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Journal articles on the topic 'Experimental Pragmatics'
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1
Garrett, Merrill, and Robert M. Harnish. "Experimental pragmatics." Pragmatics and Cognition 15, no. 1 (May 11, 2007): 65–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.15.1.07gar.
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Grice proposed to investigate ‘the total signification of the utterance’. One persistent criticism of Grice’s taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information. This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: ‘generalized implicature’, ‘explicature’, ‘unarticulated constituents’, ‘default heuristics’, ‘impliciture’. In this study we first take a sample of such phenomena and, from the point of view of pure pragmatics, survey the central descriptions of the content expressed and the mechanisms that might deliver these contents. We then, from the point of view of experimental pragmatics, focus on two accounts: Levinson’s I-heuristic, and Bach’s standardization. We find experimental evidence for the existence of such implicitures, and for the use of language specific standardizations over language neutral background information.
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Blutner, Reinhard. "Optimality-theoretic pragmatics meets experimental pragmatics." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 51 (January 1, 2009): 27–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.51.2009.373.
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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.
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Zubeldia, Larraitz. "Experimental pragmatics/semantics." Journal of Pragmatics 44, no. 14 (November 2012): 2100–2103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.013.
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Fischer, Kerstin, and Alicja Depka Prondzinska. "Experimental Contrastive Pragmatics Using Robots." Contrastive Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (April 3, 2020): 82–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26660393-bja10004.
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Abstract In this paper, we explore how robots can be used to study pragmatic strategies across a number of languages. Robots can assume many of the roles played by human interaction partners in a range of situations. They can be programmed to produce specific behaviours, each time repeating a behaviour in an identical way for as often as necessary. Thus, robots can be useful tools for investigating human behaviour in certain situations and even in cross-cultural contexts. We explore this use of robots in two case studies – one which investigates the delivery of bad news in Danish, German and English, and one which examines the giving of feedback in Danish, German and Polish. In both studies, systematic intercultural differences become apparent in the pragmatic strategies that are adopted. On the basis of the results, we discuss the advantages, potential pitfalls and possible solutions of using robots in the study of contrastive pragmatics.
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Taguchi, Naoko. "Teaching Pragmatics: Trends and Issues." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31 (March 2011): 289–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0267190511000018.
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Theoretical, empirical, and practical interest in pragmatic competence and development for second language (L2) learners has resulted in a large body of literature on teaching L2 pragmatics. This body of literature has diverged into two major domains: (a) a group of experimental studies directly testing the efficacy of various instructional methods in pragmatics learning and (b) research that explores optimal instructional practice and resources for pragmatic development in formal classroom settings. This article reviews literature in these two domains and aims at providing a collective view of the available options for pragmatics teaching and the ways that pragmatic development can best be promoted in the classroom. In the area of instructional intervention, this article reviews studies under the common theoretical second language acquisition paradigms of explicit versus implicit instruction, input processing instruction, and skill acquisition and practice. In the area of classroom practice and resources, three domains of research and pedagogical practices are reviewed: material development and teacher education, learner strategies and autonomous learning, and incidental pragmatics learning in the classroom. Finally, this article discusses unique challenges and opportunities that have been embraced by pragmatics teaching in the current era of poststructuralism and multiculturalism.
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Kennedy, Alan, Wayne Murray, and Claire Boissiere. "Parafoveal pragmatics revisited." European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16, no. 1-2 (January 2004): 128–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09541440340000187.
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Phelan, Mark. "Experimental Pragmatics: An Introduction for Philosophers." Philosophy Compass 9, no. 1 (January 2014): 66–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12093.
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Cummins, Chris. "Experimental pragmatics/semantics (review)." Language 88, no. 3 (2012): 660–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2012.0062.
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Gibbs, Raymond W. "Stability and variability in linguistic pragmatics." Pragmatics and Society 1, no. 1 (August 13, 2010): 32–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ps.1.1.03gib.
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The study of linguistic pragmatics is always caught in the wonderful tension between seeking broad human pragmatic abilities and showing the subtle ways that communication is dependent on specific people and social situations. These different foci on areas of stability and variability in linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior are often accompanied by very different theoretical accounts of how and why people act, speak, and understand in the ways they do. Within contemporary research in experimental pragmatics, there are always instances of some people behaving in regular patterns and other people failing to adhere to putative pragmatic principles. My aim in this article is to broadly describe a way of thinking about stability and instability in linguistic pragmatics as emerging from people’s self-organizing tendencies. This view claims that both broad regularities and specific variations in human behavior, like all natural systems, can be accounted for by self-organizational processes that operate without explicit internal rules, blueprints, or mental representations. A major implication of this perspective is that pragmatics and society are seen as dynamically interacting constraints operating on multiple time-scales of experience.
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Foster-Cohen, Susan H. "Exploring the boundary between syntax and pragmatics: relevance and the binding of pronouns." Journal of Child Language 21, no. 1 (February 1994): 237–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900008734.
