ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN GREETINGS AS ADJACENCY PAIRS: A PRAGMATIC STUDY

A speaker customarily opens the conversation by saying greeting to his or her interlocutor. At a glance, greetings maybe not a complicated activity but for the most part, they are highly conventionalized and follow patterned routines. Despite it, the pattern or sequence of greetings along with its type is dynamic and developed. The research aimed to describe the kinds of verbal and non-verbal greetings customarily shown in every exchange, to reveal the sequence of English and Indonesian greetings as adjacency pairs in social exchange. The data consists of English collected from "Twelve Years a Slave" while Indonesian data are obtained from observation, record, and field notes. Both of the data are analyzed by using descriptive qualitative method. The result of this research indicates that there are four types of Indonesian sequential greetings uncovered by Firth's theory, characterized by interjection-question, question-body language, interjection-invitation, and invitation. Each is used in a single utterance for each pair. Second, English data indicate the sequences of greetings uttered by first pair and second are symmetrical, body language preceding question, and body language, on the other hand, Indonesian greeting sequence, the researcher finds an asymmetrical pattern, question preceding question, body language, and visual response. Miscellaneous greeting sequences also appeared in both such as affirmation and facial expression, question and affirmation, affirmation and invitation, invitation and affirmation, and also question and direct answer.

Pragmatic Language Processing in the Adolescent Brain

Adolescence is a developmental period in which social interactions become increasingly important. Successful social interactions rely heavily on pragmatic competence, the appropriate use of language in different social contexts, a skill that is still developing in adolescence. In the present study, we used fMRI to characterize the brain networks underlying pragmatic language processing in typically developing adolescents. We used an indirect speech paradigm whereby participants were presented with question/answer dialogues in which the meaning of the answer had to be inferred from the context, in this case the preceding question. Participants were presented with three types of answers: (1) direct replies, i.e., simple answers to open-ended questions, (2) indirect informative replies, i.e., answers in which the speaker’s intention was to add more information to a yes/no question, and (3) indirect affective replies, i.e., answers in which the speaker’s intention was to express polite refusals, negative opinions or to save face in response to an emotionally charged question. We found that indirect affective replies elicited the strongest response in brain areas associated with language comprehension (superior temporal gyri), theory of mind (medial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junction, and precuneus), and attention/working memory (inferior frontal gyri). The increased activation to indirect affective as opposed to indirect informative and direct replies potentially reflects the high salience of opinions and perspectives of others in adolescence. Our results add to previous findings on socio-cognitive processing in adolescents and extend them to pragmatic language comprehension.

When Will Your Consequentialist Friend Abandon You for the Greater Good?

According to a well-known objection to consequentialism, the answer to the preceding question is alarmingly straightforward: your consequentialist friend will abandon you the minute that she can more efficiently promote goodness via options that do not include her maintaining a relationship with you. The most prominent response to this objection is to emphasize the profound value of friendship for human agents and to remind critics of the distinction between the theory’s criterion of rightness and an effective decision-making procedure. Whether or not this response is viable remains a contentious issue within the now considerable literature generated on the topic, yet it is a curious fact that the debate has unfolded in such a way that the question of when a consequentialist agent ought to break from her indirect methods of promoting the good and revert back to a direct form of consequentialist decision-making has not been decisively settled. In this paper, I claim that the empirical considerations at stake for resolving this question are more complicated than is normally acknowledged; however, I argue that this should not deter sophisticated consequentialists from endorsing flexible psychological dispositions in order to monitor these empirical considerations as best as can be expected for agents with our distinctly human faculties and limitations.

