L. Bevacqua, S. Loáiciga, H. Rohde, Christian Hardmeier
Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and event coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders’ preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, as does portraying an event as completed though the latter does not reach significance. Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference. Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verbdriven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons.
{"title":"Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression","authors":"L. Bevacqua, S. Loáiciga, H. Rohde, Christian Hardmeier","doi":"10.5210/dad.2021.207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.207","url":null,"abstract":"Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and event coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders’ preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, as does portraying an event as completed though the latter does not reach significance. Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference. Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verbdriven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"15 1","pages":"192-226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86223638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). Using the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real-world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – we showed that the process of negotiating referring expressions “in the wild” is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In addition to replicating laboratory results showing lexical entrainment, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by pairs. In round 1, introverts in stranger pairs used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend pairs were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by round 2. Lexical entrainment observed in labs is generalizable to realworld settings, and lexical entrainment in naturalistic communication, at least, is subject to social and personality factors.
地图任务(Anderson et al.， 1991)和拼图任务(Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986)是传统的参照交际任务，用于心理语言学研究，以证明会话伙伴如何就地标或不寻常目标物体的描述(或参照表达)达成一致。这些高度受控的、基于实验室的任务发生在相对不寻常的条件下，对于自然发生的对话(Speed, Wnuk， & Majid, 2016)。使用Artwalk任务(Liu, Fox Tree， & Walker, 2016)——一个真实世界的地图任务和拼图任务的混合体——我们发现，“在野外”协商引用表达式的过程与在实验室中发生的过程相似。除了重复实验结果显示词汇夹带，我们还发现，熟悉和外向影响的唯一描述词的成对使用的数量。在第一轮中，陌生人组中的内向者使用较少的描述词，但朋友组中的内向者与外向者没有区别。外向性的影响在第二轮下降。在实验室中观察到的词汇夹带可以推广到现实世界中，而在自然主义交流中的词汇夹带，至少是受社会和人格因素的影响。
{"title":"Referential Communication Between Friends and Strangers in the Wild","authors":"Kris Liu, J. D'Arcey, M. Walker, J. E. Tree","doi":"10.5210/dad.2021.103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.103","url":null,"abstract":"The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). Using the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real-world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – we showed that the process of negotiating referring expressions “in the wild” is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In addition to replicating laboratory results showing lexical entrainment, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by pairs. In round 1, introverts in stranger pairs used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend pairs were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by round 2. Lexical entrainment observed in labs is generalizable to realworld settings, and lexical entrainment in naturalistic communication, at least, is subject to social and personality factors.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"5 1","pages":"45-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75052297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The exact timing of a conversational turn conveys important information to a listener. Most turns are initiated within 250ms after the previous turn. However, interlocutors take longer to initiate certain types of turns: those that either require more cognitive processing or are socially dispreferred. Many dispreferred turns are also cognitively demanding, so it is difficult to attribute specific conversational delays to social or cognitive mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the relative contribution of cognitive and social variables to the timing of utterances in conversation. We focus on a type of turn that is socially dispreferred, cognitively demanding, and generally delayed: other-initiations of repair (OIRs). OIRs occur when a listener notices and decides to signal a comprehension problem (e.g., "What?"). We analyzed the Floor Transfer Offsets of 456 OIRs, and found that interlocutors initiated OIRs later when trouble sources had weaker discourse context or were shorter, and when the OIR was more face-threatening. Our results suggest that both cognitive and social variables contribute to the timing of delayed utterances in conversation. We discuss how attention, prediction, planning, and social preference manifest in the timing of turns.
{"title":"Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair","authors":"J. Mertens, J. D. Ruiter","doi":"10.5210/dad.2021.102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.102","url":null,"abstract":"The exact timing of a conversational turn conveys important information to a listener. Most turns are initiated within 250ms after the previous turn. However, interlocutors take longer to initiate certain types of turns: those that either require more cognitive processing or are socially dispreferred. Many dispreferred turns are also cognitively demanding, so it is difficult to attribute specific conversational delays to social or cognitive mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the relative contribution of cognitive and social variables to the timing of utterances in conversation. We focus on a type of turn that is socially dispreferred, cognitively demanding, and generally delayed: other-initiations of repair (OIRs). OIRs occur when a listener notices and decides to signal a comprehension problem (e.g., \"What?\"). We analyzed the Floor Transfer Offsets of 456 OIRs, and found that interlocutors initiated OIRs later when trouble sources had weaker discourse context or were shorter, and when the OIR was more face-threatening. Our results suggest that both cognitive and social variables contribute to the timing of delayed utterances in conversation. We discuss how attention, prediction, planning, and social preference manifest in the timing of turns.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"28 1","pages":"21-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78929200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lucie Poláková, Jirí Mírovský, Sárka Zikánová, E. Hajicová
The present article investigates possibilities and limits of local (shallow) analysis of discourse coherence with respect to the phenomena of global coherence and higher composition of texts. We study corpora annotated with local discourse relations in Czech and partly in English to try and find clues in the local annotation indicating a higher discourse structure. First, we classify patterns of subsequent or overlapping pairs of local relations, and hierarchies formed by nested local relations. Special attention is then given to relations crossing paragraph boundaries and their semantic types, and to paragraph-initial discourse connectives. In the third part, we examine situations in which annotators incline to marking a large argument (larger than one sentence) of a discourse relation even with a minimality principle annotation rule in place. Our analyses bring (i) new linguistic insights regarding coherence signals in local and higher contexts, e.g. detection and description of hierarchies of local discourse relations up to 5 levels in Czech and English, description of distribution differences in semantic types in cross-paragraph and other settings, identification of Czech connectives only typical for higher structures, or the detection of prevalence of large left-sided arguments in locally annotated data; (ii) as another type of contribution, some new reflections on methodologies of the approaches under scrutiny.
{"title":"Discourse Relations and Connectives in Higher Text Structure","authors":"Lucie Poláková, Jirí Mírovský, Sárka Zikánová, E. Hajicová","doi":"10.5210/dad.2021.201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.201","url":null,"abstract":"The present article investigates possibilities and limits of local (shallow) analysis of discourse coherence with respect to the phenomena of global coherence and higher composition of texts. We study corpora annotated with local discourse relations in Czech and partly in English to try and find clues in the local annotation indicating a higher discourse structure. First, we classify patterns of subsequent or overlapping pairs of local relations, and hierarchies formed by nested local relations. Special attention is then given to relations crossing paragraph boundaries and their semantic types, and to paragraph-initial discourse connectives. In the third part, we examine situations in which annotators incline to marking a large argument (larger than one sentence) of a discourse relation even with a minimality principle annotation rule in place. Our analyses bring (i) new linguistic insights regarding coherence signals in local and higher contexts, e.g. detection and description of hierarchies of local discourse relations up to 5 levels in Czech and English, description of distribution differences in semantic types in cross-paragraph and other settings, identification of Czech connectives only typical for higher structures, or the detection of prevalence of large left-sided arguments in locally annotated data; (ii) as another type of contribution, some new reflections on methodologies of the approaches under scrutiny.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"244 1","pages":"1-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73589681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study examines the cognitive information processes that Turkish advanced non-native speakers of English employ in assigning the referents of this and that in reading and production. We predicted that these speakers would assign referents in relation to the linear distance between discourse-linked anaphors and their referents in the discourse (i.e., based on spatial-temporal features of this and that), which means they would prefer this for a referent mentioned in the proximal chunk of text and that for a referent mentioned in the distal chunk. We also predicted that readers would not assign referents based on the focusing features of this and that. We tested our predictions in two eye- tracking reading experiments and one sentence-completion experiment. Turkish L2 learners’ on- line reference resolution in reading experiments was different from that of English native speakers that were tested in a previous study. In the eye-tracking experiments, Turkish L2 learners did not show evidence of using a recency strategy to resolve referential ambiguity and did not use spatial- temporal or focusing features of this and that to assign referents. On the other hand, in the sentence- completion experiment, the effect of prominence of discourse structure in the use of this and that was qualitatively similar to that of English native speakers, but their indexing of the degree of focus of this and that was different. Our results suggest that the difference between Turkish L2 learners and English native speakers is due to L1 interference.
本研究考察了土耳其高级非英语母语者在阅读和生产中分配这一所指物和那一所指物时使用的认知信息过程。我们预测，这些说话者会根据语篇连接的指涉物与其语篇中的指涉物之间的线性距离(即，基于这个和那个的时空特征)来分配指涉物，这意味着他们更倾向于将近端语块中提到的指涉物用这个，而将远端语块中提到的指涉物用那个。我们还预测读者不会根据这个和那个的聚焦特征来分配引用物。我们在两个眼球追踪阅读实验和一个句子补全实验中测试了我们的预测。土耳其第二语言学习者在阅读实验中的在线参考分辨率与先前研究中测试的英语母语者不同。在眼球追踪实验中，土耳其二语学习者没有显示出使用近因策略来解决指称歧义的证据，也没有使用这个和那个的时空或聚焦特征来分配指称。另一方面，在句子完成实验中，语篇结构在this and that使用中的突出效果与英语母语者的质量相似，但他们对this and that的关注程度的索引不同。我们的研究结果表明，土耳其第二语言学习者和英语母语者之间的差异是由于L1干扰造成的。
{"title":"Processing of discourse anaphors by L2 speakers of English","authors":"DERYA ÇOKAL, P. Sturt, F. Ferreira","doi":"10.5210/dad.2021.202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.202","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the cognitive information processes that Turkish advanced non-native speakers of English employ in assigning the referents of this and that in reading and production. We predicted that these speakers would assign referents in relation to the linear distance between discourse-linked anaphors and their referents in the discourse (i.e., based on spatial-temporal features of this and that), which means they would prefer this for a referent mentioned in the proximal chunk of text and that for a referent mentioned in the distal chunk. We also predicted that readers would not assign referents based on the focusing features of this and that. We tested our predictions in two eye- tracking reading experiments and one sentence-completion experiment. Turkish L2 learners’ on- line reference resolution in reading experiments was different from that of English native speakers that were tested in a previous study. In the eye-tracking experiments, Turkish L2 learners did not show evidence of using a recency strategy to resolve referential ambiguity and did not use spatial- temporal or focusing features of this and that to assign referents. On the other hand, in the sentence- completion experiment, the effect of prominence of discourse structure in the use of this and that was qualitatively similar to that of English native speakers, but their indexing of the degree of focus of this and that was different. Our results suggest that the difference between Turkish L2 learners and English native speakers is due to L1 interference.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"91 1","pages":"38-80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89915165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper we report the results of two experimental studies in which we tested the claim of Hinterwimmer and Bosch (2017) that German demonstrative pronouns are anti-logophoric pronouns: They avoid discourse referents as antecedents that function as perspectival centers. In both experiments we tested the interpretative options of demonstrative pronouns in text segments which were either perspectivally neutral or in which the narrator’s or a topical protagonist’s perspective was foregrounded. Taken together, the experimental results are most compatible with a slightly modified version of the analysis argued for in Hinterwimmer and Bosch (2017) according to which topical discourse referents in neutral narration automatically become perspectival centers.
