By ~ 93

Author(s):

John A. Hawkins

Keyword(s):

Natural Language ◽

Language Use ◽

Human Reasoning ◽

Language Understanding ◽

Everyday Language ◽

Semantics And Pragmatics ◽

Core Areas ◽

Conventional Implicatures ◽

The Relationship ◽

Paul Grice

Since Paul Grice published ‘Logic and conversation’ in 1975, there have been a number of attempts to develop his programmatic remarks on conversational and conventional implicatures further (see Gazdar, 1979; Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1985; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; and especially Levinson, 1983, and the references cited therein). The result has been a growing understanding of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and more generally of human reasoning in everyday language use. Many aspects of natural language understanding that were previously thought to be part of the conventional meaning of a given expression can now be shown to be the result of conversational inference. And with cancellability as the diagnostic test, a number of traditional problems in the study of meaning are yielding to more satisfactory analyses. Even more ambitiously, implicatures are penetrating into core areas of the syntax, as pragmatic theories of increasing subtlety are proposed for ‘grammatical’ phenomena such as Chomsky's (1981, 1982) binding principles (see Reinhart, 1983, and Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991).

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Linguistic Competence in Aphasia

Perspectives on Augmentative and Alternative Communication ◽

10.1044/aac17.3.87 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 87-92

Author(s):

Leonard L. LaPointe

Keyword(s):

Language Use ◽

Linguistic Competence ◽

Careful Study ◽

Feral Children ◽

Performance Factors ◽

Performance Loss ◽

Linguistic Rules ◽

Communication Goals ◽

Aphasia Treatment ◽

And Performance

Abstract Loss of implicit linguistic competence assumes a loss of linguistic rules, necessary linguistic computations, or representations. In aphasia, the inherent neurological damage is frequently assumed by some to be a loss of implicit linguistic competence that has damaged or wiped out neural centers or pathways that are necessary for maintenance of the language rules and representations needed to communicate. Not everyone agrees with this view of language use in aphasia. The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics, is complexly interwoven with performance factors. Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss. Advances in understanding linguistic competence and performance may be informed by careful study of bilingual language acquisition and loss, the language of savants, the language of feral children, and advances in neuroimaging. Social models of aphasia treatment, coupled with an access deficit view of aphasia, can salve our restless minds and allow pursuit of maximum interactive communication goals even without a comfortable explanation of implicit linguistic competence in aphasia.

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