Pragmatics

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Potts
Keyword(s):  
Computational Linguistics ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Primary Literature ◽  
High Level

This chapter reviews core empirical phenomena and technical concepts from linguistic pragmatics, including context dependence, common ground, indexicality, conversational implicature, presupposition, and speech acts. It seeks to identify unifying themes among these concepts, provide a high-level guide to the primary literature, and relate the phenomena to issues in computational linguistics.

Lying and Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 302-314
Author(s):  
Emar Maier
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Semantic Framework ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Maxim Of Quality

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. This chapter discusses the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. It argues that there is little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth-conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, the chapter first explores how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e., as proposals to update the common ground.

scholarly journals THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND LEADERSHIP QUALITIES IN STUDENTS

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Intelligence ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Education Institution ◽  
Leadership Traits ◽  
Leadership Qualities ◽  
Organizational Skills ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Technical Students ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, the main approaches concerning the problem of leadership traits formation as studied in both national and foreign literature are viewed. There are given results of research on leadership traits in students at technical specialties and humanities in the course of their training at a higher education institution in their connection with emotive intellect. The peculiarities of leadership traits in the tested groups with different level of emotive intellect, as well as a connection between leadership traits and emotive intellect are determined. The highest indicators according to the results of the research are demonstrated by a group of students of technical specialties with a high level of emotional intelligence, which indicates the ability to manage their emotions and behavior, the ability to solve problems. They demonstrate a high level of organizational skills, ability to work with a group. Their actions are aimed at achieving goals. The lowest rates according to the results of the study were found in a group of students of humanities with a low level of emotional intelligence. In difficult situations, it is difficult for them to find a way out. They do not know how to control the work of their comrades, to find common ground with people. The relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership skills in students of technical and humanities has been studied. A group of technical students with a high level of emotional intelligence found positive correlations between emotional intelligence and all scales of leadership qualities. There are no correlations between emotional intelligence and leadership qualities in the group of humanities students with a low level of emotional intelligence. In other groups of students, certain correlations have been established between emotional intelligence and leadership qualities.

scholarly journals The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Bohn ◽  
Michael C. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Social Reasoning ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Computational Framework ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Developmental Continuity ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this review, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early non-verbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children’s learning, comprehension, and use of language.

scholarly journals How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedy

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Aarons ◽  
Marc Mierowsky
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Noticeable Effect ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Standup Comedy

How to do things with jokes: Speech acts in standup comedyIn How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other intended behaviours. Austin accentuated the idea of speaker intention, on one hand, and hearer’s response to that intention if successfully conveyed, on the other. We consider some of the speech acts used in the work of selected standup comedians to analyse the way they determine the relationship of performer and audience. We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the licensing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and the success of these speech acts in shaping the social lives of the audience. We show that this relationship is at the forefront of standup comedy’s social impact and that it can generate heightened consciousness of the social and political environment of the time.  Finally, we consider the question of whether socially critical standup can have any noticeable effect on the attitudes or behaviour of both live and digitally mediated audiences.

Experimental Pragmatics

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Experimental Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Discourse Understanding

This chapter describes some of the important research in experimental pragmatics, most notably studies related to recovering speakers’ intentions, inferring conversational implicatures, and the role of common ground in discourse understanding. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of different experimental methods for studying pragmatics, and how research findings in the field are relevant to traditional concerns within the linguistic pragmatics community. But I will also argue that experimental pragmatic studies show great regularities and significant variation, both within and across individuals, in the ways people speak and understand language. My alternative view claims that dynamical, self-organizing processes form the critical background from which meaningful pragmatic actions emerge. The implications of this position for interdisciplinary pragmatic research will be discussed.

scholarly journals Speech Acts

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Recursive Structures ◽  
Core Language ◽  
Core Issues ◽  
Essential Insight

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture II: Seeing through the Clouds

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (11) ◽  
pp. 617-642
Author(s):  
John MacFarlane ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Satisfactory Account ◽  
General Response ◽  
The Way

One approach to the problem is to keep the orthodox notion of a proposition but innovate in the theory of speech acts. A number of philosophers and linguists have suggested that, in cases of felicitous underspecification, a speaker asserts a “cloud” of propositions rather than just one. This picture raises a number of questions: what norms constrain a “cloudy assertion,” what counts as uptake, and how is the conversational common ground revised if it is accepted? I explore three different ways of answering these questions, due to Braun and Sider, Buchanan, and von Fintel and Gillies. I argue that none of them provide a good general response to the problem posed by felicitous underspecification. However, the problems they face point the way to a more satisfactory account, which innovates in the theory of content rather than the theory of speech acts.

scholarly journals The Pervasive Role of Pragmatics in Early Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Bohn ◽  
Michael C. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Social Reasoning ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Computational Framework ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Developmental Continuity ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this article, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early nonverbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children's learning, comprehension, and use of language.

