A Complementary Perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory and Relevance Theory on Metaphor Interpretation

Conceptual blending theory and relevance theory fall under the umbrella of cognitive science. Both of them have contributed to our interpretation of the role of metaphor in cognition and language use. Conceptual blending theory considers metaphor interpretation to be the activation of relevant conceptual structures and places emphasis on how conceptual mechanism works in metaphor interpretation. Relevance theory views metaphor interpretation to be the recovery of an array of weak implicatures and places its major emphasis on the functions of the communicative principle and the relevance principle in metaphor interpretation. This article holds that conceptual blending theory and relevance theory may provide a complementary perspective on metaphor and suggests an integrative hypothesis on metaphor understanding on account of the similarities between and deficiencies of both theories

Raising Greek high-school students’ awareness of conversational implicatures with the use of corpora

Τα τελευταία χρόνια ιδιαίτερη έμφαση έχει δοθεί στην διδασκαλία της πραγματολογίας γενικά (Kasper, 1997; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005) και ειδικότερα στην αξία της διδασκαλίας της πραγματολογίας κατά την εκμάθηση της Αγγλικής ως ξένη γλώσσα (Tanaka, 1997; Lee, 2002; Taguchi, 2002; Alcón Soler, 2005; Taguchi, 2005; Aksoyalp and Toprak, 2015). Ωστόσο, παρόλο που οι Έλληνες μαθητές διδάσκονται αγγλικά από πολύ νεαρή ηλικία, αυτό που στην πραγματικότητα δημιουργείται είναι μια γενιά ικανών χρηστών της Αγγλικής που αντιμετωπίζουν πρόβλημα ανεπαρκούς κατανόησης όταν επικοινωνούν διαπολιτισμικά λόγω της έλλειψης πραγματολογικών γνώσεων. Η παρούσα μελέτη στοχεύει να διερευνήσει την εξοικείωση των Ελλήνων μαθητών λυκείου με την έννοια των ‘implicatures’ (υπονοούμενα) και να καλύψει ένα σημαντικό κενό στον τομέα της διδασκαλίας τους κατά το μάθημα των αγγλικών σε τάξεις ελληνικών σχολείων με αποτελέσματα που μπορούν να αποδειχθούν καθολικά για τη διδασκαλία των ‘implicatures’ στα αγγλικά αλλά και σε άλλες γλώσσες. Οι κύριοι στόχοι μου ήταν η αξιολόγηση της επίδρασης της διδασκαλίας των ‘implicatures’ με τη χρήση αυθεντικών κειμένων που ανακτήθηκαν από σώματα κειμένων (corpora) και η ανάπτυξη διδακτικού υλικού που μπορεί να αποδειχθεί χρήσιμο για την βελτίωση και την αξιολόγηση της πραγματολογικής επίγνωσης των μαθητών. Η μελέτη μου είχε ως στόχο να προσφέρει μια ολοκληρωμένη προσέγγιση για την αύξηση της πραγματολογικής ευαισθητοποίησης (Ifantidou, 2014) των μαθητών, καθώς περιλάμβανε υλικό βασισμένο σε παραδείγματα της πραγματικής ζωής (Boulton and Landure, 2016). Επιπλέον, επικεντρώθηκε σε πιο δημιουργικά ‘implicatures’ παρά σε συμβατικά, τα οποία είναι τυποποιημένα και, επομένως, μπορούν να επεξεργαστούν πιο εύκολα από τους μαθητές χωρίς να προκαλέσουν σοβαρά επικοινωνιακά προβλήματα (Vega, 2007). Προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση, υιοθετήθηκε το θεωρητικό πλαίσιο της Relevance Theory (Θεωρία Συνάφειας) (Carston, 2001; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson, 2009) και ακολουθήθηκε η διαδικασία ‘pre-test – teaching sessions on implicature—post-test’ τόσο για την πιλοτική όσο και για την κύρια μελέτη. Μετά την ποσοτική και ποιοτική αξιολόγηση των ευρημάτων, συνήχθη το συμπέρασμα ότι αυτό που καθιστά τo συγκεκριμένo υλικό κατάλληλο για διδασκαλία είναι το γεγονός ότι βασίστηκε αποκλειστικά σε αυθεντικές πηγές και όχι σε παραδοσιακά, μη αυθεντικά κείμενα που δεν εκθέτουν οι μαθητές στην πραγματική χρήση της γλώσσας. Επιβεβαιώθηκε επίσης ότι η διαδικασία ανάκτησης των ‘implicatures’ μπορεί να είναι ένας σημαντικός παράγοντας για τους μαθητές προκειμένου να επεξεργάζονται τη γλώσσα μόνοι τους. Τέλος, επαληθεύτηκε ότι η Relevance Theory για την προσέγγιση των ‘implicatures’ είναι πιο ακριβής και σαφέστερη όταν πρόκειται για τον ορισμό τους και είναι ιδιαίτερα ωφέλιμη για τους εκπαιδευτικούς που θέλουν να δώσουν έμφαση στα συμφραζόμενα (context).Over recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the teaching of pragmatics in general (Kasper, 1997; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005) and to the value of explicit teaching of pragmatics in an EFL classroom in particular (Tanaka, 1997; Lee, 2002; Taguchi, 2002; Alcón Soler, 2005; Taguchi, 2005; Aksoyalp and Toprak, 2015). In the Greek EFL context, although English is taught from a very young age, proficient Greek speakers of English are confronted with several misunderstandings when communicating cross-culturally. The present research aimed to investigate the familiarity of Greek high-school students with the concept of implicature and fill in a considerable gap within the field of teaching pragmatics in the EFL classroom of Greek schools, hoping that it may influence the teaching of implicatures in English, and possibly also in other languages. My main purpose was, on the one hand, to evaluate the effect of explicit teaching of implicatures with the use of authentic texts retrieved from corpora and, on the other hand, to develop teaching and testing materials with a view to raising and assessing learners’ pragmatic awareness. My research aimed to offer a complete approach to raising learners’ pragmatic awareness (as defined in Ifantidou, 2014) as it encompassed both teaching and testing materials based on real-life examples retrieved from corpora (Boulton and Landure, 2016). Moreover, it focused on creative conversational implicatures rather than conventional ones, since conventionalized implicatures are formulaic and patterned and can, thus, be processed more easily by EFL learners without causing serious communicational breakdowns (Vega, 2007). Towards that direction, the relevance-theoretic framework was adopted (Carston, 2001; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson, 2009) and the process of pre-test, teaching sessions on implicatures, post-test was followed both during the pilot and the main studies. After the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the findings, it was concluded that what made particularized conversational implicatures amenable to teaching is the fact that they appeared in contexts retrieved from authentic resources instead of traditional, expository and non-authentic texts, which fail to expose learners to real-life language. It was also confirmed that the process of implicature retrieval may be a crucial factor for induction, and advantageous for learners to process language on their own. Finally, it was verified that the relevance-theoretic approach to implicatures is more adequate when it comes to defining what an implicature is and provides the most plausible approach for teachers who intend to assign prominence to the role of context in implicature retrieval

How to set up normal optimal answer models.

Abstract. We investigate the role of multi-attribute utility analyses in game theoretic models of Gricean pragmatics, i.e. for finding a model of the linguistic context of an utterance and for the calculation of implicatures. We investigate especially relevance implicatures of direct answers. The work is based on the optimal answer mode

Pragmatic enrichment in language processing and development

The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minimum assess whether and how the literal meaning of an utterance addresses a question under discussion in the conversation. In cases of implicature, where the speaker intends to communicate more than just the literal meaning, listeners must access additional relevant information in order to understand the intended contribution of the utterance. I argue that the primary challenge for inferring speaker meaning is in identifying and accessing this relevant contextual information. In this dissertation, I integrate evidence from several different types of implicature to argue that both adults and children are able to execute complex pragmatic inferences relatively efficiently, but encounter some difficulty finding what is relevant in context. I argue that the variability observed in processing costs associated with adults' computation of scalar implicatures can be better understood by examining how the critical contextual information is presented in the discourse context. I show that children's oft-cited hyper-literal interpretation style is limited to scalar quantifiers. Even 3-year-olds are adept at understanding indirect requests and "parenthetical" readings of belief reports. Their ability to infer speaker meanings is limited only by their relative inexperience in conversation and lack of world knowledge

The Cognitive Principle of Relevance and its Application to Anti Iraq War Posters

Relevance theory is a psychological model for understanding the cognitive interpretation of language, was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986 and republished in 1995. They argue that the thing that causes an input to stand out from others is its relevance to the receiver and that every utterance creates in the addressee an expectation of relevance. The underlying assumption of relevance theory is that in any given context, the addressee has to assume that what people say is relevant.     In this paper the problem of the cognitive principle of relevance theory presented by Sperber and Wilson is approached in its application to the posters painted by people who are opposing an American led war against Iraq. The analysis will be conducted to find out how these posters achieve a successful communication and how is that the audience recognizes that the designer of each poster has something to say that matters, something that is relevant and how the addressee understands the content of these posters and how he/she uses their cognition to interpret the posters’ contents and finds them relevant as they are apposing the war against Iraq.

The acquisition of scalar implicatures

This is section 5.3. of Interface Strategies-Optimal and Costly Computations, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 200

Integrating pragmatic reasoning in an efficiency-based theory of utterance choice

This thesis explores new methods of accounting for discourse-level linguistic phenomena, using computational modeling. When communicating, efficient speakers frequently choose to either omit, or otherwise reduce the length of their utterances wherever possible. Frameworks such as Uniform Information Density (UID) have argued that speakers preferentially reduce or omit those elements that are more predictable in context, and easier to recover. However, these frameworks have nothing to say about the effects of a linguistic choice on how a message is interpreted. I run 3 experiments which show that while UID posits no specific consequences to being "overinformative" (including more information in an utterance than is necessary), in fact overinformativeness can trigger pragmatic inferences which alter comprehenders' background beliefs about the world. In this case, I show that the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model, which models back-and-forth pragmatic reasoning between speakers and comprehenders, predicts both efficiency-based utterance choices, as well as any consequent change in perceived meaning. I also provide evidence that it's critical to model communication as a lossy process (which UID assumes), which allows the RSA model to account for phenomena that it otherwise is not able to. I further show that while UID predicts increased use of pronouns when referring to more contextually predictable referents, existing research does not unequivocally support this. I run 2 experiments which fail to show evidence that speakers use reduced expressions for predictable elements. In contrast to UID and similar frameworks, the RSA model can straightforwardly predict the results that have been observed to date. In the end, I argue that the RSA model is a highly attractive alternative for modeling speaker utterance choice at the discourse level. When it reflects communication as a lossy process, it is able to predict the same predictability-driven utterance reduction that UID does. However, by additionally modeling back-and-forth pragmatic reasoning, it successfully models utterance choice phenomena that simpler frameworks cannot account for.Diese Arbeit erforscht neue Methoden, linguistische Phänomene auf Gesprächsebene per Computermodellierung zu erfassen. Effiziente Sprecher:innen entscheiden sich bei der Kommunikation häufig dazu, wenn immer es möglich ist, Äußerungen entweder ganz auszulassen oder aber ihre Länge zu reduzieren. Modelle wie Uniform Information Density (UID) argumentieren, dass Sprecher:innen vorzugsweise diejenigen Elemente auslassen, die im jeweiligen Kontext vorhersagbarer und einfacher wiederherzustellen sind. Allerdings sagen diese Modelle nichts über die Auswirkungen einer linguistischen Entscheidung bezüglich der Interpretation einer Nachricht aus. Ich führe drei Experimente durch, die zeigen, dass wenngleich UID keine spezifischen Auswirkungen von "Überinformation" (einer Äußerung mehr Information als nötig geben) postuliert, Überinformationen doch pragmatische Schlussfolgerungen, die das gedankliche Weltmodell der Versteher:innen ändern können, auslöst. Für diesen Fall zeige ich, dass das Rational-Speech-Act-Modell (RSA), welches pragmatische Hin-und-Her-Schlussfolgerungen zwischen Sprecher:innen und Versteher:innen modelliert, sowohl effizienzbasierte Äußerungsauswahl als auch jegliche resultierende Verständnisänderung vorhersagt. Ich liefere auch Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass es entscheidend ist, Kommunikation als verlustbehafteten Prozess zu modellieren (wovon UID ausgeht), was es dem RSA-Modell erlaubt, Phänomene einzubeziehen, wozu es sonst nicht in der Lage wäre. Weiterhin zeige ich, dass obschon UID beim Bezug auf kontextuell vorhersagbarere Bezugswörter eine erhöhte Nutzung von Pronomen vorhersagt, dies von existierender Forschung nicht einstimmig gestützt wird. Ich führe zwei Experimente durch, die keine Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass Sprecher:innen reduzierte Ausdrücke für vorhersagbare Elemente verwenden, finden. Im Gegensatz zu UID und ähnlichen Modellen kann dass RSA-Modell direkt die bislang beobachteten Resultate vorhersagen. Schließlich lege ich dar, warum das RSA-Modell eine höchst attraktive Alternative zur Modellierung von Sprachäußerungsentscheidungen auf Gesprächsebene ist. Wenn es Kommunikation als einen verlustbehafteten Prozess widerspiegelt, kann es dieselbe vorhersagebasierte Äußerungsreduktion vorhersagen wie auch UID. Modelliert man jedoch zusätzlich pragmatische Hin-und-Her-Schlussfolgerungen, modelliert RSA erfolgreich Phänomene bei Äußerungsentscheidungen, die einfachere Modelle nicht abbilden können.German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of SFB 1102 - Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL