Compound Figures: A Multi-Channel View of Communication and Psychological Plausibility

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels (gesture, intonation, facial expression), so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern (2000). He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent.

The Principles Underlying What is Communicated and not Said: A Cursory Discussion of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its Maxims

As humans communicate, much of what goes on is not simply about conveying information to themselves. In Grice’s paper “Logic and Conversation (1975)”, he argued that some cooperative principle is assumed to be in operation for a person to interpret what someone else says. In a typical conversational flow, the speaker needs to adhere to a pattern in order to be informative, truthful and clear and there exist a set of principles that direct the hearer to a particular interpretation of what is said. This is because a speaker can mean something either by saying it or by saying (or ‘making as if to say’) something else. What is implicated by saying something is generally not what is said. This paper attempted to critically review how speakers manage to convey more than what is said and how the hearer arrives at the speaker meaning using a descriptive qualitative approach. This paper employs a descriptive qualitative approach. The key findings of the study is described in two context: first of all, speakers intentionally obey the maxims in conversation which in essence affirms Grice’s theory of cooperative principle in fulfilment of at least some of the maxims. Second, speakers exploit the maxims either deliberately or fail to observe by deciding to violate, suspend, flout, infringe, or opt-out of a conversation. This situation is one premised to give rise to conversational implicatures. A competent hearer should be able to arrive at these possible conclusions in order to draw out the speaker meaning from what was merely said.

Humorous and Non-Humorous Effects in Sitcoms: a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Humorous utterances can be divided into those which are created for their own sake (that is, to amuse others), dubbed autotelic humour, and those which communicate truthful and/or untruthful meanings germane to the ongoing conversation, dubbed speaker-meaning-telic humour (Dynel 2018). The present paper carries out a qualitative analysis of humorous units in sitcom discourse with a view to delineating a number of propositional meanings, which can be potentially derived by the TV recipients. Special attention is confined to one of the most powerful tools used to explain humour in various humorous manifestations, i.e. weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1986 [1995]; Wilson and Sperber 2004). It is believed here that pragmatic COMPREHENSION mechanisms proposed within Relevance Theory and the notion of weakly communicated assumptions are two sides of the same coin since these account not only for the viewer’s recovery of a humorous interpretation but also of an array of non-humorous propositional meanings. Moreover, the participatory framework has been employed as an additional parameter to show the difference in the reception of a dialogue by fictional characters and the viewers.

Conceptual Engineering, Metasemantic Externalism and Speaker-Meaning

What is the relationship between conceptual engineering and metasemantic externalism? Sally Haslanger has argued that metasemantic externalism justifies the seemingly counterintuitive consequences of her proposed conceptual revisions. But according to Herman Cappelen, metasemantic externalism makes conceptual engineering effectively impossible in practice. After raising objections to Haslanger’s and Cappelen’s views, I argue for a very different picture, on which metasemantic externalism bears very little on conceptual engineering. I argue that, while metasemantic externalism principally operates at the level of semantic-meaning, we should understand conceptual engineering to operate largely at the level of speaker-meaning. This ‘Speaker-Meaning Picture’ has two key benefits. Firstly, it makes conceptual engineering often easy in practice. Secondly, it suggests a new, normative response to the well known objection that conceptual engineering serves only to change the subject.

REFERRING TERMS DALAM SURAT LUKMAN

Penelitian referring terms dalam Surat Lukman bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan referring terms dalam Al-Quran yang memfokuskan pada Surat Lukman pada bentuk definite/indefinite, explicit/inexplicit, speaker meaning, and the implicatur of referring terms pada ayat 12 dan 13. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan Analisis Wacana Model Grasian yang termasuk dalam jenis penelitian kualitatif. Hasil analisis data dengan menggunakan Model Grasian menunjukkan bahwa ayat 12 dan 13 memiliki keragaman dalam bentuk definite/indefinite dan explicit/inexplicit, the referring terms pada first-mention adalah definite/inexplicit, dan indefinite/explicit, lalu pada next-mention adalah definite/inexplicit, definite/explicit, dan zero. Maksud pembicara (The speaker meaning) dideskripsikan pada ayat 13, sedangkan implikatur referring terms dideskripsikan pada ayat 12 dan 13 dalam Surat Al-Lukman.

Utterances without Force

In this paper the author attempts to reconcile two claims recently defended by Mitchell Green. The first is that illocutionary force is part of speaker meaning (Green 2018). The second is that illocutionary force is a product of cultural evolution (Green 2017). Consistent with the second claim, the author argues that some utterances – particularly those produced by infants and great apes – are produced with communicative intent, but without illocutionary force. These utterances lack the normative properties constitutive of force because their utterers have no grasp of the norms that operate on developed speech. If there can be utterances produced with communicative intent that lack force, we must consider how exactly force is a part of speaker meaning. In response the author argues that force is an inessential and acquired part of speaker meaning. As a result we need a conception of communicative intent more basic than illocutionary intent. He spells this out in terms of a ‘perlocutionary’ intention.

Autistic adults anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker’s voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

Typically developing (TD) individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in autistic adults, and tested their timecourse in two pre-registered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences where the speaker’s voice and message were either consistent or inconsistent (e.g. “When we go shopping, I usually look for my favourite wine”, spoken by an adult or a child), and concurrently viewed visual scenes including consistent and inconsistent objects (e.g. wine and sweets). All participants were slower to select the mentioned object in the inconsistent condition. Importantly, eye movements showed a visual bias towards the voice-consistent object, well before hearing the disambiguating word, showing that autistic adults rapidly use the speaker’s voice to anticipate the intended meaning. However, this target bias emerged earlier in the TD group compared to the autism group (2240ms vs 1800ms before disambiguation). Experiment 2 recorded ERPs to explore speaker-meaning integration processes. Participants listened to sentences as described above, and ERPs were time-locked to the onset of the target word. A control condition included a semantic anomaly. Results revealed an enhanced N400 for inconsistent speaker-meaning sentences that was comparable to that elicited by anomalous sentences, in both groups. Overall, contrary to research that has characterised autism in terms of a local processing bias and pragmatic dysfunction, autistic people were unimpaired at integrating multiple modalities of linguistic information, and were comparably sensitive to speaker-meaning inconsistency effects.