Evaluating the relative contributions of copying and reconstruction processes in cultural transmission episodes

The ability to transmit information between individuals through social learning is a foundational component of cultural evolution. However, how this transmission occurs is still debated. On the one hand, the copying account draws parallels with biological mechanisms for genetic inheritance, arguing that learners copy what they observe and novel variations occur through random copying errors. On the other hand, the reconstruction account claims that, rather than directly copying behaviour, learners reconstruct the information that they believe to be most relevant on the basis of pragmatic inference, environmental and contextual cues. Distinguishing these two accounts empirically is difficult based on data from typical transmission chain studies because the predictions they generate frequently overlap. In this study we present a methodological approach that generates different predictions of these accounts by manipulating the task context between model and learner in a transmission episode. We then report an empirical proof-of-concept that applies this approach. The results show that, when a model introduces context-dependent embedded signals to their actions that are not intended to be transmitted, it is possible to empirically distinguish between competing predictions made by these two accounts. Our approach can therefore serve to understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms at play in cultural transmission and can make important contributions to the debate between preservative and reconstructive schools of thought.

The functions of the verb ‘to say’ in the Jordanian Arabic dialect of Irbid

This research investigates the functions of the verb ‘to say’ in the Jordanian Arabic dialect of Irbid (JADI). Relying on a 250,000-word corpus, we propose that the speech verb ‘to say’ in JADI has one main lexical function (i.e. introducing direct or indirect speech) in addition to three functions which the verb develops, i.e. expressing the speaker’s mental state, signalling indirect evidentiality, and revealing the speaker’s incredulity towards the accompanying utterance. We show that in these three developed functions, the verb lost one or more of its lexical properties, because of an (initial or advanced) grammaticalization process whose effects are clearly manifested by the function of the verb as an incredulity marker, in which case the verb is semantically bleached, phonologically reduced, and de-categorized. Following Traugott (1989), Wang et al. (2003) and Hsieh (2012), among others, we propose that the grammaticalization path of the speech verb in JADI into these three functions are motivated by pragmatic inference and (inter)subjectification. The directionality of the grammaticalization process is also shown to be implemented from propositional (through textual) to expressive functions.

Game Theory in Pragmatics

Game theoretic approaches to pragmatics characterize pragmatic inference as a product of interlocutors’ reasoning about their own and others’ possible linguistic choices. These choices are a function of their preferences over communicative outcomes. They are a product of what is communicated and how it is communicated, sometimes also factoring in beliefs about others’ preferences and beliefs. For instance, a speaker may prefer to bring a message across in a polite manner rather than in a more straightforward one, or succinctness may be preferred over long-windedness. At a more fundamental level, a speaker’s goal may be to convey his or her beliefs truthfully, or, the goal may be to deceive one’s audience. Hearers can have other, possibly opposed, preferences. Such subjective preference measures—captured by so-called utility functions—can thereby characterize a wide array of communicative scenarios, ranging from fully cooperative ones to ones with conflicts of interest. They also do away with the need to explicitly formulate conversational principles. Instead, pragmatic inference is directly rooted in interlocutors’ preferences and beliefs. Another cornerstone of game-theoretic approaches to pragmatics is that they often make the degree of mutual reasoning that interlocutors engage in explicit. While the simplest reasoners take only themselves as their reference point, more sophisticated ones iteratively reason about their partner’s choices and reasoning. A final key component common to these approaches is that they take a stance on interlocutors’ rationality: the degree to which they care about matters such as communicative success or manner. While some approaches assume full rationality, with interlocutors always acting according to what best fulfills their preferences, others weaken this assumption to allow for deviations. This makes them particularly suitable to predict and inform empirical data.

Default Semantics

Default Semantics (DS) is a theory of discourse that represents the main meaning intended by the speaker and recovered by the addressee, using truth-conditional, formal, but pragmatics-rich representations. It was originally developed at the University of Cambridge by K. M. Jaszczolt in the late 1990s and has since been applied to a variety of constructions, phenomena, and languages. The category of primary meaning, as it is understood in DS and represented in its semantic qua conceptual representations, cuts across the explicit/implicit divide. Semantic representations are not limited by the constraints imposed by the logical form of the sentence; they allow for its modifications but also, unlike in other post-Gricean theories, they allow for it to be overridden when the main informational content is conveyed through sources other than the linguistic expression itself. DS identifies five sources of information, all operating on an equal footing: word meaning and sentence structure (WS); situation of discourse (SD); properties of human inferential system (IS); stereotypes and presumptions about society and culture (SC); and world knowledge (WK). Since all of the sources can contribute to the truth-conditional representation, the traditional syntactic constraint that ties the representation to the logical form of the uttered sentence could be abandoned, resulting in modeling a cognitively plausible, main message as intended by a Model Speaker and recovered by a Model Addressee. As a result, DS-theoretic representations can pertain either to (i) the logical form of the sentence; (ii) the logical form with saturated indexical expressions; (iii) the logical form that is freely modified; as well as (iv) representations that do not make use of the logical form of the sentence. The identified sources of information are mapped onto four types of processes that interact in producing the representation (called merger representation, or Σ): processing of word meaning and sentence structure (WS); conscious pragmatic inference (CPI); cognitive defaults (CD, capturing strong informativeness, or strong intentionality of the underlying mental states, for example referential rather attributive reading of definite descriptions); and social, cultural, and world knowledge defaults (SCWD, capturing the relevant sociocultural conventions and encyclopedic knowledge). “Defaults” are understood there as automatic interpretations, “shortcuts through conscious inference” for the speaker and for the context, and as such are by definition not cancellable and are immune to controversies engendered by the “noncism”-“defaultism” debates in post-Gricean pragmatics. DS subscribes to the methodological and ontological assumption of compositionality of meaning on the level of such cognitive representations (Σs).

Real-time pragmatic inference across cultures: evidence from a non-industrialized society

Speakers and listeners are thought to routinely make sophisticated inferences, in real time, about their conversation partner’s knowledge state and communicative intentions. However, these inferences have only been studied in industrialized cultures. Communicative expectations may be language-dependent, as are many phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects of language. We study pragmatic inference in communication in the Tsimane’, an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, who have little contact with industrialization or formal education. Using a referential communication task and eye-tracking, we probe how Tsimane' speakers use and understand referential expressions (e.g., ``Hand me the cup.'') across contexts. We manipulated aspects of the visual display to elicit contrastive inferences, including whether the referent was unique or part of a set as well as whether members of the same set differed in size or color. Strikingly, in all cases, patterns of behavior and eye-gaze of Tsimane' and English speakers were qualitatively identical, suggesting that real-time inference may be a core feature of human communication that is shared across cultures rather than a product of life in an industrialized society.

On adverbial clauses in spoken Lithuanian

The aim of the paper is to investigate adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession in spontaneous private communication. The study explores semantic relations between the main and subordinate clauses, grammatical features and predominant conjunctions.The data for the research was collected from the morphologically annotated Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian, namely, its sub-corpus of spontaneous private speech which is used at home, at friends’ place, or which is produced by close friends.The analysis of spontaneous private communication shows that the finite adverbial clauses of time, cause, condition and concession are related to a set of conjunctions, but other indicators such as the use of verbal categories (especially tense, aspect and mood), contextual lexical markers as well as pragmatic inference also help to determine the semantic relationship between the main and the subordinate clause.In a spoken language, temporal clauses are usually combined with the conjunctions kai, kaip ‘when’, kol ‘while’, less frequently – with kada ‘when’; causal clauses are combined with the conjunction nes ‘because; since’, less frequently – with kad and kadangi ‘because’; conditional clauses are typically combined with the conjunction jeigu ‘if’, less frequently – with jei ‘if’, concessive clauses – with the conjunction nors ‘though’. The conjunctions kai ‘when’, kol ‘while’, kadangi ‘because’, jeigu and jei ‘if’ correlate with the particle tai that is very frequent in a spoken language, while the conjunction nors ‘though’ – with the contrastive conjunction bet ‘but’.In the natural language flow, the structure of adverbial sentences is modified: other sentential and discourse units can intervene between the main and the subordinate clauses, and the adverbial conjunction moves from the initial to the medial position.Traditional Lithuanian grammars emphasise that the position of adverbial clauses is undefined: they can appear before or after the main clause. However, the analysis of spontaneous speech shows that the position of a subordinate clause is influenced by the semantic relationship between the clauses. If a subordinate clause refers to a previous action or event, then it dominates in a preposition. Besides, the position of an adverbial clause is also influenced by correlative conjunctions: the main clause with the correlative particle tai dominates in the postposition.The research also revealed that Lithuanian adverbial clauses could function at the discourse level: in dialogues, the structure of a complex sentence is broken down and subordinate adverbial clauses can acquire additional – discourse – functions. Adverbial conjunctions, in their turn, can indicate relations with a previous discourse.

Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology language

Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.

Pragmatic inferences are QUD-sensitive: an experimental study

Implicatures serve as an important testing ground for examining the process of integrating semantic and pragmatic information. Starting with Bott & Noveck (2004), several studies have found that implicature computation is costly. More recently, attention has shifted toward identifying contextual cues that modulate this processing cost. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that calculation rate and processing cost are a function of whether the Question Under Discussion (QUD) supports generating the implicature (Degen 2013; Degen & Tanenhaus 2015). In this paper, we present a novel elicitation task establishing what the relevant QUDs are for a given context (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, a sentence-picture verification study, we extend earlier findings about the effect of QUDs on scalar inference to a different kind of pragmatic inference: it-cleft exhaustivity. For both inferences, we find that under QUDs that bias toward calculation, there is no increase in reaction times, but under QUDs that bias against calculating the inference we observe longer reaction times. These results are most compatible with a constraint-based account of implicature, where QUD is one of many cues. Additionally, we explore whether our findings can be informative in narrowing down precisely what aspect of the inferential process incurs a cost.