Evidentials and relevance.

Evidentials are expressions used to indicate the source of evidence and strength of speaker commitment to information conveyed. They include sentence adverbials such as 'obviously', parenthetical constructions such as 'I think', and hearsay expressions such as 'allegedly'. This thesis argues against the speech-act and Gricean accounts of evidentials and defends a Relevance-theoretic account Chapter 1 surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, with particular reference to their semantic and pragmatic status, and raises the following issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication. For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? Chapters 2-4 survey the three main semantic/pragmatic frameworks for the study of evidentials. Chapter 2 argues that speech-act theory fails to give an adequate account of pragmatic inference processes. Chapter 3 argues that while Grice's theory of meaning and communication addresses all the central issues raised in the first chapter, evidentials fall outside Grice's basic categories of meaning and communication. Chapter 4 outlines the assumptions of Relevance Theory that bear on the study of evidentials. I sketch an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials, and introduce three central distinctions: between explicit and implicit communication, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning, and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials in chapters 5-7. Chapter 5 deals with sentence adverbials, chapter 6 focuses on parenthetical constructions, and chapter 7 looks at hearsay particles. My main concern is with how these expressions pattern with respect to the three distinctions developed in chapter 4. 1 show that although all three types of expression contribute to explicit rather than implicit communication, they exhibit important differences with respect to both the truth conditional/ non-truth-conditional and the conceptual/procedural distinctions. Chapter 8 is a brief conclusion

Diagnosing Misattribution of Commitments: A Normative and Pragmatic Model of for Assessing Straw Man

This paper builds a nine-step method for determining whether a straw man fallacy has been committed in a given case or not, by starting with some relatively easy textbook cases and moving to more realistic and harder cases. The paper shows how the type of argument associated with the fallacy can be proved to be a fallacy in a normative argumentation model, and then moves on to the practical task of building a hands-on method for applying the model to real examples of argumentation. Insights from linguistic pragmatics are used to distinguish the different pragmatic processes involved in reconstructing what is said and what is meant by an utterance, and to differentiate strong and weak commitments. In particular, the process of interpretation is analyzed in terms of an abductive pattern of reasoning, based on co-textual and contextual information, and assessable through the instruments of argumentation theory

Evidentials and metarepresentation in early child language

This paper examines the developmental relation of the use and understanding of Modern Greek evidential lexical items with varying degrees of metarepresentational ability. Drawing on early natural language production of two 3;6-5;10-year-olds, the paper shows that children's use of evidentials follows a three-stage metarepresentational development. Comprehension experimental tests suggest a restricted linguistic ability and a reliable reasoning ability to interpret others' evidential state of mind. McNemar tests which were run for the evidential linguistic pairs tested (Experiment 1) and for the evidential reasoning trials administered (Experiment 2) revealed a higher likelihood for age to affect linguistic development during 4;0-5;10 years of age, than for age to affect cognitive development of evidentiality during 3;0-5;11 years of age. The discrepancy between children's fragile understanding of lexical evidentials and more robust recognition of consistent/conflicting evidential states is attributed to their immature metarepresentational abilities. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

The semantics and pragmatics of metadiscourse

This paper argues against standard views of academic metadiscourse [Hyland, Ken, 1998. Persuasion and context: The pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 437-455; Hyland, Ken, 1999. Talking to students: metadiscourse in introductory coursebooks. English for Specific Purposes 18, 3-26; Vande Kopple, William J., 1985. Some explanatory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication 36, 82-93; Vande Kopple, William J., 1988. Metadiscourse and the recall of modality markers. Visible Language 22, 233-272] which treat metadiscourse as essentially linked to non-propositional, rhetorical, stylistic, peripheral, or secondary aspects of interpretation. I redefine metadiscourse on theoretically justified grounds as either inter-textual or intra-textual. In inter-textual cases, other texts (by other authors or by the author herself at another time) are drawn upon within a single text (e.g., 'There have been reports of ...', 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has recommended that ...'); in intra-textual cases, reference is made to other parts of the same text (or to the author herself) (e.g., 'the questions that I want to consider are ...', 'I shall presently return to this point in some detail'). Drawing both on authentic (linguistic and medical) examples and on experimental evidence, I argue, using the framework of Relevance Theory [Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford; Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 2004. Relevance theory. In: Ward, G., Horn, L.R. (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 607-632], that (a) at the semantic level, metadiscourse may contribute to the propositional content of utterances and (b) at the pragmatic level, metadiscourse is indispensable to the effective interpretation of academic discourse. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Genres and pragmatic competence

How genres can be used to enhance pragmatic competence is an issue not adequately explored. Pragmatic competence is defined in this paper as a twofold ability relying on two types of competence: (a) pragmatic awareness, i.e. the ability to correctly identify pragmatically inferred effects in the form of implicated conclusions, e.g. irony, humour, contempt, respect, favouring, or incriminating attitudes conveyed by different text-types, and (b) metapragmatic awareness, the ability to meta-represent and explicate the link between relevant linguistic indexes and pragmatic effects retrieved by readers. Results from non-native university learners of English indicate that explicit genre-based instruction has significant positive effects on the development of genre-focused, convention-specific discourse but not on the development of pragmatic competence in low-level language proficiency learners. A positive correlation between language proficiency and pragmatic competence is further consolidated by the data. © 2010 Elsevier B.V