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ABSTRACTThis paper explores the interface between syntax and pragmatics, focusing on the binding of pronouns and the pragmatics of the paradigms used to test this aspect of syntactic knowledge. Reinhart's (1986) version of Binding Theory (which accords a specific role to pragmatics in processes of pronoun resolution) and Sperber & Wilson's (1986) Theory of Relevance are used to examine the syntax and pragmatics of pronoun interpretation. A set of predictions based on Relevance Theory are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. The paper concludes that Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge and argues that pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge.
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Derwing, Tracey M., Erin Waugh, and Murray J. Munro. "Pragmatically speaking." Applied Pragmatics 3, no. 2 (October 6, 2021): 107–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ap.20001.der.
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Abstract The relationship between second language (L2) comprehensibility and pragmatics is explored in two experiments involving instruction of speech acts to learners enrolled in a Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada program. The study was designed to determine whether improved pragmatic competence results in enhanced comprehensibility (how easy L2 speech is to understand). Two intact classes participated; one received 25 hours of pragmatics instruction, while the control group received the standard curriculum (no focus on pragmatics). Both classes were recorded in role-plays based on several scenarios at pre- and post-test. Transcriptions of the role-plays were coded according to a rubric; although the control group showed superior performance at the outset, the experimental group’s scores exceeded those of the Control group at post-test with a medium effect size. A subset of pre- and posttest role-plays (two refusals and two requests) were randomly assigned to 56 native English listeners who rated the speech samples for social appropriateness, comprehensibility, and fluency. The experimental group’s posttest productions on all scenarios were perceived as significantly more socially appropriate, with three scenarios showing significant improvement in comprehensibility. Although one scenario improved in fluency, another showed a decline. The results suggest that pragmatics instruction enhances L2 speech comprehensibility.
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Meibauer, Jörg. "Pragmatic evidence, context, and story design: an essay on recent developments in experimental pragmatics." Language Sciences 34, no. 6 (November 2012): 768–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2012.04.014.
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Timofeeva, Mariya K. "Linguistic scales: current state-of-the-art." NSU Vestnik. Series: Linguistics and Intercultural Communication 17, no. 3 (2019): 5–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.25205/1818-7935-2019-17-3-5-17.
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The aim of this article consists in reviewing the basic areas of studying language scales in pragmatics; several prospects of their investigation are discussed. Presently, language scales are the object of intensive research in semantics and pragmatics, from linguistic, logical, psycholinguistic, and neuro-linguistic perspectives. We are interested mainly in pragmatics (although the area of semantics is also considered) and concentrate on linguistic rather than logical, psycholinguistic, or neuro-linguistic aspects. The article continues the series of publications intending to review and systematize pragmatic investigation in basic topical areas. An interest in studying linguistic scales in pragmatics has increased primarily due to the works of H. P. Grice, L. Horn, G. Gazdar, and S. Levinson. An important class of general pragmatic principles of communication was introduced by H. P. Grice and then was elaborated on greater detail in neo-gricean pragmatics. This class of principles specifies quantity characteristics of communication, and can be defined in terms of scales. Language scales give rise to a special class of implicatures called “scalar implicatures”. In many cases, it is necessary for a speaker to choose some position on a scale. Scalar implicature appears as a result of this choice. Each position potentially generates a certain set of implications. This pragmatic phenomenon is intensively studied in linguistics, logic, and experimental investigations. The literature in the area is ample; the article draws only a general picture of the area. The article proposes: 1) to elicit a system of potential language scales for a concrete language; 2) to consider individual / situational scales; 3) to consider dynamics of scales in speech (in accordance with basic ideas of dynamic semantics). The proposed areas of practical application are the following: stylistic analysis and studying an author’s style, modelling of reasoning and communication (particularly in dialogue systems), constructing formal ontologies of different subject areas.
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Джарбо Сaмер Омар. "The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: The Case of the Singular Feminine Demonstrative in Jordanian Arabic." East European Journal of Psycholinguistics 4, no. 1 (June 27, 2017): 63–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2017.4.1.jar.
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The aim in this study is to investigate the interface between semantics and pragmatics in relation to the use of the indexical demonstrative ‘haay’ ‘this-S.F.’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It is argued here that an analysis of meaning in relation to context-sensitivity inherent in the use of ‘haay’ can give evidence to the view that semantic and pragmatic processes can be distinguished from each other. I have found that the meaning of ‘haay’ consists of three distinct levels: linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic meaning. The denotational and conventional senses of ‘haay’ comprise its linguistic meaning, its semantic meaning is generated when any of the variables in the linguistic meaning is selected in relation to 'narrow context', the pragmatic meaning depends on relating the semantic meaning to an entity in the physical context of interaction. The results of this study support the view that the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be distinctively demarcated.
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Barón, Júlia, and M. Luz Celaya. "‘May I do something for you?’: The effects of audio-visual material (captioned and non-captioned) on EFL pragmatic learning." Language Teaching Research 26, no. 2 (January 7, 2022): 238–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13621688211067000.