Linguistic expressions as cultural units

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-145
Author(s):  
Elke Diedrichsen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Sources ◽  
Communicative Interaction ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Culturally Based ◽  
Linguistic Conventions ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract The paper argues in favor of including cultural aspects in the description of communicative interaction. According to Eco (1976), a linguistic sign is a cultural unit. In order to use it properly, a speaker relies on communicative experience with this unit within a culture (Wittgenstein 1960; Feilke 1996, 1998; Everett 2012). We expand the notion of ‘cultural unit’ by including internet memes found in social media (Shifman 2013, 2014; Diedrichsen 2013a, 2013b, 2019a, 2019b). The term builds on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 definition of a ‘meme’ as a unit that is the cultural equivalent of a biological gene. The paper proposes three knowledge sources for the production and comprehension of these units. The first is semiotic knowledge, the second is common ground knowledge (Clark 1996), and the third knowledge source involves culturally shared cognitive conceptualizations on which word meanings and other linguistic conventions are founded (Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017). These three knowledge sources are established through daily interactions and learning processes within a culture (Kecskés and Zhang 2009). The paper characterizes the application of these three knowledge sources for a variety of sign uses. We will also show that a cultural view on pragmatics, as suggested by Sharifian (2017), serves to describe speech acts by identifying their culturally based source. The paper therefore demonstrates that the inclusion of cultural knowledge enables a perspective on communication that goes beyond the analysis of spoken and written words within communities of speakers, as it includes emerging means of communicative interaction in the digital age.

scholarly journals ¿Qué es un recurso turístico? Un análisis Delphi a la Academia Hispana

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Ruben Arnandis-i-Agramunt
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
First Approximation ◽  
Tourism Resource ◽  
Third Dimension ◽  
Set Up ◽  
High Level ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Level Of Agreement

Tras más de cincuenta años estudiando el desplazamiento de las personas con fines de ocio, argumentando por ello el desarrollo de equipamientos, infraestructuras e instalaciones, implementando políticas y planificaciones turísticas, evaluando programas y actuaciones, todavía la materia prima de la actividad turística, la que justifica la existencia de todos los elementos anteriores, sigue sin tener un espacio consensuado entre la academia. Esta investigación, tras una amplia revisión bibliográfica que evidencia esta situación descrita, implementa un Delphi entre veinticinco personas de la academia hispana cuyas investigaciones están directamente asociadas al tema de estudio. El objeto no era otro que encontrar los puntos de confluencia en torno al concepto de recurso y su relación con el turismo para, posteriormente, articular una propuesta que identifique los elementos básicos de todo recurso turístico. Los resultados obtenidos, tras dos rondas y un cuestionario de treinta y cuatro afirmaciones encontradas en la literatura valoradas con una escala Likert de 1 a 5, muestran un alto grado de acuerdo (hacia el consenso o el disenso), en la mayoría de aspectos evaluados en las tres dimensiones. Estos hallazgos aportan luz a algunos temas de debate. Sin embargo, también se manifiestan ciertas discrepancias, sobre todo alrededor de la tercera dimensión (la relación recurso–adaptación al uso turístico). Es, pues, una primera aproximación a la conceptualización de recurso turístico. After more than fifty years of looking into people's movement due to leisure purposes, and therefore arguing the development of equipment, infrastructures, and facilities, implementing policies and tourism planning, evaluating programs and actions, the raw material of tourism, which justifies the existence of the previous elements, has not still reached an agreement among researchers. This investigation, which demonstrates the previous evidence after a wide bibliographical review, set up a Delphi among twenty-five Hispanic researchers whose works are directly related to this matter. The aim was to seek areas of common ground, regarding the concept of resource and its relationship to tourism, in order to articulate a proposal to identify the key elements of a tourism resource. Results (after two rounds, a questionnaire with thirty-four statements found in literature, and a Likert 1–5 scale) have revealed a high level of agreement (towards consensus or dissent), in most assessed aspects of the three dimensions. These findings shed light on some points of discussion. Nevertheless, discrepancies about the third dimension (resource and adaptation to tourism purpose) have been observed. This is thus a first approximation of what tourism resource should be considered.

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