Modality and its Conversational Backgrounds in the Reconstruction of Argumentation

The paper considers the role of modality in the rational reconstruction of standpoints and arguments. The paper examines in what conditions modal markers can act as argumentative indicators and what kind of cues they provide for the reconstruction of argument. The paper critically re-examines Toulmin's hypothesis that the meaning of the modals can be analyzed in terms of a field-invariant argumentative force and field-dependent criteria in the light of the Theory of Relative Modality developed within linguistic semantics, showing how this theory can provide a more adequate model for exploiting the modals as indicators. The resulting picture confirms Toulmin's intuition only in part: on the one hand the modals are always relational in nature and dependent on a contextual conversational background of propositions; on the other hand only epistemic-doxastic modals directly express a speech-act level inferential relation between a set of premises and a standpoint. Other modalities express relations (e.g. causal or final relations) better seen as part of the content of the argument whose argumentative relevance depends on the argumentation scheme employed. Thus non-epistemic modals function as argumentative indicators only indirectl

Pragmatics and Prosody

Most of the papers collected in this book resulted from presentations and discussions undertaken during the V Lablita Workshop that took place at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on August 23-25, 2011. The workshop was held in conjunction with the II Brazilian Seminar on Pragmatics and Prosody. The guiding themes for the joint event were illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation. Thus, all papers presented here are concerned with theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of speech. Among the papers in this volume, there are different theoretical orientations, which are mirrored through the methodological designs of studies pursued. However, all papers are based on the analysis of actual speech, be it from corpora or from experimental contexts trying to emulate natural speech. Prosody is the keyword that comes out from all the papers in this publication, which indicates the high standing of this category in relation to studies that are geared towards the understanding of major elements that are constitutive of the structuring of speech

Gesture and Speech in Interaction - 4th edition (GESPIN 4)

International audienceThe fourth edition of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) was held in Nantes, France. With more than 40 papers, these proceedings show just what a flourishing field of enquiry gesture studies continues to be. The keynote speeches of the conference addressed three different aspects of multimodal interaction:gesture and grammar, gesture acquisition, and gesture and social interaction. In a talk entitled Qualitiesof event construal in speech and gesture: Aspect and tense, Alan Cienki presented an ongoing researchproject on narratives in French, German and Russian, a project that focuses especially on the verbal andgestural expression of grammatical tense and aspect in narratives in the three languages. Jean-MarcColletta's talk, entitled Gesture and Language Development: towards a unified theoretical framework,described the joint acquisition and development of speech and early conventional and representationalgestures. In Grammar, deixis, and multimodality between code-manifestation and code-integration or whyKendon's Continuum should be transformed into a gestural circle, Ellen Fricke proposed a revisitedgrammar of noun phrases that integrates gestures as part of the semiotic and typological codes of individuallanguages. From a pragmatic and cognitive perspective, Judith Holler explored the use ofgaze and hand gestures as means of organizing turns at talk as well as establishing common ground in apresentation entitled On the pragmatics of multi-modal face-to-face communication: Gesture, speech andgaze in the coordination of mental states and social interaction.Among the talks and posters presented at the conference, the vast majority of topics related, quitenaturally, to gesture and speech in interaction - understood both in terms of mapping of units in differentsemiotic modes and of the use of gesture and speech in social interaction. Several presentations explored the effects of impairments(such as diseases or the natural ageing process) on gesture and speech. The communicative relevance ofgesture and speech and audience-design in natural interactions, as well as in more controlled settings liketelevision debates and reports, was another topic addressed during the conference. Some participantsalso presented research on first and second language learning, while others discussed the relationshipbetween gesture and intonation. While most participants presented research on gesture and speech froman observer's perspective, be it in semiotics or pragmatics, some nevertheless focused on another importantaspect: the cognitive processes involved in language production and perception. Last but not least,participants also presented talks and posters on the computational analysis of gestures, whether involvingexternal devices (e.g. mocap, kinect) or concerning the use of specially-designed computer software forthe post-treatment of gestural data. Importantly, new links were made between semiotics and mocap data

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

The interpersonal function in written discourse: a comparative study of English and Italian undergraduate writing