Less Is Not More: Neural Responses to Missing and Superfluous Accents in Context

Prosody, particularly accent, aids comprehension by drawing attention to important elements such as the information that answers a question. A study using ERP registration investigated how the brain deals with the interpretation of prosodic prominence. Sentences were embedded in short dialogues and contained accented elements that were congruous or incongruous with respect to a preceding question. In contrast to previous studies, no explicit prosodic judgment task was added. Robust effects of accentuation were evident in the form of an “accent positivity” (200–500 msec) for accented elements irrespective of their congruity. Our results show that incongruously accented elements, that is, superfluous accents, activate a specific set of neural systems that is inactive in case of incongruously unaccented elements, that is, missing accents. Superfluous accents triggered an early positivity around 100 msec poststimulus, followed by a right-lateralized negative effect (N400). This response suggests that redundant information is identified immediately and leads to the activation of a neural system that is associated with semantic processing (N400). No such effects were found when contextually expected accents were missing. In a later time window, both missing and superfluous accents triggered a late positivity on midline electrodes, presumably related to making sense of both kinds of mismatching stimuli. These results challenge previous findings of greater processing for missing accents and suggest that the natural processing of prosody involves a set of distinct, temporally organized neural systems.

Implementation of DFA in Conceptual and Embodiment Design Using Decision Support Problems

How can Design for Assembly be implemented when the conceptual form of a product being designed is known but the information defining its physical form is vague and incomplete? In this paper, we answer the preceding question from a decision-based perspective. Specifically, we adapt Boothroyd and Dewhurst’s Design for Assembly method for use in conceptual and embodiment design. We achieve this adaptation through the use of Decision Support Problems, and we illustrate our adaptation through an example, namely, the design of an aircraft evacuation system. Our emphasis in this paper is on presenting the conceptual framework used to make suitable Boothroyd and Dewhurst’s Design for Assembly to conceptual design and not the numerical results per se.

Constituting and maintaining activities across sequences: And-prefacing as a feature of question design

ABSTRACTThe role of the connective and is here considered as a preface to questions in spoken interaction. Using data from informal medical encounters, it is argued that and-prefacing is used to link a question to a preceding question/answer pair or pairs. In such contexts, and-prefacing indicates that the questions it prefaces have a routine or agenda-based character. This in turn can be a resource which invokes and sustains an orientation to an activity or course of action that is implemented through a series of question/answer pairs, but transcends any individual pair. The general characteristics of and-prefaced questions are contrasted with “contingent” or “follow-up” questions, which are not normally and-prefaced. Some strategic uses of and-prefaced questions are described, and the role of the device within the more general sociolinguistic context of the data is discussed. (Connectives, conversation analysis, discourse, institutional interaction, medical encounters, turn design)

Approximately Periodic Functionals on C*-Algebras and von Neumann Algebras

In the duality for locally compact groups, much use is made of a version of the Hopf algebra technique in the context of von Neumann algebras, culminating in the theory of Kac algebras [6], [14]. It seems natural to ask whether something like a Hopf algebraic structure can be defined on the pre-dual of a Kac algebra. This leads to the question of whether the multiplication on a von Neumann algebra M, viewed as a linear map m from M ⊙ M (the algebraic tensor product) to M, can be pre-transposed to give a co-multiplication on the pre-dual M*, i.e., a linear map m* from M* to the completion of M* ⊙ M* with respect to some cross-norm. A related question is whether the multiplication on a C*-algebra A can be transposed to give a co-multiplication on the dual A*. Of course, this can be regarded as a special case of the preceding question by taking M = A**, where the double dual A** is identified with the enveloping von Neumann algebra of A.

On Metrizability of Topological Spaces

Our present work is divided into three sections. In §2 we study the metrizability of spaces with a Gδ-diagonal (see Definition 2.1). In §3 we study the metrization of topological spaces by means of collections of (not necessarily continuous) real-valued functions on a topological space. Our efforts, in §§2 and 3, are directed toward answering the following question: “Is every normal, metacompact (see Definition 2.4) Moore space a metrizable space?” which still remains unsolved. (However, Theorems 2.12 through 2.15 and Theorem 3.1 may be helpful in answering the preceding question.) In §4 we prove an apparently new necessary and sufficient condition for the metrizability of the Stone-Čech compactification of a metrizable space and hence for the compactness of a metric space.