Uttering sentences made up of words and gestures

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication (indexical gestures, mimicry, prosodic features, etc.) are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. They are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture (e.g. Goldin-Meadow, McNeill) have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive (=communicative) stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated” (2002, 129; emphasis mine). This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example (the speaker is a fretting but relieved customer talking to an assistant in a fashion shop): (1) I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like (1) – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account (as inspired by, e.g., Merchant 2004): the structure of sentence (1) does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account (as initially developed in Recanati 2001 for a class of quotations)

On an alleged distinction between Mixed Quotation and Scare Quoting

Most writers working on simultaneous use and mention assume a distinction between mixed quotation (MQ) and scare quoting (ScQ). The consensus is that MQ affects truth-conditions. Hence, many writers regard MQ as a semantic phenomenon. There is no such consensus about ScQ. On the face of it, there is a clear difference between: (1) Alice said that life “is difficult to understand”. (2) Several ‘groupies' followed the band on their tour. The words quoted in (1) are attributed to Alice, and (1) would seem false if Alice had not uttered (something like) them. No such intuition is available for (2). This induces Cappelen & Lepore, leading writers in the field, to regard (1) as a blend of Direct and Indirect Discourse and to propose the following semantic analysis (logical form): there is an utterance u such that Alice said u and u samesays (+/- expresses the same content as) “Life is difficult to understand” and u sametokens (+/- is a token of the same contextual type as) “is difficult to understand”. As for (2), they regard the impact of the quotation in it as being entirely pragmatic. I show, however, that there is no principled distinction between MQ and ScQ. The main points are: (i) speech attribution to Alice in (1) is defeasible; (ii) there are cases of simultaneous use and mention without “say” which are semantically relevant (the absence of “say” means they are not accounted for by Cappelen & Lepore's logical form); (iii) there is apparent MQ with reporting verbs that pose a problem because they cannot govern Direct Speech reports. Hence, it is illegitimate to appeal to the sametokening predicate in logical form. These examples that ‘refuse' to fall neatly under MQ or ScQ seal the fate of Cappelen & Lepore's account. To conclude, I discuss Benbaji's fully semantic theory. Benbaji adopts Cappelen & Lepore's views on MQ. But he also proposes a semantic account of ScQ (which he calls “using others' words”). One option for him is to give up the Cappelen & Lepore story and extend his views on ScQ to all instances of simultaneous use and mention. I show, however, that this too fails. Therefore, in the end, only a pragmatic account of simultaneous use and mention remains as a viable option

Constraints on metalinguistic anaphora

The focus of this paper is on a subset of heteronymous mention, namely those cases in which the mentioning expression is, roughly speaking, anaphorically linked to the string it mentions. I will distinguish two subclasses. In the first one, the antecedent of the metalinguistic anaphor is a quotation. This means that both the antecedent and the anaphor refer to a linguistic entity (the same one, it turns out; these expressions are co-referential). In the second subclass, the antecedent is not a quotation; it is a string in ordinary use. Here we have no co-reference: whereas the anaphor refers metalinguistically, the antecedent either refers to an object in the world or does not refer at all. This second subclass is especially interesting because it instantiates a shift in the universe of discourse, from extralinguistic reality to language. Where such a shift occurs, I will speak of ‘world-to-language' anaphora. I will argue that metalinguistic anaphora is best described in terms of a theory that assumes that various anaphoric expressions encode various degrees of salience of referents. But I will also show that salience is built in the context of utterance. It is not necessarily an acquired feature of the referent by the time the anaphor is processed: there is adjustment between the anaphor and its immediate linguistic environment. Besides, we will see that other factors may also affect anaphora resolution, which suggests that the best account must, in essence, be pragmatic

Predicting breast cancer using an expression values weighted clinical classifier

Background: Clinical data, such as patient history, laboratory analysis, ultrasound parameters-which are the basis of day-to-day clinical decision support-are often used to guide the clinical management of cancer in the presence of microarray data. Several data fusion techniques are available to integrate genomics or proteomics data, but only a few studies have created a single prediction model using both gene expression and clinical data. These studies often remain inconclusive regarding an obtained improvement in prediction performance. To improve clinical management, these data should be fully exploited. This requires efficient algorithms to integrate these data sets and design a final classifier. Results: We compared and evaluated the proposed methods on five breast cancer case studies. Compared to LS-SVM classifier on individual data sets, generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD) and kernel GEVD, the proposed weighted LS-SVM classifier offers good prediction performance, in terms of test area under ROC Curve (AUC), on all breast cancer case studies. Conclusions: Thus a clinical classifier weighted with microarray data set results in significantly improved diagnosis, prognosis and prediction responses to therapy. The proposed model has been shown as a promising mathematical framework in both data fusion and non-linear classification problems

