Chronal Cues to a Target

A chronal cue informs a hearer about the temporal location of the target as an aid in determining that target. The trigger is lexicalized to require this cue. The chronal cue consists of the trigger moment — the moment of the trigger’s own occurrence — in the speech-external domain, and of the base moment — the moment at which an event in reference occurs — in the speech-internal domain. The target is an interval — the chronal interval - that contains the trigger or base moment or, in the limiting case, coincides with it. A range hearer set the boundaries of this chronal interval. When speech-external, the chronal interval targeted by the trigger can be of three types. It is supersentential if it is longer than and inclusive of the sentence that the trigger appears in; subsentential if shorter than and included within that sentence; and cosentential if coextensive with that sentence.

Epistemic Cues to a Target

An epistemic cue is any information that a hearer derives from her own knowledge that then helps her determine the speaker’s intended target. The term “knowledge” here is meant to apply broadly. It covers both explicit (declarative) and implicit (procedural) knowledge; both “knowledge” and “belief”; both long-held and recently acquired knowledge; both general and local knowledge in the collocutors’ common ground; and both nonlinguistic and linguistic knowledge. Nonlinguistic knowledge is basal knowledge about first-order phenomena. Linguistic knowledge, then, is meta-knowledge about the lexicon and syntax of a language and about the principles of discourse management that the collocutors use to represent the first-order phenomena. Linguistic knowledge about discourse management often involves knowledge of Mithun’s newsworthiness principle and of our counterfactual principle. The use of epistemic cues shows extensive parallelism across the speech-external and speech-internal domains. In both domains, epistemic cues can help a hearer find a target within a higher-level conceptual complex, set a boundary around a locative target, and select the target from competing candidates. And largely the same epistemic cues from both nonlinguistic and linguistic knowledge are used in both domains.

Targetive Cues to a Target

Targetive cues are properties exhibited by a speaker’s intended target itself. They help guide the hearer toward singling that target out. Where the target is speech-external, the targetive cues are sensory stimuli that the target produces and that the hearer perceives. Where the target is speech-internal, the targetive cues are phonetic, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic properties of the target that the hearer either perceives or apprehends and then holds in short-term memory. There are three types of targetive cues, and the character of the lexical cues in the speaker’s utterance determines which one is relevant. In one case, the lexical cues ascribe features to the target that are definitive for its determination. They evoke in the hearer a category that is effective for recognizing instances of the target. The hearer under-takes a feature search over her perceivable environment to find the corresponding targetive feature cues.

Co-Form Cues to a Target

The linguistic material around a trigger comprises its co-forms. A co-form cue consists of any information provided by a co-form that helps the hearer determine the target of that trigger. Speculatively, co-form cues are provided only by the semantics of co-forms, not by their formal characteristics. Co-form semantics can lie at any of the three conceptual levels, from the literal-semantic, to the immediate-pragmatic, to the further-knowledge level.

Hearer-Focus Cues to a Target

A hearer-focus cue is a cue metacognitively available to a hearer indicating that her own current object of attention may be the speaker’s intended target. In the sequence leading to its use, the hearer first observably directs her attention to some phenomenon. This is her focusing behavior. The speaker then observes this behavior, determines the phenomenon she is focusing on, proceeds to perceive that phenomenon himself, and produces an utterance with a trigger to target it. On hearing the trigger, the hearer is alerted to look for cues to its target. She ends up accepting the possibility that her own focus of attention is the speaker’s intended target, especially if other cue categories are poorly represented. Parameters along which this procedure can vary include the sensory modality of the phenomenon that the hearer is focusing on; the hearer’s reason for focusing on it; whether the hearer does or does not anticipate the phenomenon

Cue Conflict and Its Resolution

Elsewhere in this book, the cues of a speaker’s communication in the speech-external domain are all compatible with each other. But such cues can also partly conflict in a well-formed pattern of constructive discrepancy, which is designed to prompt the hearer to resolve the conflict and form a coherent conceptual complex. A hearer processes a conflicted communication of this sort by putting it through an assessment and a resolution phase. In the assessment phase, the hearer first uses a consistency-checking operation to determine that the communication is indeed conflicted. This operation rests on a plausibility principle and a noncontradiction principle. If the communication is determined to be conflicted, he puts it through a clustering operation that segregates its cues into two clusters that are each internally compatible but that are incompatible with each other. He then puts these two clusters through an evaluation operation that assigns opposite states of validity to them. It designates the cues of one cluster and the target they indicate as valid, while designating the cues of the other cluster and the target they indicate as anomalous. This operation rests on a greater benefit principle and a priority principle.

Interaction Sequences and Joint Attention

We set forth two analytic frameworks — one pertaining to sequences of steps in a discourse AND one to common attention — to which triggers have specific relations. The framework pertaining to discourse sequences can be outlined as follows. A simplex morpheme or larger construction can be lexicalized to require either an inner or an outer sequence, which in turn can be either a single-actor or a cross-actor sequence. An interaction sequence, then, is an outer cross-actor sequence in which two collocutors alternate steps in the sequence. The steps of an interaction sequence can be either all overt or in part covert, and overt steps can be either all verbal actions or in part nonverbal actions. A step can in turn consist of a sequence of overt or covert components.

Core Cues to a Target

A core cue is an element of information about the target that the trigger is lexicalized to provide to the hearer. Seemingly all triggers provide such core cues in addition to their main function of initiating the 3-stage targeting procedure in the hearer. Core cues can be divided into those that specify intrinsic as against contingent properties of the target. Intrinsic properties include a target’s ontological category, plexity, animacy and sapience, sex, gender, substantiality, domainality, and constituent type. Its ontological category, in turn, can be that of an entity, an action, an event, a spatial location, a temporal location, a path, a manner, a quality, a quantity, and a degree, among others. Contingent properties of the target that triggers’ core cues can specify include its degree of remove, direction of remove, perceivability, compactness, and syntactic location. A target’s degree of remove from a reference point, in turn, can pertain to its spatial, temporal, personal, social, or experiential remove, while this last can in turn pertain to memorial, attentional, recognitional, or affective/perspectival remove.

Overview

Relevant to targeting, space and time in language can be understood as conceptual constructs that share numerous properties — e.g., they are matrices that are straight, evenly distributed, continuous, indefinitely extensive, and stationary, and that contain boundaries, bounded-off portions, and locations. Time uniquely has the properties of progression and grading. The theoretical framework proposed here for the targeting system distinguishes itself from approaches to comparable phenomena found in construction grammar, generative linguistics, computational linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language philosophy, and semiotics. Its seemingly unique features include a trigger’s initiating a hearer’s search for cues to a target, the division of such cues into ten categories, the hearer’s processing in determining this target, and the unity of this processing whether the target is inside or outside speech.

Perichronal Cues to a Target

A perichronal cue is any temporal property of an element other than the trigger that helps the hearer determine the target. Such perichronal cues are of either the majority indirect type or the minority direct type. Perichronal cues of the majority type are the temporal properties of the elements near a trigger that indicate which of those elements can serve as cues to its target. They are indirect because they help determine the cues, not the target itself. They variously require that certain conditions be met. Perichronal cues of the minority type are the temporal properties of the elements near a trigger that indicate certain temporal properties of its target. They are direct because they help determine the target itself, not just cues to it. They pertain only to the target of a subsentential prosodic trigger — specifically, only to the precise time and duration of its occurrence. The elements providing such cues are basically either co-forms or gestures. The temporal properties of these elements that can serve as perichronal cues are their temporal relation to each other and to the trigger, and the speed of their production.