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The present study deals with the effect of audio-visual material for second language (L2) pragmatic learning in the foreign language classroom. More specifically, it analyzes whether being exposed to captioned and non-captioned input in an experimental condition entailing no instruction on pragmatics might have any influence on the learners’ pragmatic performance. To this aim, two intact classes ( N = 31) of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1 level were exposed to videos with captions and without captions, respectively. Before and after watching the videos, all the students were asked to carry out a role-play task with situations like those in the videos. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyze the learners’ performance in terms of types and number of strategies to perform speech acts (quantitative) and in terms of pragmatic appropriateness (qualitative). Findings show that both groups used more polite strategies after watching the videos, regardless of the captioned/non-captioned condition, which seems to confirm the contribution of audio-visual material for the learning of the L2 pragmatics in an incidental way. Concerning pragmatic appropriateness, we found that learners in the captioned condition produced more pragmalinguistically appropriate role-plays than learners in the non-captioned condition, thus suggesting a positive effect of captioned material on the learning of the L2 pragmatics. Such results are discussed in relation to the few previous similar studies in the field.
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Babarczy, Anna, Andrea Balázs, and Fruzsina Krizsai. "Preschoolers’ Metaphor Comprehension. Methodological Issues in Experimental Pragmatics." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 11, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 133–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2019-0017.
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AbstractThere exists a variety of theoretical frameworks attempting to account for the nature, comprehension, and use of everyday metaphor. Since these frameworks use different operational definitions of metaphor, they tend to view the psycholinguistic process of comprehending metaphorical language and the various factors that may play a role in metaphor processing from different perspectives. The first part of the paper briefly summarizes four of these theoretical approaches to everyday metaphor (Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Similarity Theory, Relevance Theory, and the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis) and discusses some consequences of the diversity of theories that present a puzzle or prove to be undesirable for empirical research. The areas discussed include the various dimensions of metaphor categorization, the role of linguistic context, and the effects of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive skills of the comprehender. Drawing on the discussion in the first part, the second part of the paper outlines an experiment designed with reference to Giora’s Optimal Innovation Hypothesis in which preschoolers’ metaphor comprehension is explored as a function of the familiarity of the expression’s literal meaning and the perceived creativity of the metaphorical use. This experiment further explores the relationship between children’s metaphor comprehension and other cognitive abilities such as intention attribution. This method allows us to quantify metaphor comprehension and preference in the context of pragmatic development and general cognitive skills.
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Rees, Alice. "Taking the plunge: Tips for preparing, attending, and presenting at your first conference." PsyPag Quarterly 1, no. 99 (June 2016): 62–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.53841/bpspag.2016.1.99.62.
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The first conference I attended was during the first year of my PhD studies and I gave an oral presentation. The conference was in experimental pragmatics (XPRAG) and was held in Chicago. XPRAG is a biannual conference which brings together people from a range of backgrounds, including psychology and linguistics, who have an interest in experimental approaches to studying pragmatic phenomena. Reflecting on my experience, I have compiled a list of hints and tips which I hope will help others when they come to presenting their research at conferences.
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Kim, Hyekyeng. "THE EFFECTS OF PRAGMATIC INSTRUCTION ON THE PRAGMATIC AWARENESS AND PRODUCTION OF KOREAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS." Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, no. 2 (September 30, 2017): 133. http://dx.doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v7i2.8136.
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Despite the ongoing research of interlanguage pragmatics, intervention studies concerning pragmatic instruction have not been conducted as actively. The present study aims to investigate the effects of pragmatic instruction on Korean university students specifically regarding compliment responses. The effects of the instruction were examined in terms of the students' pragmatic awareness and production, according to the various language proficiency levels of the students. A total of 106 Korean university students from various majors participated in the study. The experimental group received explicit pragmatic instruction, which entailed metapragmatic instruction, awareness raising activities, and output practice regarding compliment responses, whereas the control group was exposed to the target features with no explicit instruction. A set of pragmatic awareness questionnaire and discourse completion tasks were administered as the data collection instruments and an eclectic design was adopted to analyze the effects of the instruction regarding their pragmatic awareness and production. The results indicate that explicit pragmatic instruction provided positive effects for raising the level of pragmatic awareness in the low group. Additionally, both the intermediate and low groups showed a significant improvement in production, as confirmed by the examination between and within subjects, and also displayed a range of formulaic expressions with a less idiosyncrasy attributed to first language transfer. These results call for further attention to pragmatics in second language (L2) teaching and learning.
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Benz, Anton, Katja Jasinskaja, and Uli Sauerland. "Theoretical Pragmatics: An Introduction." International Review of Pragmatics 4, no. 2 (2012): 133–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18773109-00040202.
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The last decade witnessed a surge of new research in pragmatics, fuelled by the emergence of new theoretical frameworks, an increased interest in the semantics-pragmatics interface, and the establishment of experimental pragmatics as a new research paradigm. Many of these developments concern the line of pragmatics which originated with the work of H. Paul Grice. Of new theoretical frameworks, we may mention different variants of optimality and game theoretic approaches, localist semantic theories of embedded implicatures, logical globalist formalisations of Gricean pragmatics, and multi-layered semantics for conventional implicatures. At the same time, research in older frameworks such as Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean pragmatics continued, and new investigations of speech act and presupposition theory emerged. This development led to a diversification of theoretical approaches, a synthesis of which is desirable but not to be expected in the near future. This issue is intended as a contribution to the enhancement of mutual awareness and the discussion of each other’s results.
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Harnish, Robert, and Merrill Garrett. "Q-Phenomena, I-Phenomena and Impliciture: Some Experimental Pragmatics." International Review of Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2009): 84–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187731009x455857.
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AbstractElements of communicative content that are not expressed by constituents of the sentence uttered, what we will call "unexpressed elements of content" (UECs), played an important role in the history and development of generative grammar. In the 80's and 90's, mostly inspired by the work of Grice, UECs and mechanisms for recovering them not contemplated by linguistic theory of the time, began to surface under a variety of labels. We will collectively refer to these phenomena as 'impliciture' (extending Bach: 1994). Impliciture phenomena raise some interesting questions, only some of which is the field in a position to say anything about at present. Levinson (2000) has taken the useful step of distinguishing what we call "Q-phenomena", mostly related to linguistic scales, from "I-phenomena", mostly related to stereotypical information. Starting in the late 80's, experimental work began on the nature of these unspoken contents and their attendant mechanisms. In a recent study, Garrett and Harnish (2007) looked at I-phenomena, that have been proposed to depend on stereotypical background information. We asked whether these contents really are delivered by such mechanisms as "default heuristics", operating on general background knowledge, or whether they might be more tied to language via something like the "standardization" of a form for a certain use. Initial results for the materials tested seem to favor standardization as a mechanism for delivering this content. Completed research by Orjada (2007) and Rybarova (2007) extends the study of impliciture to additional examples and new populations. One assesses performance in RH damaged populations. The other contrasts performance for populations with high and low frontal lobe function.
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Politzer, Guy, and Laura Macchi. "Reasoning and pragmatics." Mind & Society 1, no. 1 (March 2000): 73–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf02512230.
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Erk, Katrin. "The Probabilistic Turn in Semantics and Pragmatics." Annual Review of Linguistics 8, no. 1 (January 14, 2022): 101–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-015515.
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This article provides an overview of graded and probabilistic approaches in semantics and pragmatics. These approaches share a common set of core research goals: ( a) a concern with phenomena that are best described as graded, including a vast lexicon of words whose meanings adapt flexibly to the contexts in which they are used, as well as reasoning under uncertainty about interlocutors, their goals, and their strategies; ( b) the need to show that representations are learnable, i.e., that a listener can learn semantic representations and pragmatic reasoning from data; ( c) an emphasis on empirical evaluation against experimental data or corpus data at scale; and ( d) scaling up to the full size of the lexicon. The methods used are sometimes explicitly probabilistic and sometimes not. Previously, there were assumed to be clear boundaries among probabilistic frameworks, classifiers in machine learning, and distributional approaches, but these boundaries have been blurred. Frameworks in semantics and pragmatics use all three of these, sometimes in combination, to address the four core research questions above.
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Erk, Katrin. "The Probabilistic Turn in Semantics and Pragmatics." Annual Review of Linguistics 8, no. 1 (January 14, 2022): 101–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-015515.
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This article provides an overview of graded and probabilistic approaches in semantics and pragmatics. These approaches share a common set of core research goals: ( a) a concern with phenomena that are best described as graded, including a vast lexicon of words whose meanings adapt flexibly to the contexts in which they are used, as well as reasoning under uncertainty about interlocutors, their goals, and their strategies; ( b) the need to show that representations are learnable, i.e., that a listener can learn semantic representations and pragmatic reasoning from data; ( c) an emphasis on empirical evaluation against experimental data or corpus data at scale; and ( d) scaling up to the full size of the lexicon. The methods used are sometimes explicitly probabilistic and sometimes not. Previously, there were assumed to be clear boundaries among probabilistic frameworks, classifiers in machine learning, and distributional approaches, but these boundaries have been blurred. Frameworks in semantics and pragmatics use all three of these, sometimes in combination, to address the four core research questions above.
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Coppock, Elizabeth, and Thomas Brochhagen. "Diagnosing truth, interactive sincerity, and depictive sincerity." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23 (August 24, 2013): 358. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v23i0.2662.
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This paper presents two experimental findings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modifiers ("at least", "at most"). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modifiers is an implicature, not an entailment, and contrasts with results obtained using an inference-judgment paradigm, suggesting that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to certain pragmatic infelicities that inference-judgment tasks are sensitive to. The second finding is not predicted by any previous theory: In a scenario with N objects, it is not consistently judged true that there are ‘at most N + 1’ objects, even though it is consistently judged true that there are ‘at least N − 1’ objects. To explain this, we propose a novel pragmatic principle requiring that the scenario depicted by a sentence must be considered possible by the speaker (the Maxim of Depictive Sincerity). Put together, the two findings show that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to some aspects of pragmatics, but not all.
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Benz, Anton, and Reinhard Blutner. "Papers on pragmasemantics." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 51 (January 1, 2009): 216. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.51.2009.371.
