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Sperber and Wilson (1996) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) have argued that communication involves two processes, ostension and inference, but they also assume there is a coding-decoding stage of communication and a functional distinction between lexical items and grammatical marking (what they call 'conceptual' vs. 'procedural' information). Sperber and Wilson have accepted a basically Chomskyan view of the innateness of language structure and Universal Grammar.
In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language.
To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance.
In this paper, I revisit the arguments against the use of fuzzy logic in linguistics (or more generally, against a truth-functional account of vagueness). In part, this is an exercise to explain to fuzzy logicians why linguists have shown little interest in their research paradigm. But, the paper contains more than this interdisciplinary service effort that I started out on: In fact, this seems an opportune time for revisiting the arguments against fuzzy logic in linguistics since three recent developments affect the argument. First, the formal apparatus of fuzzy logic has been made more general since the 1970s, specifically by Hajek [6], and this may make it possible to define operators in a way to make fuzzy logic more suitable for linguistic purposes. Secondly, recent research in philosophy has examined variations of fuzzy logic ([18, 19]). Since the goals of linguistic semantics seem sometimes closer to those of some branches of philosophy of language than they are to the goals of mathematical logic, fuzzy logic work in philosophy may mark the right time to reexamine fuzzy logic from a linguistic perspective as well. Finally, the reasoning used to exclude fuzzy logic in linguistics has been tied to the intuition that p and not p is a contradiction. However, this intuition seems dubious especially when p contains a vague predicate. For instance, one can easily think of circumstances where 'What I did was smart and not smart.' or 'Bea is both tall and not tall.' don’t sound like senseless contradictions. In fact, some recent experimental work that I describe below has shown that contradictions of classical logic aren’t always felt to be contradictory by speakers. So, it is important to see to what extent the argument against fuzzy logic depends on a specific stance on the semantics of contradictions. In sum then, there are three good reasons to take another look at fuzzy logic for linguistic purposes.
This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP.
In this paper, data from a current study on bilingual language acquisition and language promotion of children is presented. 96 narratives from 32 Turkish-German and Russian-German bilingual children were examined with regard to the acquisition of narrative ability in three rounds of tests. The macrostructure of each narrative was evaluated based on the theories of Westby (2005), Stein and Glenn (1977) and Gagarina et al. (2012). In the quantitative analysis, the factor age of onset (AoO) was considered and therefore, two hypotheses were introduced: 1) There is an influence of AoO on the narrative ability of L2 German bilingual children. And 2) The narrative ability will converge over time and after three years there will be no difference between the groups. Neither of those hypotheses could be confirmed by the examined narrative data. Hence, other influences on narrative ability were discussed in the last chapter and prospects for further research were given. In sum, the article shows that more narrative data of these children should be collected to make a comprehensive conclusion about the influence of AoO on narrative ability.
The German word also, similar to English so, is traditionally considered to be a sentence adverb with a consecutive meaning, i.e. it indicates that the propositional content of the clause containing it is some kind of consequence of what has previously been said. As a sentence adverb, also has its place within the core of the German sentence, since this is the proper place for an adverb to occur in German. The sentence core offers two proper positions for adverbs: the so-called front field and the middle field. In spoken German, however, also often occurs in sentence-initial position, outside the sentence itself. In this paper, I will use excerpts of German conversations to discuss and illustrate the importance of the sentence positions and the discourse positions for the functions of also on the basis of some German conversations.
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.
This paper is a preliminary comparative study of the relation between word order and information structure in three Null Subject Languages ((NSLs) Spanish, Italian and Greek). The aim is twofold: first I seek to examine the differences and the similarities among these languages in this domain of their syntax. Secon, I investigate the possible derivations of the various patterns and attempt to localize the differences among these languages in different underlying syntactic structures.
Horn's division of pragmatic labour (Horn, 1984) is a universal property of language, and amounts to the pairing of simple meanings to simple forms, and deviant meanings to complex forms. This division makes sense, but a community of language users that do not know it makes sense will still develop it after a while, because it gives optimal communication at minimal costs. This property of the division of pragmatic labour is shown by formalising it and applying it to a simple form of signalling games, which allows computer simulations to corroborate intuitions. The division of pragmatic labour is a stable communicative strategy that a population of communicating agents will converge on, and it cannot be replaced by alternative strategies once it is in place.
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
In LaPolla 1990, I presented arguments to show that Chinese is a language in which there has been no grammaticalizalion of the syntactic relations "subject" and "object". This being the case, then syntactic relations cannot be what determines word order in Chinese. In this paper I will argue that, aside from a semantic rule that the actor of a verb, if expressed, must precede that verb, it is pragmatic relations (information structure) that are the main determinants of word order in Chinese.
