The strategic and epistemic properties of `know'

In communicating about certainty, speakers make choices among available formulations and hearers will aim to recover speaker intentions. In two studies, we assess speakers' production choices and hearers' interpretations to test (a) how maximal certainty is formulated, (b) whether those formulations adjust depending on context, and (c) whether speakers' context-driven adjustments are apparent to hearers. We compare the lower-certainty formulation `I believe that the deadline is tomorrow' [`believe'] with two high-certainty formulations, `I know that the deadline is tomorrow' [`know'] and `The deadline is tomorrow' [bare assertion]. Following Williamson (2000) and De Rose (2002), it is unclear which one of the latter two conveys higher epistemic standards. Given the unclear picture, we investigate when (if ever) `know' should be felicitous to utter over the bare assertion. One reason could be that `know' may be uttered felicitously for a wider range of contexts than the bare assertion (De Rose, 1992).Furthermore, `know' might be a useful linguistic tool for speakers to structure the subsequent dialogue to their liking. By presupposing content speakers assume or act as if the conveyed information was already shared knowledge and not up for debate. Thus, hearers might be more inclined to accept and accommodate e.g. Lewis (1979) presupposed content than asserted content.We investigated whether interlocutors align in the way they convey and recover meaning from statements about degrees of belief, comparing their behaviour across cooperative and uncooperative scenarios. Our results suggest (a) that speakers use know>bare assertion>believe for content with successively lower evidentiality scores and that hearers likewise infer know>bare assertion>believe in the same relative ordering. Regarding (b), speakers used `know' strategically in the uncooperative scenario to overstate their knowledge indicating that the usage of `know' is context-dependent. Regarding (c), hearers seemingly fail to recover these production strategies. This may be due to our experimental design where we investigated comprehension from a bystander point of view, or might similarly suggest that speakers succeed with their strategic approach.

Reconsidering subjectification from the perspective of animal signalling

This paper discusses the view that subjectifications (i.e. semantic changes through which words come to index speakers’ evaluations or their attitudes towards a proposition) are primarily motivated by speakers’ need for self-expression (Traugott 2010). Approaching the issue from the perspective of animal signalling (Krebs & Dawkins 1984), we propose that semantic subjectifications are at least equally likely to reflect evaluations and attitudes read into utterances by listeners who attempt to read speakers’ minds. We compare speaker-based and listener-based theories with regard to their predictions, sketch ways in which they can be tested and report findings from first attempts at doing so. First, we report evidence from diachronic corpora. Second, we describe a game-theoretic model that relates listener’s interest in speaker intentions to the average degree of speaker-honesty in a population. Third, we report preliminary results of an experiment in which we tested if listeners were more likely to interpret an utterance as indexing speaker subjectivity correlated if they perceived speakers as more powerful. We conclude that the listener-based hypothesis of subjectifications is solid enough to warrant further investigation.

Incrementality and efficiency shape pragmatics across languages

To correctly interpret a message, people must attend to the context in which it was produced. Here we investigate how this process, known as pragmatic reasoning, is guided by two universal forces in human communication: incrementality and efficiency, with speakers of all languages interpreting language incrementally and making the most efficient use of the incoming information. Crucially, however, the interplay between these two forces results in speakers of different languages having different pragmatic information available at each point in processing, including inferences about speaker intentions. In particular, the position of adjectives relative to nouns (e.g., “black lamp” vs. “lamp black”) makes visual context information available in reverse orders. In an eye-tracking study comparing four unrelated languages that have been understudied with regard to language processing (Catalan, Hindi, Hungarian, and Wolof), we show that speakers of languages with an adjective–noun order integrate context by first identifying properties (e.g., color, material, or size), whereas speakers of languages with a noun–adjective order integrate context by first identifying kinds (e.g., lamps or chairs). Most notably, this difference allows listeners of adjective–noun descriptions to infer the speaker’s intention when using an adjective (e.g., “the black…” as implying “not the blue one”) and anticipate the target referent, whereas listeners of noun–adjective descriptions are subject to temporary ambiguity when deriving the same interpretation. We conclude that incrementality and efficiency guide pragmatic reasoning across languages, with different word orders having different pragmatic affordances.

