Showing versus telling: Representing speech events in English and Spanish

2018 ◽  
pp. 205-228
Author(s):  
Rosario Caballero
Keyword(s):  
Speech Events

Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger W. Shuy
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Police Interviews ◽  
Performance Errors ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
The Government ◽  
Speech Events

Much is written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and undercover targets use ambiguous language in their interactions with police, prosecutors, and undercover agents. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations demonstrating how police, prosecutors, undercover agents, and complainants use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects, which leads to misrepresentations of the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. These misrepresentations affect the perceptions of judges and juries about the subjects’ motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional performance errors. Although perhaps overreliance on Grice’s maxim of sincerity leads some to believe this, interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law are adversarial, non-cooperative events that enable participants to ignore or violate the cooperative principle. One effective way the government does this is to use ambiguity deceptively. Later listeners to the recordings of such conversations may not recognize this ambiguity and react in ways that the subjects may not have intended. Deceptive ambiguity is clearly intentional in undercover operations and the case examples illustrate that the practice also is alive and well in police interviews and prosecutorial questioning. The book concludes with a summary of how the deceptive ambiguity used by representatives of the government affected the perception of the subjects’ predisposition, intentionality and voluntariness, followed by a comparison of the relative frequency of deceptive ambiguity used by the government in its representations of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar.

Speech events and natural speech: some implications for sociolinguistic methodology

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nessa Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Specific Variable ◽  
Speech Event ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Group Sessions ◽  
Speech Events ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTSamples of speech suitable for sociolinguistic analysis may be sought in several ways. Interviews (either formal or informal), and tape-recorded group sessions, are the methods most used currently. In research on a specific variable, the historical present tense (HP), none of these methods proved neutral or adequate. Although the historical present tense is very widely used in conversational narratives, its occurrence within interviews is so infrequent as to be striking. An explanation was found in the way in which the interview has a specific known place as a speech event in the culture of those whose speech was being studied. The so-called spontaneous interview does not have such a place, and for that very reason is even less satisfactory a source of data. The notion of natural speech is taken as properly equivalent to that of appropriate speech; as not equivalent to unselfconscious speech; and as observable easily, and often best, by simple techniques of participation. (Sociolinguistic methodology; speech events, interviews, observation, natural speech; United States English).

Rethinking Maltese English as a continuum of sociolinguistic continua through evaluations of written and oral prompts

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-272
Author(s):  
Sandro Caruana ◽  
Laura Mori
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Events

Abstract Scientific literature has tackled Maltese English (MaltE) mainly in the framework of World Englishes in order to focus on its features compared to other varieties of English around the world. In this paper we shed more light on MaltE by proposing a sociolinguistic perspective, oriented towards its social stratification, and by referring to it through degrees of linguistic competence in English. We therefore propose two continua of variation: MaltE as an L2 continuum and as a situational one. Within this framework, we identify two groups defined as Mainly Maltese Speakers (MMS) and Mainly English Speakers (MES). We suggest that MaltE can be interpreted both as an L2, and as a variety used according to speech events, domain, participants, in-groupness etc. To investigate this we carried out a perceptual experiment involving two groups of university students, specialising in Maltese and English respectively. We discuss the results based on ratings and evaluations of authentic MaltE written and spoken prompts.

Children's strategies when reporting appropriate and inappropriate speech events

Pragmatics ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Hickmann ◽  
David Warden
Keyword(s):  
Information Exchange ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Functional Value ◽  
Speech Events ◽  
Children's Strategies

This study examines the effects of utterance form and appropriateness on how children report conversations. Children between 7 and 9 years were asked to narrate filmed dialogues that contained two types of target utterances: (a) declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives that were used appropriately as directives; (b) declaratives and interrogatives that were inappropriate from the point of view of information exchange, i.e., that should not have been used by the interlocutors as means of giving or requesting information, given background knowledge conditions. When reporting the appropriate directive targets, the 7/8-year-olds frequently transformed declaratives into more explicit imperatives, while the 9-year-olds' reports did not vary systematically with directive types. With respect to the inappropriate targets, omissions were more frequent at 7/8 years, transformations at 9 years. Transformations consisted most often of changing the mood or modality of inappropriate declaratives to make them appropriate. Some role reversals also occurred with inappropriate interrogatives. Finally, children of all ages omitted or transformed other events preceding or following the target utterances, so as to make the dialogues coherent more globally. These findings show children's sensitivity to the forms and functions of utterances in conversations, but they also suggest developmental changes in their reporting strategies. The younger children prefer functionally transparent reports and they omit utterances in cases of inadequate conditions of use. With increasing age, children use more complex strategies to adapt some inappropriate utterances locally by transforming systematically their form, their conditions of use, and/or their functional value.

scholarly journals Zero Marking in English as Lingua Franca Interactions: Corpus IST-Erasmus

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
Serap Önen
Keyword(s):  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Speech Events ◽  
English As Lingua Franca ◽  
Emerging Pattern

<em>This study introduces the marking system for 3<sup>rd</sup> person present tense in English as Lingua Franca interactions. It is a corpus study which is compiled as part of a PhD study to investigate the lexico-grammatical characteristics of ELF. The corpus, Corpus IST-Erasmus, consists of 10 hours 47 minutes of recorded ELF interactions. It is compiled by means of 54 speech events with the participation of 79 Erasmus students in Istanbul, representing 24 diverse L1s. The focus of this paper is to present whether there are variations from standardized ENL forms with respect to the 3<sup>rd</sup> person present tense marking, as proposed in previous ELF research. The results indicate that the use of 3<sup>rd</sup> person zero in place of 3<sup>rd</sup> person -s is becoming an emerging pattern in ELF interactions.</em>

scholarly journals Duration and speed of speech events: A selection of methods

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-83
Author(s):  
Dafydd Gibbon ◽  
Katarzyna Klessa ◽  
Jolanta Bachan
Keyword(s):  
Software Tool ◽  
Worked Examples ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Speech Technology ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Cart Analysis ◽  
Speech Timing ◽  
Speech Events ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractThe study of speech timing, i.e. the duration and speed or tempo of speech events, has increased in importance over the past twenty years, in particular in connection with increased demands for accuracy, intelligibility and naturalness in speech technology, with applications in language teaching and testing, and with the study of speech timing patterns in language typology. H owever, the methods used in such studies are very diverse, and so far there is no accessible overview of these methods. Since the field is too broad for us to provide an exhaustive account, we have made two choices: first, to provide a framework of paradigmatic (classificatory), syntagmatic (compositional) and functional (discourse-oriented) dimensions for duration analysis; and second, to provide worked examples of a selection of methods associated primarily with these three dimensions. Some of the methods which are covered are established state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. the paradigmatic Classification and Regression Trees, CART , analysis), others are discussed in a critical light (e.g. so-called ‘rhythm metrics’). A set of syntagmatic approaches applies to the tokenisation and tree parsing of duration hierarchies, based on speech annotations, and a functional approach describes duration distributions with sociolinguistic variables. Several of the methods are supported by a new web-based software tool for analysing annotated speech data, the Time Group Analyser.

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