Word searches in Persian tutoring sessions

Word searches have been widely examined in L1 conversation and L2 conversation. A word search occurs when speakers encounter problems retrieving the words needed to continue their talk, which may be completed by the speakers themselves or other interlocutors. This study uses a conversation analytic framework to analyze word search practices that turn into language learning. The study explores how participants enter word searches and transform them into language learning experiences. The data are from seven hours of video- and/or audio-taped naturally occurring conversations in Persian tutoring sessions between a native Persian-speaking tutor and a native English-speaking tutee. The study reveals that, despite limited linguistic competence, the tutee is an interactionally competent speaker who uses word searches as an interactional resource to solve communication breakdowns. The study also shows how the participants develop word searches into explicit pedagogical opportunities and engage in teaching and learning practices.

Input limitations in a diffuse linguistic setting: Observations from a West African contact zone

The sociolinguistic background of multilingual rural societies in West Africa and the prevailing conditions of language transmission are quite different from those found in most immigrant situations in the Global North. In the case focused upon here, the target language itself is under constant pressure from other, more dominant contact languages, and the usual repertoire of a fully competent speaker already involves a larger number of language sources and internal variations. This article explores the verbal behaviour of three speakers of the endangered language Pana (Gur/Niger-Congo; Mali/Burkina Faso) who experienced varying degrees of interrupted language transmission in earlier life times. They were all brought up in situations where only one of the parents spoke Pana as a first language and where it was not part of their general linguistic environment. The speakers find themselves now in a setting where local people prefer Pana and consider it the most appropriate code for village dwellers in community-internal communication. Accordingly, the speakers under scrutiny struggle with the communicative obligations and try to cope with their usually fully competent conversation partners’ expectations. The presented analysis of discourse data shows the manifold and complex linguistic and social implications of such a situation. It will be argued that it is correspondingly difficult to disentangle general language contact phenomena from variation introduced through incomplete second-language acquisition. Furthermore, the data strongly suggests that the background of a diffuse linguistic system and a relatively unfocused society entails a greater liberty for the scrutinized speakers’ communicative possibilities. Regarding norm adherence, the partners in discourse seem to stretch the acceptance of linguistic variation to the very limits of the already diffuse linguistic system as long as social conduct and behavioural norms of communication are respected.

Law for Elites

It has been claimed that to fully understand the law, one must know the language of normative texts and the relevant rules governing its use. It usually means that normative texts do not seem to be comprehensible enough to persons without formal legal training. In an on-going research project, we are focusing on the process of writing texts of legal regulations, conducting semi-structured interviews with those involved in drafting normative texts. In this paper, we focus on lawyers as a speech community of legal language speakers and we discuss why and to what extent this speech community may be considered an elite in a society. We show that competent usage of special – legal – language in regulating the whole society may help create a special group of persons wielding an important segment of cultural capital: the knowledge of legal language, and, in consequence, competent knowledge of law. Given the fact that this language is used to exercise (legal) power in a society, lawyers appear to be in the advantageous position of an elite. We argue that those who draft new legal texts reproduce writing rules and customs, constantly re-creating legal language as a language mostly incomprehensible to a non-competent speaker, and, in consequence, creating lawyers as an elite speech community.

Meanings as Species

One kind of meaning is constituted by what we need to grasp about usage to be competent participants in a community’s linguistic practices. This book proposes that this sort of meaning is primarily a matter of common knowledge about the presuppositions speakers make in using their language. It argues we should think of this as a population-level, process-like phenomenon. It’s population-level since what needs to be grasped is determined by a rough equilibrium of assumptions across speakers; it’s process-like since what needs to be grasped is a dynamic property of a practice: the competent speaker needs to track how what’s taken for granted about a community’s words fluctuates as the environment changes what is salient to all. The case for thinking of meaning in this way is a matter of its payoffs in theorizing about language. Thinking of meaning in this way reconciles Quine’s skepticism about an epistemically interesting sort of analyticity with the belief that everyday talk about meaning tracks something real, something about which we can and should theorize. It helps ground a sensible way of thinking about philosophical analysis and the role of our intuitions therein, and helps resolve a number of puzzles about relations between illocution and meaning. It helps ground a way of thinking about our practices of ascribing content to others. And it helps provide an understanding of ‘conceptual engineering’—as an attempt to add or subtract from interpretive common ground but not (necessarily) to shift reference—that makes such engineering look like a sensible, conceivably successful project.

