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In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that what is communicated through an utterance is not merely an explicature upon which implicature(s) are recovered, but rather a propositional complex that contains both explicit and implicit information. More specifically, I propose that this information is constructed on the fly as the interpreter processes every lexical item in its turn while parsing the utterance in real time, in this way creating a string of ad hoc concepts. While hearing an utterance and incrementally constructing a context, the propositional complex communicated by an utterance is pragmatically narrowed and simultaneously pragmatically broadened in order to incorporate only the set of optimally relevant propositions with respect to a specific point in the interpretation. The narrowing of propositions from the initial context at each stage allows relevant propositions to be carried on to the new level, while their broadening adds to the communicated propositional complex new propositions that are linked to the lexical item that is processed at every step of the interpretation process.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
Die Sprache ist ein hervorragendes Werk, das durch Interaktion entsteht und mit dem wir eine Wirklichkeit erzeugen, die eine sowohl konstruierende als auch destruierende Rolle spielen kann. Manche Linguisten vergleichen den Sprachgebrauch mit dem Sprachspiel. Mit seiner Hervorhebung der Sprachverwendung und seinem einprägsamen und geschliffenen Ausspruch 'Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache' gilt Wittgenstein als Vorgänger der linguistischen Pragmatik. Seine Äußerungen inspirierten die Theoretiker der Sprechakttheorie. Nach Austin verläuft der Sprachgebrauch in Sprechakten, wobei jeder Akt aus den Teilakten Lokution, Illokution und Perlokution entsteht und auch defizitäre Sprechakte möglich sind. Aus der Tatsache, dass der Anzahl der Kontexte keine Grenzlinie zu ziehen ist, dass es also unendlich viele Kontexte und dementsprechend so viele Funktionen gibt, können wir ebenfalls auf eine unendliche Zahl von expliziten oder impliziten Sprechakten schließen. Die Sprechakte haben einen modalen Charakter, der a) vom Blickpunkt des Sprechers und des Hörers, b) vom Kontext, in dem sich die Sprechakte abspielen, c) von der Gesellschaft als der Trägerin einer Kultur und d) von den Naturumständen, unter denen die Interaktanten leben, abhängt. Die Sprechakte gelingen nur dann, wenn die Interaktanten kooperationsbereit sind. Das allein genügt aber nicht; auch das Höflichkeitsprinzip ist sehr konstitutiv. In dieser Arbeit werden besondere türkische Sprechakte analysiert, die zeigen, dass die Äußerungstypen nicht immer mit den Illokutionen übereinstimmen. Das kann vom Kontext und auch von suprasegmentalen Merkmalen des jeweiligen Sprechaktes abhängen.
In this paper, we outline the foundations of a theory of implicatures. It divides into two parts. The first part contains the base model. It introduces signalling games, optimal answer models, and a general definition of implicatures in terms of natural information. The second part contains a refinement in which we consider noisy communication with efficient clarification requests. Throughout, we assume a fully cooperative speaker who knows the information state of the hearer. The purpose of this paper is not the study of examples. Our concern is the framework for doing these studies.
Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.
The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the discussion of asymmetries between natural language comprehension and production. The theoretical debate will be concentrated on two different ways of interpreting bidirection: first, bidirectional optimization as a psychologically realistic online mechanism; second, bidirectional optimization as an offline phenomenon of fossilizing optimal form-meaning pairs. It will be argued that neither of these extreme views fits completely with the empirical data when taken per se.
Ever since the discovery of neural networks, there has been a controversy between two modes of information processing. On the one hand, symbolic systems have proven indispensable for our understanding of higher intelligence, especially when cognitive domains like language and reasoning are examined. On the other hand, it is a matter of fact that intelligence resides in the brain, where computation appears to be organized by numerical and statistical principles and where a parallel distributed architecture is appropriate. The present claim is in line with researchers like Paul Smolensky and Peter Gärdenfors and suggests that this controversy can be resolved by a unified theory of cognition – one that integrates both aspects of cognition and assigns the proper roles to symbolic computation and numerical neural computation.
The overall goal in this contribution is to discuss formal systems that are suitable for grounding the formal basis for such a unified theory. It is suggested that the instruments of modern logic and model theoretic semantics are appropriate for analyzing certain aspects of dynamical systems like inferring and learning in neural networks. Hence, I suggest that an active dialogue between the traditional symbolic approaches to logic, information and language and the connectionist paradigm is possible and fruitful. An essential component of this dialogue refers to Optimality Theory (OT) – taken as a theory that likewise aims to overcome the gap between symbolic and neuronal systems. In the light of the proposed logical analysis notions like recoverability and bidirection are explained, and likewise the problem of founding a strict constraint hierarchy is discussed. Moreover, a claim is made for developing an "embodied" OT closing the gap between symbolic representation and embodied cognition.
Mention some of all
(2006)
In the interpretation of natural language one may distinguish three types of dynamics: there are the acts or moves that are made; there are structural relations between subsequent moves; and interlocutors reason about the beliefs and intentions of the participants in a particular language game. Building on some of the formalisms developed to account for the first two types of dynamics, I will generalize and formalize Gricean insights into the third type, and show by means of a case study that such a formalization allows a direct account of an apparent ambiguity: the ‘exhaustive’ versus the ‘mention some’ interpretation of questions and their answers. While the principles which I sketch, like those of Grice, are motivated by assumptions of rationality and cooperativity, they do not presuppose these assumptions to be always warranted.
Příspěvek pojednává o pojmu konotace 'emocionální'. Tato konotace je na jedné straně souĉástí slovního významu a koresponduje s denotativními komponenty významu. Jako příklad jsou uvedena verba dicendi oznaĉující řeĉový akt 'vychloubání'. Na druhé straně vystupuje 'emocionální' jako souĉást významu textu. Na příkladech z románu Almy M. Karlin jsou představeny dva zpŧsoby, kterými je moţno vysvětlit konotaci textu: jako aktualizaci a předání konotací daných jazykovým systémem a jako povědomí o uţití slov bez emocionální konotace v systému jazyka, které se vytváří teprve v textu.