scholarly journals I Do Not Exist. Problems for Dynamic Semantics

2018 ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Eduardo García Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Dynamic Semantics ◽  
Recent Proposal ◽  
Static Semantics ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Existential Constructions ◽  
The Common

According to dynamic semantics, what is said by an utterance of a sentence is determined by how the common ground is affected by the acceptance of such utterance. It has been claimed that dynamic semantics offers an account of what is said by an utterance in a context that excels that of traditional static semantics. Assertions of negative existential constructions, of the form ‘X does not exist’, are a case in point. These assertions traditionally pose a problem for philosophers of language. A recent proposal, owed to Clapp (2008), argues that static semantics is unable to solve the problem and offers a dynamic semantics account that promises to succeed. In this paper I want to challenge this account and, more generally, the scope of the dynamic semantics framework. I will offer a counterexample, inspired by “answering machine” uses of indexical and demonstrative expressions, to show how dynamic semantics fails.  I conclude by considering the merits of both static and dynamic accounts.

scholarly journals Computing the meaning of the assertive speech act by a software agent

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Brian Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Software Agent ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Situation Type ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

This paper examines the nature of the assertive speech act of Irish. We examine the syntactical constructional form of the assertive to identify its constructional signature. We consider the speech act as a construction whose meaning as an utterance depends on the framing situation and context, along with the common ground of the interlocutors. We identify how the assertive speech act is formalised to make it computer tractable for a software agent to compute its meaning, taking into account the contribution of situation, context and a dynamic common ground. Belief, desire and intention play a role in <em>what is meant</em> as against <em>what is said</em>. The nature of knowledge, and how it informs common ground, is explored along with the relationship between knowledge and language. Computing the meaning of a speech act in the situation requires us to consider the level of the interaction of all these dimensions. We argue that the contribution of lexicon and grammar, with the recognition of belief, desire and intentions in the situation type and associated illocutionary force, sociocultural conventions of the interlocutors along with their respective general and cultural knowledge, their common ground and other sources of contextual information are all important for representing meaning in communication. We show that the influence of the situation, context and common ground feeds into the utterance meaning derivation. The ‘<em>what is said’</em> is reflected in the event and its semantics, while the ‘<em>what is meant’</em> is derived at a higher level of abstraction within a situation.

The Difference between Lying and Misleading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Stokke
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
The World ◽  
Question Under Discussion ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Prosodic Focus

The notions of what is said and assertion, as relative to questions under discussion, are used to provide an account of the lying-misleading distinction. The chapter argues that utterances are sometimes interpreted relative to the so-called Big Question, roughly paraphrased by “What is the world like?” This observation is shown to account for the fact that, when conveying standard conversational implicatures, what is asserted is likewise proposed for the common ground. The chapter applies the resulting account of the lying-misleading distinction to ways of lying and misleading with incomplete predicates, possessives, presuppositions, pronouns, and prosodic focus. A formal notion of contextual questionentailment is defined which shows when it is possible to mislead with respect to a question under discussion while avoiding outright lying.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

scholarly journals Across the Divide: Looking for the common ground of Hindustani

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2056-2079 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LUNN
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

Linguistic influences on gesture’s form

Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Communicative Function ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Original Action ◽  
New Information ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Given ◽  
Linguistic Influences

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.

The History of Emotions and Nationalism Studies: a Сognitive Turn in Contemporary Historiography

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Olga Vorobieva
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
National Character ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Cognitive Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
The Common ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

The article considers the cognitive potential of the history of emotions in the study of nationalism in historiographical discussions of 1990—2000s. The authors analyze the works, which criticize constructivist approaches and problematize the relationship between nationalism, “national character”, “emotional mode” and everyday behavioral practices. Based on P. Bourdieu&apos;s concept of ‘habitus’ and its modification in N. Elias&apos;s historical sociology, the article highlights the common ground and productive interaction between histories of emotion and nationalism studies. This reciprocal movement is interpreted as a symptom of the search for a common conceptual platform and vocabulary for the mutual translation of their research practices. The authors believe that a productive trend within this dialogue could be a more active address to cognitive studies advocating a rethinking of the relationship between individual consciousness and collective regimes of knowledge-power of sentimental, modern and “post-modern” eras.

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