What Are Meanings, That We Might Share Them?

The goal of this chapter is to sketch an account of meaning as the anchor of linguistic competence—that with which one must be in cognitive contact to qualify as a competent speaker. Meanings supervene on mutual presuppositions among speakers about how people understand one another. When someone uses a word, they can expect others to have these assumptions for making sense of the sentence in which the word is used. The core of this chapter lays out this picture of meaning, discusses how it is related to linguistic competence, and relates meaning in this sense to meaning in the sense of that which a use of a sentence conventionally says. The chapter is bookended with a discussion of philosophical analysis, because a motivation for thinking about meaning in this way is that it makes a case for the importance of something much like philosophical analysis traditionally conceived.

Coda

One kind of meaning is constituted by what we need to grasp about usage in order to be competent participants in the linguistic practices of a community. What we need to grasp first and foremost is how those with whom we communicate normally expect us to understand them, and how those interlocutors assume we are normally to be understood. I’ve argued that we should think of this sort of meaning as a population-level, process-like phenomenon. It’s population-level since what needs to be grasped is determined by a rough equilibrium of assumptions across speakers: the competent speaker needs to track certain bits of ...

Wittgenstein on Thinking as a Process or an Activity

In this paper I focus on a major aspect of the later Wittgenstein’s investigation of thinking – his discussion of the idea of thinking as a process or an activity. I shall show that Wittgenstein’s remarks, apart from some concerning the methodology and conception of philosophy, are grammatical remarks, meaning that they describe the use of the word “thinking” and can be agreed to by every competent speaker. I thus show that Wittgenstein’s investigation of thinking is a grammatical one, and hence that there is no inconsistency between his conception of philosophy and his philosophical practice. In the process of doing so, I shall also review previous studies on this topic and point out their deficiencies.

Highlights of a competence oriented methodology of teaching Ukrainian in school

The author is concerned that modern schools do not actually produce personalities who have linguistic stability, who have extensive experience in language use, for whom language is a value and a means of self-realization, but rather small “devices” with different memory cards and content. Despite the obvious advance of the theory of the question, the author still had the feeling that something really important has not been taken into account, because the competence mechanism fails to be fully launched because the focus on knowledge indicators slows it down. The author considers a certain way out of the current situation a necessity to form a citizen during the study of school subjects, and therefore demonstrates the role of the Ukrainian language in solving this problem. The author offers an algorithm of actions on the problem of forming a citizen, which should be complete: knowledge contributes to the formation of skills, skills become the impetus to thinking, contribute to the emergence of feelings, on the basis of which there is an attitude without which there is no personality. If the attitude is formed, the student feels confident in the choice situation, their behavior is motivated. If a person is not trained to think and analyze, if a thought, decision, action is not the product of their efforts, operations, then they become mentally lazy, accustomed to consume a ready-made opinion, which is formed for them by the media, politicians, neighbors and even detractors. The author points out that the world no longer encourages people to possess knowledge - search engines know everything. An important result of school language education is the formation of a competent speaker.

Meaning and rule-following

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of meaning, understanding and intention – central notions in the philosophy of language and mind. The fundamental issue is what it is for words to have meaning, and for speakers to use words in accordance with their meanings. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein explores the idea that what could give a word its meaning is a rule for its use, and that to be a competent speaker is to use words in accordance with these rules. His discussion of the nature of rules and rule-following has been highly influential, although there is no general agreement about his conclusions and final position. The view that there is no objectivity to an individual’s attempt to follow a rule in isolation provides one strand of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. To some commentators, Wittgenstein’s discussion only leads to the sceptical conclusion that there are no rules to be followed and so no facts about what words mean. Others have seen him as showing why certain models of what it takes for an individual to follow a rule are inadequate and must be replaced by an appeal to a communal linguistic practice.

