Journal ArticleDOI
Indirect Speech Acts
Nicholas Asher,Alex Lascarides +1 more
TLDR
It is shown how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action.Abstract:
In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking.read more
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Arab News and Conflict: A multidisciplinary discourse study
TL;DR: Arab News and Conflict as mentioned in this paper examines the role of language in the representations of events and ideologies found in news media, focusing on the Arab media discourse in times of conflict with Israel and the US, spanning the years 2001 to 2009.
Journal ArticleDOI
Socializing Children to Honorifics in Japanese: Identity and Stance in Interaction.
TL;DR: This paper examined the socialization of honorifics in Japanese and found that children learn the central meaning of addressee honourifics as a display of a public self, but also pick up on the affective meanings of addresee honorific words in caregiver speech and deploy them in interaction with peers in creative ways.
Journal ArticleDOI
Linguistic and Civic Refinement in the N’ko Movement of Manding-Speaking West Africa
TL;DR: The Register has become an essential tool in analyzing languages as sociocultural artifacts as mentioned in this paper, used in tandem with the concept of language ideology, and scholars have elucidated the central role of register as a sociological artifact.
Journal Article
Comprehension of non-conventional indirect requests: An event-related brain potential study
Seana Coulson,Christopher Lovett +1 more
TL;DR: This paper used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine the real-time processing of non-conventional indirect requests and literal statement control stimuli in 20 healthy adults.
Intonation and Discourse: Biased Questions
Nicholas Asher,Brian Reese +1 more
TL;DR: The authors surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure, including tag questions, negative polar questions, and what they call "focus" questions, with an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT).
References
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How to do things with words
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented a series of lectures with the following topics: Lecture I * Lecture II* Lecture III * Lectures IV* Lectures V * LectURE VI * LectURES VI * LII * LIII * LIV * LVI * LIX
Book ChapterDOI
Logic and Conversation
TL;DR: For instance, Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from Quine over certain specific specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.
Book
Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Ivan A. Sag,Carl Jesse Pollard +1 more
TL;DR: This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar, introduced in the authors' "Information-Based Syntax and Semantics," and demonstrates the applicability of the HPSG approach to a wide range of empirical problems.