Speaking Your Mind: Expression in Locke's Theory of Language

There is a tension between John Locke’s awareness of the fundamental importance of a shared public language and the manner in which his theorizing appears limited to offering a psychologistic account of the idiolects of individual speakers. I argue that a correct understanding of Locke’s central notion of signification can resolve this tension. I start by examining a long standing objection to Locke’s view, according to which his theory of meaning systematically gets the subject matter of our discourse wrong, by making our ideas the meanings of our words. By examining Locke’s definition of “truth”, I show that Lockean signification is an expression relation, rather than a descriptive or referential relation. Consequently, the sense in which our words signify our ideas is roughly that our utterances advertise our otherwise undisclosed mental lives to each other. While this resolves one aspect of the public/private tension, I close with a brief discussion of the remaining tension, and the role for normative constraints on signification to play in generating a genuinely shared public language

Typology and complexity

For the Workshop I was asked to talk about complexity in language from a typological perspective. My way of approaching this topic was to ask myself some questions, and then see where the answers led. The first one was of course, "What sort of system are we looking at complexity in - what kind of system is language?

The modal particle ma 嘛: theoretical frames, analysis and interpretive perspectives

This article sets out to provide a semantic and pragmatic account of the modal particle ma 嘛, endeavouring to put into light new aspects in its function which, at present, remain widely unexplored in the literature. It presents an analysis of the particle ma by interrogating a written and a spoken corpus, showing how the semantic and the pragmatic levels are tightly interweaved in the functioning of ma: the results supported my hypothesis that the particle is plausibly a marker of interpersonal evidentiality (IE), a category set up by Tantucci (2013), used to signal a socially acknowledged piece of information, playing a fundamental role in the expression of politeness by safeguarding the interlocutors’ face; consequently, ma is always used with information that has an active or accessible status in the interlocutors’ mind and that is always pragmatically salient, independently of its position (at the end or inside the sentence), marking a Topic or a Focus. The particle performs pragmatic functions close to the ones of discourse markers since it increases the relevance of the marked information to the context, therefore also playing a contributing role in the coherence of discourse

Directive Utterances In Holy Köran: A Pragmatics Perspective

This research is aiming on 1) describing the sentence types of directive utterances used in English translation of Holy Köran Chapter An-Nisaa’ and 2) describing the intentions of the illocution contained in directive utterances in English translation of Holy Köran Chapter An-Nisaa’. In this research, the researcher uses a descriptive qualitative as the type of the research. The object of the study is directive utterances contained in Holy Köran Chapter An-Nisaa’. The data of the study is English translation of Holy Köran Chapter An-Nisaa’. The researcher uses documentation to collect the data then coding the directive utterances contained in Holy Köran Chapter An-Nisaa’. The techniques of analyzing the data are describing the sentence types contained the directive utterances in Holy Köran Scripture on Chapter An-Nisaa’ by refering to the theory of Yule (1996) based on the theory of classification of sentences by type of Frank (1972) and describing the illocution meaning of directive utterances in Holy Köran Scripture on Chapter An-Nisaa’ verses 1-176 by referring to the theory of Levinson (1983) and describing the intention contained in the illocution meaning of directive utterances by referring to the theory of Kreidler (1996) which is based on the speech context by refering to the theory of Hymes (1972). The result of this study shows that 1) there are two sentence types of directive utterances used in Holy Koran Chapter An-Nisaa’ namely: declarative sentence and imperative sentence. There are actually three sentence types of directive utterances based on theory Yule’s theory. However the writer does not find interrogative sentences. The sentence type of declarative has 6 data (11, 32%) and imperative has 47 data (88, 67%). 2). There are three categories of intention of directive utterance used in Holy Koran Chapter An-Nisaa’ namely: commanding, prohibiting, and ordering. There are actually five intentions of directive utterances based on the Kreidler’s theory (1996). The intention of commanding has 27 data (50, 94%), prohibiting has 21 (39, 62%), and ordering has 5 data (9, 43%)

Sociolinguistic and contact-induced variation in Hungarian language use in Subcarpathia, Ukraine

In addition to showing regional and social variation, the language use of the minority Hungarians of Subcarpathia, Ukraine, also presents a reflection of the region’s complex linguistic history and its effects from contact with Russian and Ukrainian. On the basis of quantitative empirical findings, this study shows Subcarpathian Hungarians to be a sociolinguistically stratified group of speakers whose Hungarian language use varies in a systematic manner according to sex, age, level of education, and place of residence. The paper also outlines some of the main differences in the language use of Hungarians in Subcarpathia and Hungary which are manifested in statistically significant ways