The stand-up comedian as an egocentric communicator

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Ibukun Filani
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
General Perspective

Abstract The general perspective in pragmatics research on stand-up comedy is that the comedian co-produces humor with the audience. In this paper, I argue that the stand-up comedian’s communicative behavior is also partly rooted in egocentrism. To achieve this, I adopted a sociocognitive approach to intention and egocentrism in analyzing a routine that was performed in Chicago by Okey Bakassi, a Nigerian stand-up comedian. I operationalize egocentrism as one of the humor strategies of the comedian. While focusing on the propositional content of the comedian’s utterances, the analysis revealed strategies like privatization, ad hoc concept formation and ad hoc coherence, which the comedian used in individualizing the prior common ground to generate the needed incongruity for humor in the performance sphere.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Light as a Metaphor for Truth

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-169
Author(s):  
Hans Blumenberg
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Preliminary Stage ◽  
Theories Of Truth ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Logical Validity

This chapter assesses Hans Blumenberg's essay, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth” (1957). With this essay, Blumenberg formulated the seed of the project for which he is, at least in Germany, best known: his “metaphorology.” While metaphorology initially seemed to be an extension of conceptual history — a research project aimed at investigating the semantic changes to central concepts of philosophy — it at the same time called into question the very centrality of concepts and terminologies as the only and authentic bearers of philosophical thought. Instead, it makes the case for studying the role pre- and nonconceptual speech plays in the language of philosophy. Where traditionally theories of truth would be interpreted in terms of their propositional content or logical validity, Blumenberg's article instead looks at the metaphors with which truth is described and which operate, as he puts it in the subtitle, “At the Preliminary Stage of Concept Formation.”

scholarly journals Communication Mediated by a Powered Wheelchair: People with Profound Cognitive Disabilities

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisbeth Nilsson
Keyword(s):  
Social Exchange ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Cognitive Disabilities ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Powered Wheelchair ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
Self Recognition

Keywords guidance, interaction, feeling experiences, self-recognition, concept formation, orientation, intentionality, agency, communicative behavior Abstract The Driving to Learn project explored what people with profound cognitive disabilities could achieve from practice in a joystick-operated powered wheelchair and what facilitated their eventual achievements. Grounded theory methodology was applied for a project involving 45 children and adults with profound cognitive disabilities, 64 with milder degrees of cognitive disabilities, and 17 infants with typical development. The findings included two lines of development: (1) growing consciousness of joystick-use and powered mobility use, and (2) learning communication by driving. An emerging approach for facilitating tool use learning also nurtured the participants' alertness, attention to social exchange, development of sense of self, anticipation, intentionality and a will in mind that was communicated through showing by driving. Significance: Becoming capable of showing communicative intentions, even in a limited sense, changed the attention, interaction and responsiveness of social others. This in turn increased the participants' opportunities for development of more shared meanings and communication.

scholarly journals Metonymy and frame integration: Interfacing between concepts and discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Georgios Ioannou
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Process ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Integration Mechanism ◽  
Typological Approach ◽  
Partial Integration

Abstract This article inquiries into specific aspects of the relation between conceptual contiguity found in metonymic shifts and the online construction of frames, seen as a dynamic process of construal. It first reviews the theory of metonymy regarding the conceptual, lexical and contextual facets of the phenomenon. It then explores the possibility of extending the conceptual relevance of metonymy beyond the traditional typological approach of metonymic categorization, re-interpreting it as a frame-integration mechanism, or blending, whereby two frames are brought together into an extended ICM. Metonymic blending is formulated as a partial integration between two input spaces discursively driven, whereby an ad hoc identification of a referential commonness plays the role of the generic space of the blending. Subsequently, in the light of the assumption that frame-extension is not given categorically but it also includes – beyond its cognitive relevance – an interactional aspect, this analysis draws an interesting link: that between the generic space of metonymic blend, and common ground. The latter is precisely what facilitates the metonymic blend, regulating the distance between the integrated frames, at the same time remaining silent as discursively given information.