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Optimality theory as used in linguistics (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006) and cognitive psychology (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) is a theoretical framework that aims to integrate constraint based knowledge representation systems, generative grammar, cognitive skills, and aspects of neural network processing. In the last years considerable progress was made to overcome the artificial separation between the disciplines of linguistic on the one hand which are mainly concerned with the description of natural language competences and the psychological disciplines on the other hand which are interested in real language performance.
The semantics and pragmatics of natural language is a research topic that is asking for an integration of philosophical, linguistic, psycholinguistic aspects, including its neural underpinning. Especially recent work on experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck & Sperber, 2005; Garrett & Harnish, 2007) has shown that real progress in the area of pragmatics isn’t possible without using data from all available domains including data from language acquisition and actual language generation and comprehension performance. It is a conceivable research programme to use the optimality theoretic framework in order to realize the integration.
Game theoretic pragmatics is a relatively young development in pragmatics. The idea to view communication as a strategic interaction between speaker and hearer is not new. It is already present in Grice' (1975) classical paper on conversational implicatures. What game theory offers is a mathematical framework in which strategic interaction can be precisely described. It is a leading paradigm in economics as witnessed by a series of Nobel prizes in the field. It is also of growing importance to other disciplines of the social sciences. In linguistics, its main applications have been so far pragmatics and theoretical typology. For pragmatics, game theory promises a firm foundation, and a rigor which hopefully will allow studying pragmatic phenomena with the same precision as that achieved in formal semantics.
The development of game theoretic pragmatics is closely connected to the development of bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner, 2000). It can be easily seen that the game theoretic notion of a Nash equilibrium and the optimality theoretic notion of a strongly optimal form-meaning pair are closely related to each other. The main impulse that bidirectional optimality theory gave to research on game theoretic pragmatics stemmed from serious empirical problems that resulted from interpreting the principle of weak optimality as a synchronic interpretation principle.
In this volume, we have collected papers that are concerned with several aspects of game and optimality theoretic approaches to pragmatics.
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Gretsch, Cécile. "Pragmatics and integrational linguistics." Language & Communication 29, no. 4 (October 2009): 328–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2009.02.010.
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Krzyżanowska, Karolina, and Igor Douven. "Missing-link conditionals: pragmatically infelicitous or semantically defective?" Intercultural Pragmatics 15, no. 2 (April 25, 2018): 191–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ip-2018-0004.
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Abstract According to virtually all major theories of conditionals, conditionals with a true antecedent and a true consequent are true. Yet conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have nothing to do with each other—so-called missing-link conditionals—strike us as odd, regardless of the truth values of their constituent clauses. Most theorists attribute this apparent oddness to pragmatics, but on a recent proposal, it rather betokens a semantic defect. Research in experimental pragmatics suggests that people can be more or less sensitive to pragmatic cues and may be inclined to differing degrees to evaluate a true sentence carrying a false implicature as false. We report the results of an empirical study that investigated whether people’s sensitivity to false implicatures is associated with how they tend to evaluate missing-link conditionals with true clauses. These results shed light on the question of whether missing-link conditionals are best seen as pragmatically infelicitous or rather as semantically defective.
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Gu, Xiaobo, and Yanfei Zhang. "Ira Noveck: Experimental Pragmatics: The Making of a Cognitive Science." Intercultural Pragmatics 19, no. 2 (March 30, 2022): 263–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ip-2022-2006.
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Noveck, Ira A., and Anne Reboul. "Experimental Pragmatics: a Gricean turn in the study of language." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 11 (November 2008): 425–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.07.009.
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Herskovits, Annette. "Semantics and Pragmatics of Locative Expressions*." Cognitive Science 9, no. 3 (July 1985): 341–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0903_3.
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Spellman, Barbara A., and Keith J. Holyoak. "Pragmatics in Analogical Mapping." Cognitive Psychology 31, no. 3 (December 1996): 307–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1996.0019.
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Mueller-Lust, Rachel A. G., and Georgia M. Green. "Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding." American Journal of Psychology 103, no. 2 (1990): 281. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1423148.
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Donaldson, Bryan. "Nativelike right-dislocation in near-native French." Second Language Research 27, no. 3 (April 18, 2011): 361–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658310395866.
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Recent research on advanced and near-native second-language (L2) speakers has focused on the acquisition of interface phenomena, for example at the syntax—pragmatics interface. Proponents of the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace, 2005; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009) argue that (external) interfaces present difficulties for L2 grammars, resulting in permanent deficits even in near-native grammars. Other research, however, has argued that interfaces are acquirable, albeit with delays (Ivanov, 2009; Rothman, 2009). This study examines right-dislocation (RD) in experimental and production data from near-native French. Right-dislocation marks topic in discourse and thus requires the integration of syntactic and discourse—pragmatic knowledge. Participants were 10 near-native speakers of French who learned French after age 10 and whose grammatical competence was comparable to the near-native speakers of French in Birdsong (1992), and 10 French native speakers. The data come from two experimental tasks and an 8.5-hour corpus of spontaneous informal dyadic conversations. The near-natives demonstrated nativelike judgments, preferences, and use of RD in authentic discourse. Only one near-native displayed evidence of first-language (L1) transfer, which resulted in non-nativelike use of RD. On the whole, the results suggest nativelike acquisition of this area of the syntax—pragmatics interface and fail to provide support for the Interface Hypothesis.