Pragmatic transfer, relevance and procedural meaning in L2

Pragmatic transfer traces back to Thomas' (1983, 1984) definition of "pragmatic failure" as a violation of sociolinguistic rules which result in misinterpretation (for a historical overview, see Bou Franch, 2012). As a result, negative transfer has received a great deal of attention for being a cause of miscommunication in L2 and a domain where corrective strategies towards native-like performance were much in need (see Kasper, 1992). In this study, positive transfer is triggered by a cognitive procedure rather than a sociolinguistic skill and is examined in terms of learners' acquired ability to infer pragmatic meanings in L1 and L2. Using the relevance-theoretic distinction of conceptual-procedural meaning (Wilson, 2011), the study seeks to unveil facilitating effects of L1, L2 and interventions on participants' ability to interpret newspaper editorials while using procedural expressions as evidence for pragmatic inferences drawn. © 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

Metaphor comprehension: Meaning and beyond

Preliminary evidence on non-propositional effects as indispensable to the informational content of metaphorical utterances is provided in Ifantidou (2019), Ifantidou and Hatzidaki (2019). The idea put forward was that the aesthetic apprehension of linguistic metaphors extends to enriching underdetermined aspects of propositional content. In this paper, I further examine the distinguishing aspects of metaphors during interpretation. Following Sperber and Wilson 2015, Wilson and Carston 2019, I argue that an emotional response is triggered to the situation represented by the metaphor (see also Ifantidou 2019). I will suggest that metaphors enhance comprehension by being vehicles for emotions such as affection or dislike, as in texts which present difficulties in language comprehension. Ιn these cases, metaphors evoke non-propositional effects, such as images or emotional responses, by connecting to interpreters’ perceptions, memories, previous experiences, imagining, and beliefs. Evidence that addressees are able to derive meaning more frequently from metaphors than from literal sentences in equally supportive linguistic contexts (in terms of length, complexity, linguistic under-determinacy) attenuates the idea that metaphors enhance understanding as a merely linguistic tool, and reinforces the view that metaphorical processing involves a blend of language information with perceptual experience. © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Pragmatic competence and explicit instruction

The paper examines pragmatic competence re-defined (Ifantidou, 2011a,b) in terms of an open-ended array of pragmatically inferred implicatures rather than a fixed set of routines (e.g. speech acts) or isolated implicatures. The data draws on L2 students of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, who are exposed to and assessed by pragmatic awareness and meta-pragmatic awareness types of task. Longitudinal evidence is used to assess the development of pragmatic competence in students first exposed to a pragmatic awareness task in fall 2009 and re-assessed in spring 2011 after explicit instruction. Cross-sectional data from a pragmatic test tapping into different aspects of pragmatic competence, namely (a) speech acts, (b) implicatures in a constrained linguistic context, (c) pragmatic inference in a global context, show differential results on the types of pragmatic ability assessed for two groups of learners. Performance achievement in the pragmatic trial under (c) is attributed to preceding explicit instruction in the case of group 1, and to instruction offered 12 months before the pragmatic trial in the case of group 2. Short-term and long-term effects of explicit intervention are confirmed. © 2013 Elsevier B.V

Pragmatics, cognition and asymmetrically acquired evidentials

This paper examines the development of a variety of evidential lexical items in Modern Greek from a longitudinal perspective involving 4;6 - 11;7 year olds. The main question to be addressed concerns parallel or asynchronous order of acquisition: Does the ability to use evidentials emerge for all items under investigation synchronically or does such an ability emerge earlier on for certain items while later for others? If the latter holds, how can this developmental lag be explained? An answer to these questions will draw on the pragmatic-cognitive abilities engaged by different types of evidential markers, and in particular, on the complexity of metarepresentations (Sperber 1994; Wilson 2000, 2005) different evidential markers rely on in order to be used by young children

Newspaper headlines and relevance: Ad hoc concepts in ad hoc contexts

This paper addresses the issue of newspaper-headline interpretation by questioning standard assumptions on how headlines are designed on the basis of largely prescriptive pragmatic guidelines or norms. The main questions examined are firstly, whether 'appropriate headlines' from the writer's perspective converge with 'effective headlines' from the reader's perspective, and secondly, whether there is a pragmatic heuristic which can explain in psychologically plausible terms the way headlines are selected and interpreted by newspaper readers. Drawing on 137 readers' reaction to a selection of UK/US newspaper headlines and on a corpus of 1310 reader-selected headlines, it is shown that headline readers tend to disregard standard norms such as length, clarity, and information as long as headlines rivet their attention in terms of creative style regardless of underdetermined semantic meaning. Using the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson and Carston, 2007; Sperber and Wilson, 2008), it is suggested that readers select headlines guided by expectations of relevance and interpret headlines by creating occasion-specific ad hoc concepts and ad hoc contexts in an overall attempt to optimally ration processing effort with cognitive effects. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved