"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

Perception and Testimony as Data Providers

Assuming that the sceptical challenge might be either bypassed or answered, this still leaves unspecified how high-quality information about the external world is acquired. In this paper, I will argue that, if knowledge is accounted information, then when we apply this definition to the analysis of perceptual knowledge and knowledge by testimony (the only two sources of information about the external world), the result is that both qualify as data providers.Peer reviewe

Effect of verb argument structure on picture naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI)

Background: This study investigated verb argument structure effects in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Aims: A picture-naming paradigm was used to compare the response times and naming accuracy for nouns and verbs with differing argument structure between Spanish-speaking children with and without language impairment. Methods & Procedures: Twenty-four children with SLI (ages 5;3-8;2 [years;months]), 24 age-matched controls (ages 5;3-8;2), 24 MLU-w controls (ages 3;3-7;1 years), and 31 adults participated in a picture-naming study. Outcomes & Results: The results show all groups produced more correct responses and were faster for nouns than all verbs together. As regards verb type accuracy, there were no differences between groups in naming one-argument verbs. However, for both two- and three-argument verbs, children with SLI were less accurate than adults and age-matched controls, but similar to the MLU-matched controls. For verb type latency, children with SLI were slower than both the agematched controls and adults for one- and two-argument verbs, while no differences were found in three-argument verbs. No differences were found between children with SLI and MLU-matched controls for any verb type. Conclusions & Implications: It has been shown that the naming of verbs is delayed in Spanish children with SLI. It is suggested that children with SLI may have problems encoding semantic representations

Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science

Nicholas Shea offers Varitel Semantics as a naturalistic account of mental content. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea’s own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic functions

ADJECTIVISH INDONESIAN VERBS: A COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE

There has been a deeply rooted belief that parts of speech can be discretely categorized. It is somethingwidely accepted in linguistics. There is a tendency of taking for granted of such an academic beliefTherefore it happens from time to time without being thought critically the degree of its empirical truthThose studying linguistics will sooner or later read many linguistics text books stating that once a word hasits own category, there will be no potential of the word to have another word category. Most people learninglinguistics considered it as something necessary to occur. This linguistic phenomenon is not just taken tobe true, yet it comes to be taken as something conclusive. Factually, there are Indonesian verbs behavingadjectivishly. They are, to some extent, verbs, yet to another one, they are adjectives. It is evidenced by thefact that they have the properties of adjective. These linguistic phenomena demonstrate that there are Indonesian verbs that have stronger quality of their verbness. It means that there are Indonesian verbs thaare verbier than others. Based on the data found, Indonesian transitive verbs have higher potential to behaveadjectivishly than the Indonesian intransitive ones. A certain kind of Indonesian transitive verbs can betreated adjectivishly. This finding shows that the degree of word category discreteness, particularly verb, isnot something clear and cut. There are possibilities to emerge that word categories can, to some extent, be fuzzy. The fuzzy quality can be referred to the attributions of adjective to the Indonesian transitive verbs. Imeans that categorizing word class is not as simple as we thought before

MADURESE PROVERBS (A Sociolinguistics Cognitive perspective of Madurese Meaning of life)

This paper aim to continue Rifai's Manusia Madura description of Madurese people various way through proverbs, from one of the cognitive science sight, cognitive linguistics. A work that based on some traditional and old proverbs well known by Madurese, especially old people, reflects to their habits, characteristics, life and work ethos, appearances, point of views and principles. One of the proverb, such as like Buppa' babbhu ghuru rato is one of the basic Madurese proverb that is short in form and has fundamental interpretation in meaning to describe Madurese people in general. A life of one of the biggest races population that has been mostly related with rudeness, underestimation, and other bad things, whereas its language takes important role of how to know the world, instead of to know the knowledge Madurese language itself first. Many of Linguistics works are in descriptive try to describe and explain the language phenomena related to other things, where these will be found in this paper through proverbs and their generated ideas linked to postulates and factual things in the real world. The expectation of these proverbs that is as part of Madurese identity may be different with what is happening to Madurese people in this globalization era, such as what did happen to the former Bangkalan's Bupati. Therefore the result of this work would be like some model of Madurese paroles in corpus data that may opposite with the proverbs meaning, so it can be awareness; prediction of Madurese people mind works to be understood through their comprehension of proverbs; and the representative strategies and maintenance for Madura through the use of Madurese language reflecting cognition and knowledge

The formulation of argument structure in SLI: an eye-movement study

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanishspeaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge regarding argument structure. Eleven children with SLI (aged 3;8 to 6;6) and eleven control children participated in an eyetracking experiment in which participants had to describe events with different argument structure in the presence of visual scenes. Picture descriptions, latency time and eye movements were recorded and analyzed. The picture description results showed that the percentage of responses in which children with SLI substituted a non-target verb for the target verb was significantly different from that for the control group. Children with SLI made more omissions of obligatory arguments, especially of themes, as the verb argument complexity increased. Moreover, when the number of arguments of the verb increased, the children took more time to begin their descriptions, but no differences between groups were found. For verb type latency, all children were significantly faster to start describing one-argument events than two- and three-argument events. No differences in latency time were found between two- and three-argument events. There were no significant differences between the groups. Eye-movement showed that children with SLI looked less at the event zone than the age-matched controls during the first two seconds. These differences between the groups were significant for three-argument verbs, and only marginally significant for one- and two-argument verbs. Children with SLI also spent significantly less time looking at the theme zones than their age-matched controls. We suggest that both processing limitations and deficits in the semantic representation of verbs may play a role in these difficulties

VERBAL WARFARE IN THE POLISH MEDIA: AN ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

The outcome of the analyses of spoken and written data reveals that political, social and economic antagonisms are well fed by language which highlights dichotomies and depicts ‘the others’ as the source of all evil. The metaphorical language largely follows the patterns investigated and described by Lakoff, providing a wealth of material to support the claim that ARGUMENT IS WAR. In the light of the collected data, multiple ‘wars’ are in progress successfully generating language of conflict