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Müller, Cornelia. "How recurrent gestures mean." Gesture 16, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 277–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.16.2.05mul.
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Abstract Drawing upon corpus analyses of recurrent gestures, a pragmatics perspective on gestural meaning and conventionalization will be developed. Gesture pragmatics is considered in terms of usage-based, embodied and interactively emerging meaning. The article brings together cognitive linguistic, cognitive semiotic and interactional perspectives on meaning making. How the interrelation between different types of context (interactional, semantic/pragmatic/syntactic, distribution across a corpus) with the embodied motivation of kinesic forms in actions and movement experiences of the body might play out in the process of conventionalization is illustrated by discussing three recurrent gestures: the Palm-Up-Open-Hand, the Holding Away, and the Cyclic gesture. By merging conventional and idiosyncratic elements recurrent gestures occupy a place between spontaneously created (singular) gestures and emblems as fully conventionalized gestural expressions on a continuum of increasing conventionalization (cf. Kendon’s continuum: McNeill, 1992, 2000). Recurrent gestures are an interesting case to study how processes of conventionalization may involve emergent de-compositions of gestural movements into smaller concomitant Gestalts (cf. Kendon, 2004, Chapters 15 & 16). They are particularly revealing in showing how those de-compositional processes are grounded experientially in contexts-of-use and remain grounded in conventionalized, yet still embodied, experiential frames.
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Zhang, Jianhua. "Cohesion, coherence and temporal reference from an experimental corpus pragmatics perspective." Pragmatics and Society 11, no. 3 (July 31, 2020): 501–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ps.00034.zha.
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Murphy, Elliot. "Phasal Eliminativism, Anti-Lexicalism, and the Status of the Unarticulated." Biolinguistics 10 (March 26, 2016): 021–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9047.
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This paper explores the prospect that grammatical expressions are propositionally whole and psychologically plausible, leading to the explanatory burden being placed on syntax rather than pragmatic processes, with the latter crucially bearing the feature of optionality. When supposedly unarticulated constituents are added, expressions which are propositionally distinct, and not simply more specific, arise. The ad hoc nature of a number of pragmatic processes carry with them the additional problem of effectively acting as barriers to implementing language in the brain. The advantages of an anti-lexicalist biolinguistic methodology are discussed, and a bi-phasal model of linguistic interpretation is proposed, Phasal Eliminativism, carved by syntactic phases and (optionally) enriched by a restricted number of pragmatic processes. In addition, it is shown that the syntactic operation of labeling (departing from standard Merge-centric evolutionary hypotheses) is responsible for a range of semantic and pragmatic phenomena, rendering core aspects of syntax and lexical pragmatics commensurable.
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VAN TIEL, BOB, and MIKHAIL KISSINE. "Quantity-based reasoning in the broader autism phenotype: A web-based study." Applied Psycholinguistics 39, no. 6 (October 1, 2018): 1373–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014271641800036x.
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ABSTRACTWe conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show that, independently of their autism spectrum quotient, participants are likely to derive those pragmatic inferences that can be derived by reasoning solely about alternatives that the speaker could have used. However, if the derivation of the pragmatic inference draws upon more complex counterfactual reasoning about what the speaker could have said, the probability that it is derived decreases significantly with one’s autism quotient. We discuss the consequences for theories of pragmatics in autism and for linguistic theorizing in general.
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Pasquier, Philippe, and Brahim Chaib-draa. "Agent communication pragmatics: the cognitive coherence approach." Cognitive Systems Research 6, no. 4 (December 2005): 364–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2005.03.002.
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Chaves, Monica de Freitas Frias, and Cilene Rodrigues. "The impact of schizotypy on pragmatics." Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 62 (October 2, 2020): e020014. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/cel.v62i0.8658759.
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High levels of linguistic referential failures are associated with liability to develop schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, and it has been shown that these failures can differentiate healthy subjects, high-schizotypal and schizophrenics groups. Nevertheless, few investigations have focused on whether or not schizotypal traits in nonclinical populations can also impact linguistic reference. In Brazilian Portuguese, only one previous study (acceptability judgements task) had been conducted, and its results suggest association between schizotypal traits and a more rigid preference for assignment of specific readings to definite singular DPs. Here, we present another experimental study in Brazilian Portuguese, a comprehension task designed to examine possible effects of schizotypal personality traits on the interpretation of definite singular DPs. The findings, in line with the previous results, support the conclusion that schizotypy does affect the interpretation of definite singular DPs in Brazilian Portuguese. Together, these two experiments suggest that schizotypal personality traits impact the integration of linguistic contextual information into the semantic meaning of definite DPs. This is consistent with the general hypothesis that schizotypy, similarly to schizophrenia, is associated with pragmatic difficulties. Yet, our results emphasize that the impact of schizotypal traits on pragmatics can be observed even in healthy (nonclinical) speakers.