{"title":"Demonstrative Pronouns as Anti-Logophoric Pronouns: An Experimental Investigation","authors":"S. Hinterwimmer, Andreas Brocher, Umesh Patil","doi":"10.5087/dad.2020.204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2020.204","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we report the results of two experimental studies in which we tested the claim of Hinterwimmer and Bosch (2017) that German demonstrative pronouns are anti-logophoric pronouns: They avoid discourse referents as antecedents that function as perspectival centers. In both experiments we tested the interpretative options of demonstrative pronouns in text segments which were either perspectivally neutral or in which the narrator’s or a topical protagonist’s perspective was foregrounded. Taken together, the experimental results are most compatible with a slightly modified version of the analysis argued for in Hinterwimmer and Bosch (2017) according to which topical discourse referents in neutral narration automatically become perspectival centers.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"40 1","pages":"110-127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74950991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Existing literature shows that readers and listeners rapidly adjust their expectations about likely discourse continuations through discourse markers, as well as through other linguistic and extra-linguistic cues. However, it is unclear whether (i) the facilitative effects of various (extra-)linguistic cues differ in quality and (ii) whether the effects interact with one another in any principled manner. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments on concessive constructions in German and English wherein optional lexical and/or contextual cues appeared ahead of the concessive discourse marker. The results demonstrate that readers can use both types of cues to anticipate the upcoming discourse relation. Our study thus provides novel evidence for expectation-driven accounts of discourse processing and elucidates the functions of discourse signals. Furthermore, the results also show that the role that a type of cues plays is subject to cross-linguistic variation.
{"title":"Lexical and contextual cue effects in discourse expectations: Experimenting with German 'zwar...aber' and English 'true/sure...but'","authors":"Juliane Schwab, Mingya Liu","doi":"10.5087/dad.2020.203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2020.203","url":null,"abstract":"Existing literature shows that readers and listeners rapidly adjust their expectations about likely discourse continuations through discourse markers, as well as through other linguistic and extra-linguistic cues. However, it is unclear whether (i) the facilitative effects of various (extra-)linguistic cues differ in quality and (ii) whether the effects interact with one another in any principled manner. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments on concessive constructions in German and English wherein optional lexical and/or contextual cues appeared ahead of the concessive discourse marker. The results demonstrate that readers can use both types of cues to anticipate the upcoming discourse relation. Our study thus provides novel evidence for expectation-driven accounts of discourse processing and elucidates the functions of discourse signals. Furthermore, the results also show that the role that a type of cues plays is subject to cross-linguistic variation.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"974 1","pages":"74-109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77082084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates Robert Brandom's programme of logical expressivism and in the process attempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a comparison with the works of sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. The key claim of logical expressivisim is the idea that logical terms serve to make explicit the inferential relations between statements which already hold implicitly in a discursive practice that lacks such terms in its vocabulary. Along with this, it is claimed that the formal validity of an argument is derivative on so-called material inference, in that an inference is taken to be logically valid only if it is a materially good inference and cannot be made into a bad inference by substituting nonlogical for nonlogical vocabulary in its premises and conclusion. We note that no systematic account of logical validity employing this substitutional method has been offered to date; rather, proposals by e.g. Lance and Kremer, Piwek, Kibble and Brandom himself have followed the more conventional path of developing a formally defined system which is informally associated with natural language examples. We suggest a number of refinements to Brandom’s account of conditionals and of validity, supported by analysis of linguistic examples including material from the SNLI and MultiNLI corpora and a review of relevant literature. The analysis suggests that Brandom’s expressivist programme faces formidable challenges once exposed to a wide range of linguistic data, and may not in fact be realisable owing to the pervasive context-dependence of linguistic expressions, including 'logical' vocabulary. A further claim of this paper is that a purely assertional practice may not provide an adequate basis for conditional reasoning, but that a more promising route is provided by the introduction of imperatives, as in so-called "pseudo-imperatives" such as "Get individuals to invest their time and the funding will follow". We conclude the resulting dialogical analysis of conditional reasoning is faithful to Brandom's Sellarsian intuition of linguistic practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons, and conjecture that language is best analysed not as a system of rules but as a Wittgensteinian repertoire of evolving micro-practices.
{"title":"From Discursive Practice to Logic? Remarks on Logical Expressivism","authors":"R. Kibble","doi":"10.5087/dad.2020.202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2020.202","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates Robert Brandom's programme of logical expressivism and in the process attempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a comparison with the works of sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. The key claim of logical expressivisim is the idea that logical terms serve to make explicit the inferential relations between statements which already hold implicitly in a discursive practice that lacks such terms in its vocabulary. Along with this, it is claimed that the formal validity of an argument is derivative on so-called material inference, in that an inference is taken to be logically valid only if it is a materially good inference and cannot be made into a bad inference by substituting nonlogical for nonlogical vocabulary in its premises and conclusion. We note that no systematic account of logical validity employing this substitutional method has been offered to date; rather, proposals by e.g. Lance and Kremer, Piwek, Kibble and Brandom himself have followed the more conventional path of developing a formally defined system which is informally associated with natural language examples. We suggest a number of refinements to Brandom’s account of conditionals and of validity, supported by analysis of linguistic examples including material from the SNLI and MultiNLI corpora and a review of relevant literature. The analysis suggests that Brandom’s expressivist programme faces formidable challenges once exposed to a wide range of linguistic data, and may not in fact be realisable owing to the pervasive context-dependence of linguistic expressions, including 'logical' vocabulary. A further claim of this paper is that a purely assertional practice may not provide an adequate basis for conditional reasoning, but that a more promising route is provided by the introduction of imperatives, as in so-called \"pseudo-imperatives\" such as \"Get individuals to invest their time and the funding will follow\". We conclude the resulting dialogical analysis of conditional reasoning is faithful to Brandom's Sellarsian intuition of linguistic practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons, and conjecture that language is best analysed not as a system of rules but as a Wittgensteinian repertoire of evolving micro-practices.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"89 1","pages":"34-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86450949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian , which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.
{"title":"The Use of Perspective Markers and Connectives in Expressing Subjectivity: Evidence from Collocational Analyses","authors":"Yipu Wei, J. Evers-Vermeul, T. Sanders","doi":"10.5087/dad.2020.103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2020.103","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian , which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"23 1","pages":"62-88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81729514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prior research undertaken for the purpose of identifying deceptive language has focused on deception as it is used for nefarious ends, such as purposeful lying. However, despite the intent to mislead, not all examples of deception are carried out for malevolent ends. In this study, we describe the linguistic features of humorous deception. Specifically, we analyzed the linguistic features of 753 news stories, 1/3 of which were truthful and 2/3 of which we categorized as examples of humorous deception. The news stories we analyzed occurred naturally as part of a segment named Bluff the Listener on the popular American radio quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. Using a combination of supervised learning and predictive modeling, we identified 11 linguistic features accounting for approximately 18% of the variance between humorous deception and truthful news stories. These linguistic features suggested the deceptive news stories were more confident and descriptive but also less cohesive when compared to the truthful new stories. We suggest these findings reflect the dual communicative goal of this unique type of discourse to simultaneously deceive and be humorous.
{"title":"Please, Please, Just Tell Me: The Linguistic Features of Humorous Deception","authors":"S. Skalicky, Nicholas D. Duran, S. Crossley","doi":"10.31219/osf.io/cafbh","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/cafbh","url":null,"abstract":"Prior research undertaken for the purpose of identifying deceptive language has focused on deception as it is used for nefarious ends, such as purposeful lying. However, despite the intent to mislead, not all examples of deception are carried out for malevolent ends. In this study, we describe the linguistic features of humorous deception. Specifically, we analyzed the linguistic features of 753 news stories, 1/3 of which were truthful and 2/3 of which we categorized as examples of humorous deception. The news stories we analyzed occurred naturally as part of a segment named Bluff the Listener on the popular American radio quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!. Using a combination of supervised learning and predictive modeling, we identified 11 linguistic features accounting for approximately 18% of the variance between humorous deception and truthful news stories. These linguistic features suggested the deceptive news stories were more confident and descriptive but also less cohesive when compared to the truthful new stories. We suggest these findings reflect the dual communicative goal of this unique type of discourse to simultaneously deceive and be humorous.","PeriodicalId":37604,"journal":{"name":"Dialogue and Discourse","volume":"26 1","pages":"128-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88190734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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