Introduction

This paper outlines the 11 contributions to issue 17 of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics, devoted to "Hybrid quotations" (cases of apparent simultaneous use and mention). It also sketches the main issues raised by hybrid quotations, not all of which surface in the contributions: the semantics-pragmatics interface; mixed quotation vs. scare quoting, grammatical and semantic well-formedness, context-shifts, and iconicity

On an alleged distinction between Mixed Quotation and Scare Quoting

Most writers working on simultaneous use and mention assume a distinction between mixed quotation (MQ) and scare quoting (ScQ). The consensus is that MQ affects truth-conditions. Hence, many writers regard MQ as a semantic phenomenon. There is no such consensus about ScQ. On the face of it, there is a clear difference between: (1) Alice said that life “is difficult to understand”. (2) Several ‘groupies' followed the band on their tour. The words quoted in (1) are attributed to Alice, and (1) would seem false if Alice had not uttered (something like) them. No such intuition is available for (2). This induces Cappelen & Lepore, leading writers in the field, to regard (1) as a blend of Direct and Indirect Discourse and to propose the following semantic analysis (logical form): there is an utterance u such that Alice said u and u samesays (+/- expresses the same content as) “Life is difficult to understand” and u sametokens (+/- is a token of the same contextual type as) “is difficult to understand”. As for (2), they regard the impact of the quotation in it as being entirely pragmatic. I show, however, that there is no principled distinction between MQ and ScQ. The main points are: (i) speech attribution to Alice in (1) is defeasible; (ii) there are cases of simultaneous use and mention without “say” which are semantically relevant (the absence of “say” means they are not accounted for by Cappelen & Lepore's logical form); (iii) there is apparent MQ with reporting verbs that pose a problem because they cannot govern Direct Speech reports. Hence, it is illegitimate to appeal to the sametokening predicate in logical form. These examples that ‘refuse' to fall neatly under MQ or ScQ seal the fate of Cappelen & Lepore's account. To conclude, I discuss Benbaji's fully semantic theory. Benbaji adopts Cappelen & Lepore's views on MQ. But he also proposes a semantic account of ScQ (which he calls “using others' words”). One option for him is to give up the Cappelen & Lepore story and extend his views on ScQ to all instances of simultaneous use and mention. I show, however, that this too fails. Therefore, in the end, only a pragmatic account of simultaneous use and mention remains as a viable option

Foreign-Language Quotations and Code-Switching: the Grammar Behind

In this paper, I look into a minor language-contact phenomenon — foreign-language quotations — and explore its connections to a widely studied language-contact phenomenon — code-switching. Rather than focus on the sociolinguistic dimension of these phenomena, I concentrate on the issue of their grammaticality. I start from the widely accepted assumption that code-switchers are competent bilingual speakers and that there is a grammar underlying code-switched utterances. I then turn to a variety of cross-linguistic quotations and examine its connections to code-switching. My hypotheses are (i) that the use of quotations from other languages is also grammatically constrained, (ii) that the grammar governing it is similar (the same?) as that behind code-switching

Nonparametric Regression via StatLSSVM

We present a new MATLAB toolbox under Windows and Linux for nonparametric regression estimation based on the statistical library for least squares support vector machines (StatLSSVM). The StatLSSVM toolbox is written so that only a few lines of code are necessary in order to perform standard nonparametric regression, regression with correlated errors and robust regression. In addition, construction of additive models and pointwise or uniform confidence intervals are also supported. A number of tuning criteria such as classical cross-validation, robust cross-validation and cross-validation for correlated errors are available. Also, minimization of the previous criteria is available without any user interaction

Commitment: the term and the notions

The notion of 'commitment' is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic inquiry: studies on speech acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised for its own sake. In this introductory paper, we review the notion as used in the three areas mentioned above, paying particular attention to who commits themselves to what, and to whether commitment is essentially a private or a public attitude. The paper also introduces the eleven contributions to issue 22 of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics