Evaluative Disagreements

A recent quarrel over faultless disagreements assumes that disputes over evaluative sentences should be understood as regular, factual disagreements. Instead, I propose that evaluative disagreements should be understood in Lewisian terms. Language use works like a rule-governed game. In it, the assertion of an evaluative sentence is an attempt to establish one value as default in the conversation; its rejection, in turn, is in most cases the refusal to accept this move

Evaluational adjectives

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions

CROSS CULTURAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION STYLES: DATA REVISITED

The way conflicts are solved is thought to be culturally learned (Hammer, 2005); therefore, this is reflected through language use.  Conflicts, as inevitable parts of communication, naturally mirror cultural differences. Intercultural conflict styles have been studied so far by various researchers.  How conflicts are initiated, maintained and escalated or terminated are all culture bound (Leung, 2002) and all the related stages vary from one culture to another.  In the related literature, there have been attempts to describe different conflict handling classifications. Using Hammer’s (2005) categorization that was found to be more refined and summative, conflict resolution styles of Turkish and American College students were explored using Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) with eight conflict situations where the respondents were required to write verbal solutions to overcome the conflicts described in the test. Those utterances were categorized according to Directness/Indirectness Scale modified from Hammer’s (2005) “International Conflict Style Inventory (ICSI)” that classifies intercultural conflict resolution styles as high/low level of directness and high/low level of emotional expressiveness.  It is believed that the study provides insight into intercultural communication as there are culturally generalizable (etic) and learned patterns of conflict resolution styles pertinent to different cultures (Hammer, 2009, p. 223; Ting-Toomey, 1994).Keywords: conflict resolution styles, Turkish and American cultures 

`The moloch of details'? cycles of criticism and the meaning of history now

In a recent review of Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648– 1815 (2007), Keith Thomas marvelled at the author’s range, given that ‘the volume of specialised writing has grown immeasurably since the 1950s’ and because ‘the subject matter of history has expanded and its younger practitioners are intensely specialised.’1 Such observations are not new. More than a century ago, William Milligan Sloane offered a similar sentiment, but more colourfully, when lamenting that history had been ‘immolated by the Moloch of details’.2 The specialization which Sloane inveighed against increased in the subsequent years, with the expansion of the university-based history and the growing emphasis upon specialist knowledge. At the same time, the discipline fractured into more and more sub-specialisms, thus amplifying the problems which Sloane encountered in the 1890s. As historians strengthened their dogged faith in the power of the sources and in their powers of scientific deduction, many of the works they produced became divorced from a general reading population

Objectionable thick concepts in denials

So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick concept as "objectionable" in a certain sense. The paper also briefly considers contextualist, presuppositional, and implicature accounts of the evaluative contents of thick concepts, but finds none clearly superior to the others

Multidisciplinary perspectives on intercultural conflict: the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of conflict, culture and communication.

A few decades ago, managers spent more than 20% of their time trying to resolve conflicts (Thomas and Schmidt 1976). Nowadays, conflicts are probably even more complex and time consuming to resolve, because technological advances, the world‟s exponential growth rate, and globalization have led to increased contact between culturally diverse people. Different norms, values, and language can make negotiating more stressful and less satisfactory (Brett and Okumura 1998), and conflict cannot be managed effectively without simultaneously considering both culture and communication. In fact, the three concepts of conflict, culture and communication are like a Bermuda Triangle – hazardous conditions will emerge unless the three are simultaneously handled appropriately. Conflict processes are studied by researchers in a range of disciplines, including organizational behaviour, management studies, (intercultural) communication studies, peace studies, and applied linguistics. Unfortunately, research in these various disciplines tends to exist in parallel fields, with infrequent passages across theoretical and empirical divides. In this chapter we provide an overview of key theoretical frameworks, explore some of the main views as to the impact of culture, and consider the interrelationships between conflict, culture and communication. We call for more interdisciplinary research, so that boundaries can be broken down and illuminating new insights can emerge

Assertion and Accommodation: a Study of the Assertive Language in the Conversations of School-Age (5-13 Years) Girls

This study aimed to investigate the use of accommodation of assertive utterances (AUs) in the conversations of 49 girls aged 5;0-13;1. Based on the findings of earlier research that the use of such language is more closely related to age than to gender, it was predicted speakers would accommodate their use of and response to assertive utterances as a result of their partner’s age. Naturalistic language from these speakers was collected over a year, and evidence of accommodation was observed in all speakers. Fewer AUs were used with younger speakers compared to older ones, and those used with younger girls were more likely to be produced with the sole purpose of controlling the hearer’s behaviour. In addition, AUs were more likely to be complied with, or accepted, when they were produced by older girls. Given what is known about the types of language used by powerful/powerless individuals, it appears that these speakers consider age to be an indicator of status. A particularly interesting finding was that it was the age of a speaker in relation to other members of the conversation that influenced their use of and response to AUs, rather than the age of the speaker alone