The proper treatment of egophoricity in Kathmandu Newari

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Coppock ◽  
Stephen Wechsler
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
First Person ◽  
Proper Treatment ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Formal Treatment ◽  
Discourse Model ◽  
De Se ◽  
The Common ◽  
Speech Reports

In egophoric (or conjunct/disjunct) verb-marking systems, a conjunct verb form co-occurs with first-person subjects in declaratives and second-person subjects in interrogatives, and also appears in de se attitude and speech reports; a disjunct verb form appears elsewhere. Conjunct marking also interacts with evidentiality: a speaker who abdicates responsibility for the content of an utterance by means of an evidential marker uses the disjunct verb form despite co-occurence with a first-person subject. Focussing on the case of Kathmandu Newari, Coppock and Wechsler propose that conjunct morphology marks the contents of attitudes de se. They develop a formal treatment of egophoricity, including a dynamic discourse model of the way attitudes de se are communicated. The propositional content of an attitude de se, modelled as a set of centered worlds, is effectively uncentered by its agent, to produce an ordinary proposition that is eligible to enter the common ground.

scholarly journals Communication as commitment sharing: speech acts, implicatures, common ground

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Geurts
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Action Coordination ◽  
Main Tenet

Abstract The main tenet of this paper is that human communication is first and foremost a matter of negotiating commitments, rather than one of conveying intentions, beliefs, and other mental states. Every speech act causes the speaker to become committed to the hearer to act on a propositional content. Hence, commitments are relations between speakers, hearers, and propositions. Their purpose is to enable speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions: communication is coordinated action for action coordination. To illustrate the potential of the approach, commitment-based analyses are offered for a representative sample of speech act types, conversational implicatures, as well as for common ground.

Assertoric commitments

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 155-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Kissine
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
The Common

This paper deals with the two kinds of commitment associated with assertive speech acts: the commitment to having justifications for the propositional content and the commitment to the truth of this content. It is argued that the former kind of commitment boils down to the monotonic commitment to the truth of the propositional content, and can be cancelled. The latter, by contrast, is non-monotonic, and is associated with all assertive speech acts, even those containing a reservation marker. These facts can be explained if one (a) endorses the ‘Direct Perception’ view, according to which every piece of communicated information goes, by default, into the hearer’s ‘belief box’; (b) defines the success of assertive speech acts in terms of the possibility to update the common ground with their propositional content.

scholarly journals Career Gatekeeping in Cultural Fields

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hamann ◽  
Stefan Beljean
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Labor Markets ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Performance Criteria ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Selection Decisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Respective Field

This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories vs. professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic vs. systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization vs. transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes.

scholarly journals Partial Truths: Adults Choose to Mention Agents and Patients in Proportion to Informativity, Even If It Doesn’t Fully Disambiguate the Message

Open Mind ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Melissa Kline ◽  
Laura Schulz ◽  
Edward Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Sentence Level

How do we decide what to say to ensure our meanings will be understood? The Rational Speech Act model (RSA; Frank & Goodman, 2012 ) asserts that speakers plan what to say by comparing the informativity of words in a particular context. We present the first example of an RSA model of sentence-level (who-did-what-to-whom) meanings. In these contexts, the set of possible messages must be abstracted from entities in common ground (people and objects) to possible events (Jane eats the apple, Marco peels the banana), with each word contributing unique semantic content. How do speakers accomplish the transformation from context to compositional, informative messages? In a communication game, participants described transitive events (e.g., Jane pets the dog), with only two words, in contexts where two words either were or were not enough to uniquely identify an event. Adults chose utterances matching the predictions of the RSA even when there was no possible fully “successful” utterance. Thus we show that adults’ communicative behavior can be described by a model that accommodates informativity in context, beyond the set of possible entities in common ground. This study provides the first evidence that adults’ language production is affected, at the level of argument structure, by the graded informativity of possible utterances in context, and suggests that full-blown natural speech may result from speakers who model and adapt to the listener’s needs.

scholarly journals Symmetry and Contextuality

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hartmann Römer
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Hidden Symmetries ◽  
Essential Change ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Given ◽  
Simple Definition

The general concept of symmetry is realized in manifold ways in different realms of reality, such as plants, animals, minerals, mathematical objects or human artefacts in literature, fine arts and society. In order to arrive at a common ground for this variedness a very general conceptualization of symmetry is proposed: the existence of substitutions, which, in the given context, do not lead to an essential change. This simple definition has multiple consequences. (i) The context dependence of the notion of symmetry is evident in the humanities but is by no means irrelevant, yet is often neglected, in science. By taking this context dependence into account, the subtle problematics of concept formation and of the ontological status of ‘similarities’ become evident. In general, the substitutions underlying the concept of symmetry are not really performed but remain in a state of virtuality. Counterfactuality, freedom and creativity come into focus. The detection of previously hidden symmetries may provide deep and surprising insights. (ii) Related to this, due attention is devoted to the aesthetic dimension of symmetry and the breaking of it. (iii) Finally, we point out to what extent life is based on the interplay between order and freedom, between full and broken symmetry.

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