Why pragmatic impairment? A case study in the comprehension of inferential meaning

This paper discusses a case study of Sarah (aged 9;8-10;3) who is reported to have pragmatic difficulties. The focus is on her comprehension of questions, which are asked on the basis of pictures and heard stories. Particular focus is on the pragmatic (or inferential) demands of the input questions and their relationship to the (in)appropriacy of the answer. Data from 16 normally functioning 6- and 8-year-old children are also presented for comparative purposes. The study shows that Sarah has difficulty with questions which require her to go beyond visually presented or verbally stated information. On one set of tasks she was to answer questions on the basis of composite pictures: for some of the questions, the answer was obvious from the picture (descriptive questions) and for others information needed to be inferred beyond the picture (for example, by imagining what had happened before and what is likely to happen next). Sarah\u27s performance was poorer on the inferential questions than the descriptive questions and poorer than the performance of 6- and 8-year-old normally functioning control children. Although the control children also found the inferential questions more difficult than the descriptive questions, this difficulty was not as pronounced as Sarah\u27s. This trend was also apparent in a set of tasks which required the children to answer questions on the basis of verbally told stories. This study suggests that pragmatically impaired children may have difficulty going beyond explicitly presented information and this would manifest as pragmatic production and comprehension problems. In cognitive terms, this may indicate difficulty with the process of inferencing

Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results.Comment: iii + 49 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript file; revised version of the first author's Bilkent M.S. thesis, written under the supervision of the second author; notify Akman via e-mail ([email protected]) or fax (+90-312-266-4126) if you are unable to obtain hardcopy, he'll work out somethin

Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface

This paper is concerned with conditional thoughts that are expressed via ‘incomplete conditionals’ in which an if-clause is uttered with no corresponding main clause, and yet still succeeds at communicating a fully-fledged conditional proposition. Incomplete conditionals pose a puzzle for the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals as in one respect, a condition is expressed explicitly using the canonical form ‘if p’, yet in another, the target of the condition is left unexpressed, requiring recourse to other linguistic or extra-linguistic information for its recovery. Taking observations from attested corpora, we explore the various ways in which the consequent of an incomplete conditional can be recovered, demonstrating that cases of incompleteness range from simple cases of ellipsis which are susceptible to a syntactic solution at one end of the continuum, to pragmatically recoverable cases at the other. This involves considering aspects of meaning arising out of the co-text, including cross-sentential anaphoric dependencies and considerations of coherence, as well as extra-linguistic context such as shared sociocultural information and world knowledge

"Implicature-Laden" Elicitations in Talk Radio Shows

Indirect elicitations in talk radio programmes on BBC Radio are not uncommon, notwithstanding, misunderstanding between the host and his conversational partner is not frequent. Investigating some of the reasons this paper focuses on how the socio-cultural and cognitive factors of the context interweave in discourse. The author suggests that valid interpretation and appropriate response to inferred elicitations can be best explained within the framework of Relevance Theory, and more specifically, with the presumption of accessibility of schemas obtained from the cognitive environment of the discourse partners. Through examples of empirical research the paper aims to reveal how the mutual knowledge of the participants controls discourse via the mental processes occurring in the interaction of two minds

Metaphoric extension and invited inferencing in semantic change

Two models of semantic change, metaphoric extension (Sweetser, 1990) and invited inferencing (Traugott and Dasher, 2002), have been offered as explanations for changes such as “see” > “know/understand”. In this paper, I will show that, while either model works for some of the changes, each model can explain changes that the other cannot. Metaphoric extension and invited inferencing can therefore be considered as two types of change rather than two competing theories. I furthermore suggest that changes such as “see” > “know/understand” occur when metaphoric extension and invited inferencing reinforce one another via parallel chaining (a concept adapted from Goossens, 2003).Dos modelos de cambio semántico, la extensión metafórica (Sweetser, 1990) y la inferencia invitada (Traugott y Dasher, 2002), sirven para explicar cambios como «ver» > «saber/entender». En esta presentación, muestro que los dos modelos funcionan con un grupo determinado de cambios, pero cada modelo puede explicar unos cambios que no puede explicar el otro. Por consiguiente, se consideran la extensión metafórica y la inferencia invitada como dos tipos de cambio antes que dos teorías rivales. Además, sugiero que los cambios como «ver» > «saber/entender» ocurren cuando la extensión metafórica y la inferencia invitada se refuerzan por la parallel chaining (un concepto adaptado de Goossens, 2003)

Why pragmatic impairment? A case study in the comprehension of inferential meaning

Abstract This paper discusses a case study of Sarah (aged 9;8-10;3) who is reported to have pragmatic difficulties. The focus is on her comprehension of questions, which are asked on the basis of pictures and heard stories. Particular focus is on the pragmatic (or inferential) demands of the input questions and their relationship to the (in)appropriacy of the answer. Data from 16 normally functioning 6-and 8-year-old children are also presented for comparative purposes. The study shows that Sarah has difficulty with questions which require her to go beyond visually presented or verbally stated information. On one set of tasks she was to answer questions on the basis of composite pictures: for some of the questions, the answer was obvious from the picture (descriptive questions) and for others information needed to be inferred beyond the picture (for example, by imagining what had happened before and what is likely to happen next). Sarah's performance was poorer on the inferential questions than the descriptive questions and poorer than the performance of 6-and 8-year-old normally functioning control children. Although the control children also found the inferential questions more difficult than the descriptive questions, this difficulty was not as pronounced as Sarah's. This trend was also apparent in a set of tasks which required the children to answer questions on the basis of verbally told stories. This study suggests that pragmatically impaired children may have difficulty going beyond explicitly presented information and this would manifest as pragmatic production and comprehension problems. In cognitive terms, this may indicate difficulty with the process of inferencing. ABSTRACT This paper discusses a case study of Sarah (aged 9;&10;3) who i s reported to have pragmatic difficulties. The focus is on her comprehension of questions, which are asked on the basis of pictures and heard stories. Particular focus is on the pragmatic (or inferential) demands of the input questions and their relationship to the (in)appropriacy of the answer. Data from 16 normally functioning 6-and 8-year-old children are also presented for comparative purposes. The study shows tha

A Memory-Based Processing Approach to Training Student Interpreters

This study demonstrates that adequate training of the students to fully use of their memory enables them to enhance their translation ability, overcome translation problems, and avoid communication failure. The study argues that failure in any oral translation task, including interpreting, could be attributed to the role of memory (in comprehending and producing oral texts); the more the memory is trained to keep as much information as possible, the easier the interpreting task and the less likely the failure is. To investigate the role of memory in interpreting and how it influences (positively/negatively) the process and product of interpreting, the researchers designed two questionnaires: a quantitative one for the 4th year students at the Department of English, School of Basic Education, University of Sulaimani, and a qualitative one for the translation lecturers, and a videotaped test for a sample of five best students. The data has been analyzed according to a well-specified set of criteria including the linguistic input (e.g. difficulty and structural complexities), background knowledge, and some basic cognitive processes required in interpreting (e.g. attention, associations, inferencing, etc.). This study contributes to research on translation studies and it may yield certain pedagogical implications. Keywords: Long-term and Short-term memories, Text comprehension and production, Interpreting, Information processing

Explicitation and Implicitation in Legal Translation – A Process Study of Trainee Translators

Le présent article a pour objet d’examiner l’utilisation de l’explicitation et de l’implicitation dans le domaine de la traduction juridique. Sur le plan linguistique, les textes juridiques sont complexes et difficiles à comprendre pour les non-spécialistes. Du point de vue cognitif, on pourrait par conséquent s’attendre à ce que l’explicitation et l’implicitation apparaissent fréquemment dans les textes cibles juridiques, étant donné que les traducteurs ont tendance à laisser dans les textes cibles des traces de leur compréhension, fruit d’un travail ardu. D’un autre côté, les traductions dans le domaine juridique ont des conséquences juridiques dans le monde réel. Du point de vue juridique, on pourrait donc s’attendre à ce que l’explicitation et l’implicitation apparaissent assez rarement dans les textes juridiques traduits, vu l’effet, sur le plan juridique, que peuvent avoir l’ajout ou la suppression d’informations. Cependant, comment cette contradiction se traduit-elle dans les textes cibles produits par des traducteurs d’expertises variables ? Le présent article étudie le phénomène de l’explicitation et de l’implicitation dans les traductions réalisées par les étudiants en traduction. Notre hypothèse est que le manque de compétences suffisantes en matière de scénarios juridiques a plus de poids que les efforts mentaux des étudiants et que ceux-ci choisiront, pour plus de sûreté, de se restreindre aux explicitations et aux implicitations obligatoires.This article explores the use of explicitation and implicitation in the context of legal translation. Legal texts are linguistically complex and difficult to understand for lay persons. From a cognitive point of view it may therefore be assumed that ex- and implicitations will be frequent phenomena in legal TTs, because translators will tend to leave traces of their hard-won understanding in the TT. On the other hand, legal translations have legal consequences in the real world. From a legal point of view it may therefore conversely be assumed that ex- and implicitations will be relatively rare phenomena in legal TTs because of the potential legal effect of adding or removing information. But how is this schism reflected in legal TTs performed by translators at different levels of expertise? This article examines phenomena of ex- and implicitations in trainee translator TTs. It is hypothesized that lack of sufficient knowledge of legal scenarios will override heavy mental processing efforts and that trainee translators will restrict themselves to choosing only obligatory ex- and implicitations as their safe bet

Morphological awareness in readers of IsiXhosa

This study focuses particularly on the development of four Morphological Awareness reading tests in isiXhosa and on the relationship of Morphological Awareness to reading success among 74 Grade 3 isiXhosa-speaking foundation-phase learners from three peri-urban schools. It explores in-depth why not all previously established Morphological Awareness tests for other languages suit the morphology of isiXhosa and how these tests have been revised in order to do so. Conventionally, the focus of Morphological Awareness literature has been on derivational morphology and reading comprehension. This study did not find significant correlations with comprehension, but rather with the children's ability to decode. Fluency and Morphological Awareness have not been given as much attention in the literature, but Morphological Awareness could be important for processing the agglutinating structure of the language in reading. This study also argues that it is not a specific awareness of derivational morphology over inflectional morphology, but rather a general awareness of one's language structure that is more important at this stage in their literacy development; specifically a general awareness of prefixes and suffixes. In addition, it was found that an explicit awareness of the morphological structure of the language related more to fluency and tests that accessed an innate and implicit Morphological Awareness had the strongest correlations overall with comprehension. The findings from this report have implications regarding how future curriculum developments for morphologically rich languages like isiXhosa should be approached. The positive and practical implications of including different types of Morphological Awareness tutoring in curricula is argued for, especially when teaching younger readers how to approach morphologically complex words in texts