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Ravesh, Mahnaz Mahmoudi, and Hossein Heidari Tabrizi. "The Effect of Teaching Interlanguage Pragmatics on Interpretation Ability of Iranian Translation Students." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 8, no. 3 (June 30, 2017): 44. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.3p.44.
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The present study sought to investigate whether Iranian translation students were successful in comprehending interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) features. Moreover, it tried to figure out whether teaching interlanguage pragmatics proved helpful for the improvement of interpretation ability of Iranian translation students. To this end, 30 students of undergraduate translation studying at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, were chosen to participate in the study. Then, they were divided into two groups of control and experimental. The Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was used to measure the participants’ language proficiency. Then, a Discourse Completion Test was administered to measure the participants’ interlanguage pragmatics. Using the SPSS 20 software, the ANCOVA and t test were run for the data obtained from both the pre-test and the post-test. The results revealed that ILP features are lacking in the university context. Furthermore, it was shown that ILP features were effective for improving Iranian students’ interpretation ability. In this sense, university professors can pay attention to this finding and, where required, they can incorporate ILP features into their courses so as to make attempts to render a more effective learning and teaching environment.
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Schneider, Klaus P. "Pragmatic variation and cultural models." Review of Cognitive Linguistics 10, no. 2 (December 7, 2012): 346–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/rcl.10.2.05sch.
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The present paper focuses on pragmatic variation between national varieties of English, reporting an experimental study conducted in the framework of variational pragmatics. It is argued that experimental methods such as dialogue production tasks do not reveal actual verbal behaviour, which is subject to the specific circumstances of concrete social situations, but the underlying behavioural norms of the respective sociocultural community of speakers. These norms emerge from repeated encounters with similar verbal behaviour in social situations of the same type and are collectively shared prototypical patterns of behaviour stored in cultural models in the long-term memory. Such cultural models specify what is expected and considered appropriate in a given type of situation. More particularly, they specify what can be said when and how, i.e. discourse topics, discourse positions and speech act realizations, as is exemplified in the empirical study reported on.
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Zhang, Ying. "The Influence of Combining Computer-Assisted Language Learning With Instruction on Chinese College Students’ L2 Pragmatic Ability." Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 45, no. 2 (May 1, 2022): 243–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cjal-2022-0206.
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Abstract In the area of computer-assisted language learning (CALL), although a number of studies have adopted various CALL-based devices (e. g., blogs, gaming, and synthetic environments) to foster second language (L2) acquisition, the vital component of instruction has received little attention. The present study explored the usefulness of CALL-based communication in conjunction with instruction on EFL learners’ L2 pragmatic development. Sixty-two EFL students from a university in China were recruited for the current research. The experimental group communicated with a native English speaker through synchronous messaging via Skype and had two instructional sessions pertinent to compliment responses, while the control group interacted with a native English speaker via Skype without having the teaching intervention. Findings from an independent samples t-test demonstrated that the experimental group produced significantly more proper compliment responses in the immediate posttest than the control group (p < . 001). Moreover, a significant difference (p < . 001) was found for the experimental group between the pre-intervention and delayed post-intervention mean scores, suggesting that CALL coupled with teaching intervention had a long-term impact on learners’ L2 pragmatic development. These findings enrich our understanding of the beneficial and lasting influence of combining CALL with instruction on EFL students’ pragmatic development. In addition, pedagogical implications for deploying CALL paired with L2 pragmatics instruction are provided.
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Silva, Rosângela Souto. "Pragmatics, bilingualism, and the native speaker." Language & Communication 20, no. 2 (April 2000): 161–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(99)00019-1.
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de Oliveira Fernandes, Daniel, and Steve Oswald. "On the Rhetorical Effectiveness of Implicit Meaning—A Pragmatic Approach." Languages 8, no. 1 (December 22, 2022): 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages8010006.
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This paper explores the interface between pragmatics and argumentation by considering the impact of different types of implicit meaning on different types of rhetorical effects. On the rhetorical front and drawing on classical rhetoric but going beyond the Aristotelian rhetorical triangle (ethos, logos, pathos), the paper discusses an open list of rhetorical effects affecting speakers, audiences, messages and the conversational flow of interaction. On the pragmatic front, the paper accounts for how specific features of different types of implicit meaning (presupposition, implicature and back-door speech acts) are likely to trigger specific rhetorical effects. In so doing, it discusses and justifies the need for and the feasibility of an experimental investigation of the rhetorical effectiveness of implicit meaning.
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Yousefi, Marziyeh, and Hossein Nassaji. "The Impact of Corrective Feedback on L2 Pragmatics Production in Face-to-face and Technology-mediated Settings." Language Teaching Research Quarterly 39 (December 2023): 305–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.32038/ltrq.2024.39.19.
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This paper presents findings from a quasi-experimental study that examined the effect of corrective feedback (CF) on L2 pragmatics, specifically comparing Face-to-Face (FF) and Technology-Mediated (TM) modes. The study involved a total of forty-four ESL students from three parallel intact classes. The primary focus of this paper is to report the results obtained from data collected through production tasks employing Role-play scenarios. To analyze the data, a mixed-model Analysis of Variance was conducted, examining the main and interaction effects of CF, delivery mode (FF and TM), speech act type (request and refusal), and time (pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test). The results demonstrated that CF had a substantial positive effect on L2 pragmatic production, resulting in significant overall improvement. Furthermore, the results showed that both FF and TM modes of CF were similarly effective for enhancing pragmatic production. Additionally, the study demonstrated that the effects of CF on pragmatic production were durable and long-lasting. Altogether, these findings support the utilization of corrective feedback in technology-mediated language instruction within L2 classrooms.
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Hipólito, Inês. "Anatomia da Linguagem: Podemos Compreender Jogos de Linguagem a Partir de Redes Corticais?" Kairos. Journal of Philosophy & Science 18, no. 1 (April 1, 2017): 84–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/kjps-2017-0004.
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AbstractThere is today much interest in research of neuronal substrata in metaphor processing. It has been suggested that the right hemisphere yields a key role in the comprehension of figurative language (non-literal) and, particularly, in metaphors. Figurative language is included in pragmatics, a branch of linguistics that researches the use of language, in opposition to the study of the system of language. There lingers, though, an open debate in respect to the identification of the specific aspects concerning semantics, as opposed to those dominated by pragmatics. Can studies from neuronal correlates clarify questions that relate to semantics/pragmatics representation? I shall analyze neuroscientific developments about implicit language to attempt to understand, in section 2, scientific techniques available and more suitable to the phenomenology of the act of understanding an implicit, figurative or implicated message in a certain language game. To do so, I shall start by reviewing the studies in philosophy of language, and accommodate the development of the research in pragmatics underlying metaphor, particularly, inPhilosophical Investigationsby Wittgenstein. Finally, I discuss the possibility of interpretative capabilities being socioculturally grounded. I expect this methodological analysis to contribute to the enlightenment of the problem of phenomenology of intersubjective pragmatics, and to its future experimental paradigms.
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Westera, Matthijs, and Adrian Brasoveanu. "Ignorance in context: The interaction of modified numerals and QUDs." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 24 (April 5, 2015): 414. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2436.
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<p>We argue for a purely pragmatic account of the ignorance inferences associated with superlative but not comparative modifiers (at least vs. more than). Ignorance inferences for both modifiers are triggered when the question under discussion (QUD) requires an exact answer, but when these modifiers are used out of the blue the QUD is implicitly reconstructed based on the way these modifiers are typically used, and on the fact that "at least n", but not "more than n", mentions and does not exclude the lower bound "exactly n". The paper presents new experimental evidence for the context-sensitivity of ignorance inferences, and also for the hypothesis that the higher processing cost reported in the literature for superlative modifiers is context-dependent in the exact same way.</p><p>Keywords: superlative vs. comparative modifiers, ignorance inferences, questions under discussion, experimental semantics and pragmatics</p>
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Frixione, Marcello, and Antonio Lombardi. "Street Signs and Ikea Instruction Sheets: Pragmatics and Pictorial Communication." Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6, no. 1 (October 22, 2014): 133–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0216-1.
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Green, E. Mara. "Performing gesture." Gesture 16, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 329–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.16.2.07gre.
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Abstract This article focuses on a signed performance by a deaf Nepali man who communicates in natural sign, which is similar to home sign but with greater cross-signer conventionality. The signer skillfully employs pantomimic (“gestural”) and lexical (“linguistic”) repertoires for distinct pragmatic purposes. In the narrative frame, he uses pantomime to vividly enact his morning routine; in the metanarrative frame, he utilizes lexical signs to directly address the audience. By examining the two repertoires’ formal characteristics and their relationship to different frames, this analysis showcases the signer’s communicative competency, demonstrates the relevance of pragmatics and genre to studies of all signed communicative modes, and challenges the idea that gesture is what language leaves behind.
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BOSCO, FRANCESCA M., ROMINA ANGELERI, LIVIA COLLE, KATIUSCIA SACCO, and BRUNO G. BARA. "Communicative abilities in children: An assessment through different phenomena and expressive means." Journal of Child Language 40, no. 4 (May 7, 2013): 741–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000913000081.
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ABSTRACTPrevious studies on children's pragmatic abilities have tended to focus on just one pragmatic phenomenon and one expressive means at a time, mainly concentrating on comprehension, and overlooking the production side. We assessed both comprehension and production in relation to several pragmatic phenomena (simple and complex standard communication acts, irony, and deceit) and several expressive means (linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic). Our study involved 390 Italian-speaking children divided into three age groups: 5;0–5;6, 6;6–7;0, and 8;0–8;6. Children's performance on all tasks improved with their age. Within each age group, children responded more accurately to tasks involving standard communication than to those involving deceit and irony, across all expressive means and for both comprehension and production. Within each pragmatic phenomenon, children responded more accurately to simple acts than to complex ones, regardless of age group and expressive means, i.e., linguistic or extralinguistic. Overall results fit well with the Cognitive Pragmatics theory (Bara, 2010).