Social Communication Across the Lifespan: The Influence of Empathy

Studies testing the effects of aging on social communication have mainly focused on one sensory modality, for example using written vignettes. In the current study, we examine the effect of healthy aging, empathy, and anxiety traits on a social communication task using video stimuli that reflect real-world interactions. By means of an online recruitment platform, we asked young, middle-aged, and older adults between the ages 18 and 76 (N=100) to evaluate videos of actors using different forms of literal and nonliteral language, such as sarcasm or teasing. The participants’ task was to infer the speakers’ belief and the speaker’s intention, and we also collected data on self-reported social anxiety levels and empathy. Older participants demonstrated lower accuracy in discriminating nonliteral from literal interactions compared to younger and middle-aged groups, while older adults with higher perspective-taking scores were more accurate at identifying teasing as nonliteral. This effect was partially mediated by empathy. When evaluating speaker intentions, older adults judged sarcasm as friendlier compared to literal negative utterances. Our results expand on age-related similarities and differences in evaluating speaker intentions and we discuss our results in the context of the Tinge Hypothesis.

FUNCTIONING OF THE LATEST LEXICAL BORROWINGS IN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE POLITICAL TEXTS

Foreign language, mainly of American-English origin, actively penetrates into the modern Russian language. The channels of introduction of Englishisms are the media. The article discusses the functioning of a number of the latest lexical borrowings in public speeches of some Russian politicians. A study is being made of the appropriateness of using probable agnonyms and the possibility of their understanding by the audience. An attempt is being made to identify possible speaker intentions. The purpose of the article is to identify and classify agnonyms among the latest lexical borrowings in political texts.

What is meaning? Paul Grice’s answer

The present paper discusses the ideas presented in Paul Grice’s groundbreaking paper ‘Meaning’ published in 1957. The ideas are examined in the perspective of Grice’s ma­ture, complete and elaborate approach to language. The following tenets are indicated as the main features of that approach: (1) though meaning and use are closely connected, they should not be identified; (2) the theory of meaning and language as a whole must be systematic and explanatory; (3) the meaning of linguistic expressions is explicated in terms of psychological states, first of all, in terms of intentions; (4) three kinds of meaning are distinguished: the meaning of a sentence, the uttered content (what is said), and speaker (utterer’s) meaning; (5) conversation is treated as a rational activity submit­ted to some general principles: to recognize the speaker intentions the audience makes a special kind of inference – implicatures; (6) natural languages has no special informal logic; (7) semantic and pragmatic aspects of language has no clear-cut boundary, they in­teract with each other. In discussing Grice’s article ‘Meaning’ a special attention is paid to three points: the difference between natural and non-natural meaning, the applied proce­dure of conceptual analysis (through identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for attributing non-natural (or speaker) meaning and the nature (reflexive or iterative) of speaker intentions which later were called ‘communicative’. Though Grice is commonly regarded to be a philosopher of ordinary language, his views on the character of meaning and conversation testify to the effect that he rejects some important principles of that philosophical school.

Do They Really Mean It? Children’s Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

Interpreting other people’s intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children’s understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children’s responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.

Identification and Analysis of Commissive Speech Acts to Decode Indirect Messages in News Headlines

Headlines carry more indirect messages than the direct ones. The present article aims to explore the indirect messages in CNN headlines written about a variety of political, diplomatic and security affairs in Pakistan. It also investigates the role of the linguistic as well as the contextual elements in the identification of the indirect messages carried by the headlines in the form of speech acts. The research finds that the headlines have pragmatically encoded meanings. The headlines are not just pieces of information, but they are associated with communicating a range of messages related commitment to future actions, possible future actions, announcing future actions, expressing speaker intentions regarding future activities and pledging for future. The linguistic devices and the contexts associated with the headlines play a significant role in the identification and analysis of the indirect messages in the headlines.