THE ANALYSIS OF MOOD AS INTERPERSONAL MEANING IN THE DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL LETTER ADDRESSED TO RECEP T. ERDOGAN ON OCTOBER 9TH 2019

This article reports the analysis of the Mood toward Trumps’ presidential letter to Erdogan dated October 9th, 2019. The researcher used a qualitative method based on the theory of systemic functional linguistics which Halliday introduced based on three-meta-functions of language to analyze the data. The researcher focused on interpersonal meaning theory to analyze the mood system, residue, and types of mood in each clause as Trump’s official written utterance. The reason for the analysis was that there are many controversial utterances that have been used by Trump to address Erdogan. The letter was an official letter from US President to Turkey's President as a response to Turkey’s president's decision to launch a military operation in Syria. The analysis has found that there are four imperative moods and fifteen declarative moods shown in the letter. The imperative moods then might be discussed as a controversial context because when Trump used imperative sentences it could be interpreted that Trump used a direct diplomatic communication style with Erdogan. Otherwise, the declarative mood marks the letter as a clear language style in explaining Trump’s purpose and aim systematically. The researcher then suggests to the reader to analyze powerful people's messages conveyed through their letters, speech, diplomatic dialogue, or official forum group discussion to gain more understanding of how meaning contextually works in spoken or written text

Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed

(Re)conceptualizing resistance to (re)conceptualize campus climate challenges: Analyzing the resistant register of student reflection writing in a university diversity course

Given the rise in diversity across college campuses, campus climate surveys have recommended universities offer diversity courses to help improve sensitivity towards diversity. This dissertation project looks at one of these university diversity courses and how students resist social justice issues in their written reflection papers. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this project specifically analyzes which linguistic devices students use in their reflections to construe a resistant tenor. This study identifies three primary linguistic devices in student writing: personalization through pronoun use, use of modal verbs, and use of declarative sentence structure. Together, I argue these three devices achieve a discourse characterized by a Register of Resistance. This dissertation concludes that understanding student resistance from the linguistic lens, provided by SFL and CDA, affords an important opportunity to (re)conceptualize teaching and learning in diversity courses meant to improve campus climates. An implication drawn from the research is that students may benefit from increasing their critical language awareness by analyzing their own writing in order to recognize how they participate consciously or unconsciously in discourses which serve to (re)produce social inequities

Inferring Acceptance and Rejection in Dialogue by Default Rules of Inference

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: {\sc implicature rejections}, {\sc epistemic rejections} and {\sc deliberation rejections}. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.Comment: 37 pages, uses fullpage, lingmacros, name

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Know-how, intellectualism, and memory systems

ABSTRACTA longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between knowthatand know-how. This traditional “anti-intellectualist” view is soentrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in supportof an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicitmemory, derived from the so-called “standard model of memory.”In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has beenchallenged by an “intellectualist” view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the anti-intellectualist view have turned to the cognitivescience of memory, and to the standard model in particular, todefend their view. Here, I argue that this strategy is a mistake. As it turns out, upon closer scrutiny, the evidence from cognitivepsychology and neuroscience of memory does not support theanti-intellectualist approach, mainly because the standard modelof memory is likely wrong. However, this need not be interpretedas good news for the intellectualist, for it is not clear that theempirical evidence necessarily supp..