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.
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.
The article aims to give an overview about the application of Optimality Theory (OT) to the domain of pragmatics. In the introductory part we discuss different ways to view the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Rejecting the doctrine of literal meaning we conform to (i) semantic underdetermination and (ii) contextualism (the idea that the mechanism of pragmatic interpretation is crucial both for determining what the speaker says and what he means). Taking the assumptions (i) and (ii) as essential requisites for a natural theory of pragmatic interpretation, section 2 introduces the three main views conforming to these assumptions: Relevance theory, Levinson’s theory of presumptive meanings, and the Neo-Gricean approach. In section 3 we explain the general paradigm of OT and the idea of bidirectional optimization. We show how the idea of optimal interpretation can be used to restructure the core ideas of these three different approaches. Further, we argue that bidirectional OT has the potential to account both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatic interpretation. Section 4 lists relevant examples of using the framework of bidirectional optimization in the domain of pragmatics. Section 5 provides some general conclusions. Modeling both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatics opens the way for a deeper understanding of the idea of naturalization and (cultural) embodiment in the context of natural language interpretation.
On the syntax and pragmatics interface : Left-peripheral, medial and right-peripheral focus in greek
(2004)
The present paper explores the extent to which narrow syntax is responsible for the computation of discourse functions such as focus/topic. More specifically, it challenges the claim that language approximates ‘perfection’ with respect to economy, conceptual necessity and optimality in design by reconsidering the roles and interactions of the different modules of the grammar, in particular of syntax and phonology and the mapping between the two, in the representation of pragmatic notions. Empirical and theoretical considerations strongly indicate that narrow syntax is ‘blind’ to properties and operations involving the interpretive components — that is, PF and LF. As a result, syntax-phonology interface rules do not ‘see’ everything in the levels they connect. In essence, the architecture of grammar proposed here from the perspective of focus marking necessitates the autonomy of the different levels of grammar, presupposing that NS is minimally structured only when liberated from any non-syntactic/discourse implementations, i.e., movement operations to satisfy both interface needs. As a result, the model articulated here totally dispenses with discourse projections, i.e. FocusP.
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.
The claim of this paper is that embedded definites can, despite the appearances, be accounted for on the uniqueness approach. Far from being a surprise, we argue that the behavior of embedded definites is actually expected once two independent facts are taken into account: the ability of noun phrases to take scope, i.e., to be interpreted in a different place from their syntactic position, and the interaction of presuppositions and scope-taking elements. Specifically, we analyze embedded definites as a case of inverse linking (Gabbay and Moravscik, 1974; May, 1977): the embedded definite takes scope over the embedding one. The presupposition of the embedded definite is weakened as a result of the independently motivated process of intermediate accommodation (Kratzer, 1989; Berman, 1991). In our case, this process transfers the presupposition of the embedding definite into the restrictor of the embedded one.
Like other scope-taking processes, inverse linking is generally taken to be subject to locality constraints: if a syntactic island, such as a finite clause boundary, intervenes in the path of a scope-taking element, then the resulting reading is unavailable or degraded (Rodman, 1976). Since our account views embedded definites as cases of inverse linking, we predict that inserting an island into an embedded definite, all else being equal, should lead to a similar degradation. We report results from an online survey with 800 participants that confirm this prediction.
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.
This study investigates macrostructure in elicited narratives of 69 monolingual German-, Russian- and Swedish-speaking adults. Using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives), and its Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories, story structure and story complexity, concerning episodic organization, were examined across the 3 languages. As theoretical underpinnings, a multidimensional model of macrostructure was used. This model includes analyses of story structure (SS), in which a narrative merits a maximum score of 17, based on the occurrence of five types of macrostructural components (Internal states as initiating event and as reaction, Goal, Attempt and Outcome), and of story complexity (SC), which measures combinations of Goals, Attempts and Outcomes within one episode. The highest attainable complexity is the GAO-sequence, when a Goal, Attempt and Outcome are produced within the same episode. The results for SS were similar for German, Russian and Swedish, where adults included 11-12 components per story. A more detailed analysis of the individual components revealed striking similarities across the 3 languages, both for frequently used and seldom occurring components. SC did not differ significantly across languages nor across stories, whilst for SS, a slight difference between the two stories was found. We interpret this finding as story complexity (a qualitative measure of macrostructure) being of a more universal nature. Furthermore, our results indicate that caution is warranted when conclusions about children’s narrative skills are to be drawn on the basis of the MAIN Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories.
Introduction
(2019)