Reference

It is usual to think that referential relations hold between language and thoughts on one hand, and the world on the other. The most striking example of such a relation is the naming relation, which holds between the name ‘Socrates’ and the famous philosopher Socrates. Indeed, some philosophers in effect restrict the vague word ‘reference’ to the naming relation, or something similar. Others use ’reference’ broadly (as it is used in this entry) to cover a range of semantically significant relations that hold between various sorts of terms and the world: between ‘philosopher’ and all philosophers, for example. Other words used for one or other of these relations include ‘designation’, ‘denotation’, ‘signification’, ‘application’ and ‘satisfaction’. Philosophers often are interested in reference because they take it to be the core of meaning. Thus, the fact that ‘Socrates’ refers to that famous philosopher is the core of the name’s meaning and hence of its contribution to the meaning of any sentence – for example, ‘Socrates is wise’ – that contains the name. The name’s referent contributes to the sentence’s meaning by contributing to its truth-condition: ‘Socrates is wise’ is true if and only if the object referred to by ‘Socrates’ is wise. The first question that arises about the reference of a term is: what does the term refer to? Sometimes the answer seems obvious – for example, ‘Socrates’ refers to the famous philosopher – although even the obvious answer has been denied on occasions. On other occasions, the answer is not obvious. Does ‘wise’ refer to the property wisdom, the set of wise things, or each and every wise thing? Clearly, answers to this should be influenced by one’s ontology, or general view of what exists. Thus, a nominalist who thinks that properties do not really exist, and that talk of them is a mere manner of speaking, would not take ‘wise’ to refer to the property wisdom. The central question about reference is: in virtue of what does a term have its reference? Answering this requires a theory that explains the term’s relation to its referent. There has been a great surge of interest in theories of reference in this century. What used to be the most popular theory about the reference of proper names arose from the views of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and became known as ‘the description theory’. According to this theory, the meaning of a name is given by a definite description – an expression of the form ‘the F’ – that competent speakers associate with the name; thus, the meaning of ‘Aristotle’ might be given by ‘the last great philosopher of antiquity’. So the answer to our central question would be that a name refers to a certain object because that object is picked out by the name’s associated description. Around 1970, several criticisms were made of the description theory by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan; in particular, they argued that a competent speaker usually does not have sufficient knowledge of the referent to associate a reference-determining description. Under their influence, many adopted ‘the historical–causal theory’ of names. According to this theory, a name refers to its bearer in virtue of standing in an appropriate causal relation to the bearer. Description theories are popular also for words other than names. Similar responses were made to many of these theories in the 1970s. Thus, Kripke and Hilary Putnam rejected description theories of natural-kind terms like ‘gold’ and proposed historical–causal replacements. Many other words (for example, adjectives, adverbs and verbs) seem to be referential. However we need not assume that all other words are. It seems preferable to see some words as syncategorematic, contributing structural elements rather than referents to the truth-conditions and meanings of sentences. Perhaps this is the right way to view words like ‘not’ and the quantifiers (like ‘all’, ‘most’ and ‘few’). The referential roles of anaphoric (cross-referential) terms are intricate. These terms depend for their reference on other expressions in their verbal context. Sometimes they are what Peter Geach calls ‘pronouns of laziness’, going proxy for other expressions in the context; at other times they function like bound variables in logic. Geach’s argument that every anaphoric term can be treated in one of these two ways was challenged by Gareth Evans. Finally, there has been an interest in ‘naturalizing’ reference, explaining it in scientifically acceptable terms. Attempted explanations have appealed to one or more of three causal relations between words and the world: historical, reliable and teleological.