Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure

Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operating within a discourse segment should be abandoned in order to integrate centering with a model of global discourse structure. The within-segment restriction causes three problems. The first problem is that centers are often continued over discourse segment boundaries with pronominal referring expressions whose form is identical to those that occur within a discourse segment. The second problem is that recent work has shown that listeners perceive segment boundaries at various levels of granularity. If centering models a universal processing phenomenon, it is implausible that each listener is using a different centering algorithm.The third issue is that even for utterances within a discourse segment, there are strong contrasts between utterances whose adjacent utterance within a segment is hierarchically recent and those whose adjacent utterance within a segment is linearly recent. This chapter argues that these problems can be eliminated by replacing Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state with an alternate model, the cache model. I show how the cache model is easily integrated with the centering algorithm, and provide several types of data from naturally occurring discourses that support the proposed integrated model. Future work should provide additional support for these claims with an examination of a larger corpus of naturally occurring discourses.Comment: 35 pages, uses elsart12, lingmacros, named, psfi

Language without information exchange

This paper attempts to revive a once‐lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange attracted theorists to metasemantic accounts grounding language use in illocutionary action (roughly, using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude). When this picture is rejected, a metasemantics grounding language in locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention) emerges as a more viable proposal, dissolving an intractable issue for traditional theories: the metasemantics of subsentential expressions

Fitting Pragmatics into the Human Mind: A philosophical investigation of the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis

This thesis focuses on the hypothesis that pragmatic understanding is underpinned by a mental module closely related to the ability to interpret others’ behaviors by inferring underlying mental states, also called ‘mindreading’. First, it aims at evaluating the plausibility of this hypothesis in light of the available data in the empirical literature by drawing on the argumentative toolbox of the philosophy of mind and language. Second, it aims at developing this hypothesis by addressing its main theoretical and empirical challenges. In Chapter One, I outline a historical overview of the different declinations of the modularity hypothesis in cognitive science, with a focus on early works in cognitive pragmatics and Theory of Mind research. In Chapter Two, I provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis by focusing on the central tenets of Relevance Theory. In Chapter Three, I explore the idea of pragmatics as a ‘sub-module’ of Theory of Mind from an empirical perspective by surveying the current state of the art in experimental and clinical pragmatics, thus ‘clearing up’ the recent controversy on the modularity of pragmatics from some misconceptions and empirical predictions which do not follow from the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis. In Chapter Four, I provide a novel cognitive framework for the modular view of pragmatics by evaluating the significance of research on ostensive communication in infancy with respect to the hypothesis of an early-developing modular heuristic for interpreting communicative behaviors. Chapters Five and Six both focus on the several ‘developmental dilemmas’ that must be confronted by intentional-inferential accounts of infant communication like the one endorsed in the present thesis, which will be disentangled, analyzed, and addressed by evaluating several possible solutions. In these two chapters, I show how the cognitive framework offered in Chapter Four can be employed and further extended to deal with such developmental dilemmas from a renewed modular perspective

Reference and the facilitation of search in spatial domains

This is a pre-final version of the article, whose official publication is expected in the winter of 2013-14.Peer reviewedPreprin

Salience and pointing in multimodal reference

Pointing combined with verbal referring is one of the most paradigmatic human multimodal behaviours. The aim of this paper is foundational: to uncover the central notions that are required for a computational model of human-generated multimodal referring acts. The paper draws on existing work on the generation of referring expressions and shows that in order to extend that work with pointing, the notion of salience needs to play a pivotal role. The paper investigates the role of salience in the generation of referring expressions and introduces a distinction between two opposing approaches: salience-first and salience-last accounts. The paper then argues that these differ not only in computational efficiency, as has been pointed out previously, but also lead to incompatible empirical predictions. The second half of the paper shows how a salience first account nicely meshes with a range of existing empirical findings on multimodal reference. A novel account of the circumstances under which speakers choose to point is proposed that directly links salience with pointing. Finally, a multidimensional model of salience is proposed to flesh this model out

Irony in a second language: exploring the comprehension of Japanese speakers of English

This thesis focuses on the extent to which non-native speakers of English understand potentially ironic utterances in a similar way to native speakers. Barbe (1995: 4) sees irony as one of ‘the final obstacles before achieving near native-speaker fluency.’ This assumption is supported by the findings of earlier studies (Bouton 1999, Lee 2002; Manowong 2011; Yamanaka 2003) which assumed a Gricean framework seeing irony as communicating the ‘opposite of what is said’ (Grice 1975, 1978). This thesis adopts instead the relevance-theoretic account of irony as echoic (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012), arguing that previous work suffers from both problematic theoretical assumptions and flawed experimental methods. The thesis reports the findings of two experiments designed to examine similarities and differences between the responses of non-native speakers of English (here Japanese speakers) and native speakers and how similar or different the effects of prosody are for these groups. The first experiment, conducted by an online survey, provided surprising results, suggesting that Japanese speakers can respond to potentially ironical utterances similarly to native speakers. The second experiment, focusing on the effects of prosody, compared the groups with regard to response trends. Three prosodic contours were used in this study, labelled ‘basic’ (a kind of default, unmarked tone), ‘deadpan’ (with a narrower pitch range), and ‘exaggerated’ (with a wider pitch range). The results indicated that Japanese participants could perceive English prosodic structure in similar ways to native speakers and were affected by prosodic contours in similar ways. It also suggested that Japanese participants were affected less strongly by ‘exaggerated’ intonation and slightly more strongly by ‘deadpan’ tones. These findings suggest that a relevance-theoretic framework provides the means to carry out fuller investigations than carried out previously and to develop a more systematic explanation of the understanding of irony in a second language

Communicative act development

How do children learn to map linguistic forms onto their intended meanings? This chapter begins with an introduction to some theoretical and analytical tools used to study communicative acts. It then turns to communicative act development in spoken and signed language acquisition, including both the early scaffolding and production of communicative acts (both non-verbal and verbal) as well as their later links to linguistic development and Theory of Mind. The chapter wraps up by linking research on communicative act development to the acquisition of conversational skills, cross-linguistic and individual differences in communicative experience during development, and human evolution. Along the way, it also poses a few open questions for future research in this domain

The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI

Non-Ideal Foundations of Language

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals. Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition—primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, racist speech, silencing, and manipulation. Non-Ideal Foundations of Language will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of language who are interested in the social and political applications of language, as well as traditional metasemantic theory