Learning Maximum Absolute Meaning Through Reasoning About Speaker Intentions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Lee ◽  
Chigusa Kurumada
Keyword(s):  
Speaker Intentions

cognitive-pragmatic account of the English imperative-conditional construction

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-269
Author(s):  
Keding Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Processing Unit ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
The Third ◽  
Pragmatic Enrichment ◽  
Symbolic Structure ◽  
Speaker Intentions ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Pragmatic Account ◽  
Everyday Communication

The imperative-conditional construction (ICC) in English is a type of construction which consists of an ordinary imperative clause and an ordinary declarative clause connected by the connective and or or. This article deals with the speaker intentions of ICCs and their motivations from a cognitive-pragmatic approach. Based on the concept of construction in cognitive linguistics, an ICC can be called a complex symbolic structure which, though composed of two components, should be regarded as a single pragmatic processing unit. It is demonstrated that, in everyday communication, the ICC can usually convey three kinds of speaker intentions: a prohibitive intention, an inducing/forcing intention, and an advisory intention. The first refers to the intention of the speaker to prohibit the hearer from carrying out the act described by the imperative. The second is the intention of the speaker to induce or force the hearer to bring about the act described by the imperative. The third refers to the intention of the speaker to advise the hearer to carry out the act described by the imperative. These speaker intentions are highly motivated. The motivations include the constructional context, the conditional relation between the imperative and the declarative, the directive force of the imperative, the pragmatic enrichment of the declarative, and the complementary and interactive relationship between the imperative and declarative clauses, among which the constructional context serves as an overall motivation, and the rest may be seen as specific motivations.

Do They Really Mean It? Children’s Inference of Speaker Intentions and the Role of Age and Gender

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 689-712
Author(s):  
K. Rothermich ◽  
O. Caivano ◽  
L.J. Knoll ◽  
V. Talwar
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Video Clip ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Age And Gender Differences ◽  
Speaker Intentions ◽  
And Gender

Interpreting other people’s intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children’s understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of young adults using different speaker intentions. After watching each video clip, children answered questions about the characters and their beliefs, and the perceived friendliness of the speaker. Children’s responses reveal age and gender differences in the ability to interpret speaker belief and social intentions, especially for scenarios conveying teasing and prosocial lies. We found that the ability to infer speaker belief of prosocial lies and to interpret social intentions increases with age. Our results suggest that children at the age of 8 years already show adult-like abilities to understand literal statements, whereas the ability to infer specific social intentions, such as teasing and prosocial lies, is still developing between the age of 8 and 12 years. Moreover, girls performed better in classifying prosocial lies and sarcasm as insincere than boys. The outcomes expand our understanding of how children observe speaker intentions and suggest further research into the development of teasing and prosocial lie interpretation.

Reconsidering subjectification from the perspective of animal signalling

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Ritt ◽  
Andreas Baumann ◽  
Eva Zehentner ◽  
Alexandra Zöpfl
Keyword(s):  
Average Degree ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
Speaker Intentions ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model

Abstract This paper discusses the view that subjectifications (i.e. semantic changes through which words come to index speakers’ evaluations or their attitudes towards a proposition) are primarily motivated by speakers’ need for self-expression (Traugott 2010). Approaching the issue from the perspective of animal signalling (Krebs & Dawkins 1984), we propose that semantic subjectifications are at least equally likely to reflect evaluations and attitudes read into utterances by listeners who attempt to read speakers’ minds. We compare speaker-based and listener-based theories with regard to their predictions, sketch ways in which they can be tested and report findings from first attempts at doing so. First, we report evidence from diachronic corpora. Second, we describe a game-theoretic model that relates listener’s interest in speaker intentions to the average degree of speaker-honesty in a population. Third, we report preliminary results of an experiment in which we tested if listeners were more likely to interpret an utterance as indexing speaker subjectivity correlated if they perceived speakers as more powerful. We conclude that the listener-based hypothesis of subjectifications is solid enough to warrant further investigation.

scholarly journals Incrementality and efficiency shape pragmatics across languages

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (24) ◽  
pp. 13399-13404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Rubio-Fernandez ◽  
Julian Jara-Ettinger
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Context Information ◽  
Visual Context ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Pragmatic Information ◽  
Incoming Information ◽  
Speaker Intentions ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning

To correctly interpret a message, people must attend to the context in which it was produced. Here we investigate how this process, known as pragmatic reasoning, is guided by two universal forces in human communication: incrementality and efficiency, with speakers of all languages interpreting language incrementally and making the most efficient use of the incoming information. Crucially, however, the interplay between these two forces results in speakers of different languages having different pragmatic information available at each point in processing, including inferences about speaker intentions. In particular, the position of adjectives relative to nouns (e.g., “black lamp” vs. “lamp black”) makes visual context information available in reverse orders. In an eye-tracking study comparing four unrelated languages that have been understudied with regard to language processing (Catalan, Hindi, Hungarian, and Wolof), we show that speakers of languages with an adjective–noun order integrate context by first identifying properties (e.g., color, material, or size), whereas speakers of languages with a noun–adjective order integrate context by first identifying kinds (e.g., lamps or chairs). Most notably, this difference allows listeners of adjective–noun descriptions to infer the speaker’s intention when using an adjective (e.g., “the black…” as implying “not the blue one”) and anticipate the target referent, whereas listeners of noun–adjective descriptions are subject to temporary ambiguity when deriving the same interpretation. We conclude that incrementality and efficiency guide pragmatic reasoning across languages, with different word orders having different pragmatic affordances.

Recognizing sarcasm without language

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry S. Cheang ◽  
Marc D. Pell
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Communicative Intent ◽  
Speaker Intentions

The goal of the present research was to determine whether certain speaker intentions conveyed through prosody in an unfamiliar language can be accurately recognized. English and Cantonese utterances expressing sarcasm, sincerity, humorous irony, or neutrality through prosody were presented to English and Cantonese listeners unfamiliar with the other language. Listeners identified the communicative intent of utterances in both languages in a crossed design. Participants successfully identified sarcasm spoken in their native language but identified sarcasm at near-chance levels in the unfamiliar language. Both groups were relatively more successful at recognizing the other attitudes when listening to the unfamiliar language (in addition to the native language). Our data suggest that while sarcastic utterances in Cantonese and English share certain acoustic features, these cues are insufficient to recognize sarcasm between languages; rather, this ability depends on (native) language experience.

Speaker Intentions in Context

Noûs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. King
Keyword(s):  
Speaker Intentions

scholarly journals Whose side are they on?

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Vera Hukker ◽  
Petra Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Spatial Prepositions ◽  
Speaker Intentions ◽  
Do So

Abstract Spatial prepositions express relations between objects in space. A subset of spatial prepositions is ambiguous due to the different perspectives from which these spatial relations can be considered. The ability to consider another person’s perspective is still developing in children. This study investigates how Dutch-speaking children (mean age 10) and adults interpret perspective-dependent spatial prepositions uttered by a speaker. We found that adults took the speaker’s perspective in a third of the cases, whereas children did so in a sixth of the cases. No differences in interpretation emerged between prepositions in assertions and requests, although these different speech acts reflect different speaker intentions. In general, children performed like adults, but less often took the speaker’s perspective with naast compared to voor and achter in assertions. We conclude that 10-year-olds can take another person’s perspective when interpreting spatial prepositions, but, like adults, only do so in a minority of cases.

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