This study is a comparative analysis of university student writing in English and Italian (the native languages of the students). The main research issue investigated here relates to the differences and similarities in student writing across languages when the same text -type is produced within comparable situations. Cross -linguistic and cross -cultural variation in encoding and transmitting knowledge and in the way critical enquiry is conducted can be an area of potential difficulty when languages and cultures come into contact. Comparative analysis is a tool for investigating, explaining and, possibly, avoiding some of the potential errors and misunderstandings that may arise in cross -cultural communication. In particular the study focuses on writing conventions used by English and Italian native speaker students when writing about literature for their university courses.The data are texts of argumentative prose about literature (in the students' mother tongue) written for university examinations during an undergraduate degree course. The linguistic analysis focuses on discoursal devices related to the interpersonal metafunction. The fundamental hypothesis underlying the study is that the devices more centrally related to this metafunction can offer insights into the writing conventions adopted by the students. Whereas the interpersonal metafunction as the focus of analysis is a concept derived from Halliday, the actual linguistic analysis of discoursal features draws on different approaches to discourse study because the framework of analysis had to be flexible enough to encompass the investigation of two different languages and there was no standardised method of analysis for the present type of research. The linguistic areas focused upon are: person markers, `impersonal' and passive structures, modality, evaluative strategies (Politeness Theory), metadiscoursal features, devices establishing an overt link between writer and reader, rhetorical prominence and its effects on discourse.The Italian and English corpora of data (chosen to be representative of the text -type and the context of language production) have been manually analysed and tagged. The study is qualitative and descriptive (not normative): quantitative observations only contribute to identifying tendencies within a qualitative analysis. The findings have yielded tendencies and insights rather than clear -cut answers to the research questions, and the linguistic investigation itself has opened several potential areas for further research.The data show that the same argumentative text -type has a similar function in both sets of data, but the encoding of discoursal features indicates that the relation between the main participants (students and examiners) and that between the participants and the literary topics differ cross -linguistically. The English students show a more direct approach to the subject matter and the addressee than do the Italian students. This influences both the linguistic encoding of the argumentative mode in the two sets of data and the conventionalised projection of discourse roles in the students' texts. The study shows that awareness should be raised of the potential problems which might occur at the discourse level when students are asked to use unfamiliar writing conventions or have to write in a foreign language setting

Metaphor, theories of concepts and biological reductionism

This thesis is an attempt to present a multidisciplinary approach to adjectival polysemy, particularly adjectival polysemy of a metaphorical type, and its underlying conceptual structure. The last ten years have clearly shown a tendency towards reducing the number of meanings and the idea of metaphor as a mechanism of concept formation has been gaining much force, influencing research in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. Despite that fact, the long-standing tradition of analytic philosophy did not succumb to the attack. However few contentions are shared in these different fields, one is held unquestioningly by almost everyone. It is the literal-metaphorical distinction which is at the heart of both traditional philosophy and the theory of embodied realism. Drawing extensively on evidence from research on cross-modal perception, synesthesia, double-function terms in cross-cultural studies, child development, psycholinguistic experiments and experiments with brain-damaged subjects, reinterpreting the available data and analyzing in detail theories of concepts contained in cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and informational semantics, the thesis casts doubt on the validity of the literalmetaphorical distinction, for this class of examples. It stipulates the existence of psychologically primitive concepts, which are likely to be atomic and innate, and offers a no-polysemy view of conceptual structure with implications for linguistic polysemy. It also shows the limits of biological reductionism and emphasizes the need for functional approaches to cognition. The proposed alternative is both unexpected and exciting, and may serve as a basis for bringing together empirical evidence and philosophical coherence in a non-contradictory wa

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

A multifactorial study of the uses of may and can in French-English interlanguage

This study contributes to the understanding of how language learners make use of a second language, specifically how French English learners make use of the English modals may and can. The study is based on the assumptions that (i) acquiring a new language is a cognitively demanding task which requires the acquirer to identify [a] large amount of co-occurrence data, that (ii) those data are probabilistic in nature rather than absolute, and (iii) that semantic differences are particularly hard to discern and learn as they are not oxplicably noticeable. This study applies Divjak and Grie's (2008) behavioural Profile approach to semantic analysis to a corpus of native and learner English and native French in order to offer a fine-grained quantitative investigation of the co-occurrence patterns of may and can in both English varieties. It shows not only that may and can can be characterised and differentiated on the basis of their co-occurrence patterns, but also that such co-occurrence patterns vary systematically in native English and French-English interlanguage. This finding is supported by monofactorial and multifactorial statistical results indicating that (i) the meanings and the functions of may and can in both English varieties are correlated with the distributions of formal elements within their contexts of occurrence and (ii) that the uses of may and can activate different linguistic levels simultaneously. Generally, these results suggest that the grammatical context of the forms' occurrences presents processing constraints that influence and ultimately characterise learners' choices of may and can. More specifically, the study identifies six grammatical components that systematically trigger the use of may and can in a non-native fashion. Overall, the study shows that (i) it is possible to predict learner language on the basis of corpus-based and psychologically-informed hypotheses on the processing and the acquisition of lexical items of second language learners

Language is a complex adaptive system

The ASLAN labex - Advanced studies on language complexity - brings together a unique set of expertise and varied points of view on language. In this volume, we employ three main sections showcasing diverse empirical work to illustrate how language within human interaction is a complex and adaptive system. The first section – epistemological views on complexity – pleads for epistemological plurality, an end to dichotomies, and proposes different ways to connect and translate between frameworks. The second section – complexity, pragmatics and discourse – focuses on discourse practices at different levels of description. Other semiotic systems, in addition to language are mobilized, but also interlocutors’ perception, memory and understanding of culture. The third section – complexity, interaction, and multimodality – employs different disciplinary frameworks to weave between micro, meso, and macro levels of analyses. Our specific contributions include adding elements to and extending the field of application of the models proposed by others through new examples of emergence, interplay of heterogeneous elements, intrinsic diversity, feedback, novelty, self-organization, adaptation, multi-dimensionality, indeterminism, and collective control with distributed emergence. Finally, we argue for a change in vantage point regarding the search for linguistic universals