Showing papers on "Utterance published in 1985"

Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity

Abstract: When 'marked' or 'external' negation has not been treated as an additional semantic operator alongside the straightforward truth-functional, presupposition-preserving ordinary ('internal') negation, it has been collapsed with internal negation into a unified general logical operator on propositions. Neither of these approaches does justice to the differences and kinships between and within the two principal varieties of negation in natural language. Marked negation is not reducible to a truth-functional one-place connective with the familiar truth-table for negation, nor is it definable as a separate logical operator; it represents, rather, a metalinguistic device for registering objection to a previous utterance (not proposition) on any grounds whatever, including the way it was pronounced.*

How Children Start Arguments.

Abstract: Previous research on children's arguments has neglected their initial phases, particularly how they arise out of children's ongoing practical activities. This paper examines how any utterance or activity can be opposed, the concept of opposition being at the center of any definition of argument. However, once opposition has occurred, it can be treated in a variety of ways, and a full-blown argument or dispute is only one possible and contingent outcome. Children analyze others' moves not only verbally, but nonverbally as well. Thus, bodily actions and presupposition are necessary components in the analysis of how arguments are started. Nonverbal oppositional moves may be at the base of semantically constructed disputes. When opposition occurs, it is to be taken to imply the violation of some rule or value. The meaning of that rule or value relative to children's culture is taken to have to do not with its content, but its usage in promoting a local social organization. (Conversational analysis, child language, social organization, presupposition, dispute genres, American English [middle class, Caucasian])

Writing in Preschoolers: An Age-Related Analysis.

Abstract: We investigated the development in preschoolers' conceptualization of the written system from its graphic rendering and its mapping onto meaning by analyzing children's writings and readings of their writings. Forty-two Israeli children aged 3.4 – 5.8 years were asked to draw, write, and interpret a number of utterances. By the age of four, children's writings became constricted in size relative to their drawings and were composed of linearly organized units separated by regular blanks. These units increased in their adherence to conventional Hebrew letters throughout the age range examined. Children's interpretations of their own writing were classified into five modes: Interpretation unrelated to the utterance; preserving the content of the utterance but not its verbal form; complete reiteration; dividing the utterance into phonetic units; and description of the written characters. These modes were related to age and to conventionality of characters used.

Intonation and organization of utterances

Abstract: Syntactic theories of intonation assume that intonation is congruent to syntax. It is, however, in the cases where it is not that intonation can restructure an utterance and become informative. In a first stage, we identify the prosodic units which play a part in the organisation of utterances. In a second stage, we examine how intonation contributes to the linear and hierarchical structure of utterances. The functioning of prosodic units in semantic and pragmatic organisation of the sentence allows us to bring to light syntactic constraints. This method seems the best way to evaluate the respective interactions of intonation with syntax and pragmatics. These syntactic constraints constitute formal marks which justify the content of prosodic rules (syntactic, semantic, accentual and rhythmic) which make it possible to predict or explain the intonation of utterances.

The delta rule development system for speech synthesis from text

Abstract: Progress in speech synthesis has been hampered by the lack of rule-writing tools of sufficient flexibility and power. This paper presents a new system, Delta, that gives linguists and programmers a versatile rule language and friendly debugging environment. Delta's central data structure is well-suited for representing a broad class of multi-level utterance structures. The Delta language has flexible pattern-matching expressions, control structures, and utterance manipulation statements. Its dictionary facilities provide elegant exception handling. The interactive symbolic debugger speeds rule development and tuning. Delta can not only accommodate existing synthesis models, but can also be used to develop new ones.

Why that now?” two kinds of conversational meaning∗

Abstract: In conversational analysis, the meaning of an utterance‐in‐conversation is the hearing given to the utterance by the participants, as displayed in their responses. This orientation to participants is very clear in conversational analytic studies and quite consistent with an interactional approach. What is perhaps less clear is that there is another way, within the framework of conversational analysis, of arriving at interpretations of utterances. These latter interpretations are referred to here as “conversationally grounded analyst's interpretations,” and they may be quite distinct from participant hearings. An exchange during a family therapy session is examined in detail to illustrate the notion of an analyst's interpretation. Finally, the usefulness of such a concept in the analysis of conversation is discussed.

Pragmatic modeling in information system interfaces (goals, dialogue, plans, ill-formedness)

Abstract: Natural language interfaces currently treat each query as an isolated request for information, with little use of the dialogue context within which the utterance occurs. This thesis investigates how natural language systems can assimilate an on-going dialogue and use the resulting knowledge to increase their robustness. The thesis first presents a strategy for inferring a model of the task-related plan motivating an information-seeker's queries. Focusing heuristics are used to relate each new utterance to the existing plan context and construct an enlarged context model. It then develops a pragmatics-based approach to handling two classes of problematic utterances: utterances involving pragmatic overshoot and intersentential elliptical fragments. The framework for handling pragmatic overshoot rephrases the pragmatically illformed query based on the speaker's perceived intentions in making the utterance. The ellipsis interpretation strategy identifies the discourse goal which the speaker is pursuing with the utterance and interprets it relative to the speaker's inferred task-related plan. The results of this research indicate that natural language interfaces must place greater emphasis upon established dialogue context, both the inferred task-related plan and anticipated conversational goals, in understanding utterances.

Repairing reference identification failures by relaxation

Abstract: The goal of this work is the enrichment of human-machine interactions in a natural language environment. We want to provide a framework less restrictive than earlier ones by allowing a speaker leeway in forming an utterance about a task and in determining the conversational vehicle to deliver it. A speaker and listener cannot be assured to have the same beliefs, contexts, backgrounds or goals at each point in a conversation. As a result, difficulties and mistakes arise when a listener interprets a speaker's utterance. These mistakes can lead to various kinds of misunderstandings between speaker and listener, including reference failures or failure to understand the speaker's intention. We call these misunderstandings miscommunication. Such mistakes constitute a kind of "ill-formed" input that can slow down and possibly break down communication. Our goal is to recognize and isolate such miscommunications and circumvent them. This paper will highlight a particular class of miscommunication - reference problems - by describing a case study, including techniques for avoiding failures of reference.

Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder

Abstract: Framed Narratives was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The work of French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713-1784) has inspired conflicting reactions in those who encounter him. Diderot has been admired and despised; he has moved his readers and irritated them - often at the same time. His work continually shifts between mutually exclusive positions - neither of which provides an entirely satisfactory answer to the question at hand, yet neither of which can be disregarded. The nature of these paradoxes has been the fundamental problem in Diderot, a problem that his interpreters have approached by imagining synthetic perspectives or frames within which the paradoxes could be resolved.In Framed Narratives, Jay Caplan focuses on the problem of framing in and of Diderot. He proposes an interpretive model that draws upon the notion of dialogue developed by Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, no utterance can be reduced to a univocal meaning; one's discourse is always marked by other voices. In Diderot, Caplan shows, the narrative device of the tableau engages the reader (or beholder) in a dialogic relationship with the author and the characters. Diderot defines the players of those roles as members of a family, one of whom is always missing, and that sacrificial relationship becomes an integral part of the text. Caplan then uses the concept of the tableau to interpret the rhetoric of gender, genre, and pathos in Diderot's works for and about the theater, his novel The Nun, the philosophical dialogue D'Alembert's Dream,and his correspondence.What emerges from these readings is not only an interpretation of certain texts, but a description of Diderot's-and, by implication, early bourgeois-poetics. Framed Narratives is, in addition, one of the first attempts to rely upon Bakhtin's concepts in the interpretation of specific texts, in this case the work of an essentially dialogic writer. A socio-historical supplement to Framed Narratives is provided in Jochen Schulte-Sasse's afterword.

A pragmatics-based approach to understanding intersfntential ellipsis

Abstract: Intersentential elliptical utterances occur frequently in information-seeking dialogues. This paper presents a pragmatics-based framework for interpreting such utterances, including identification of the speaker's discourse goal in employing the fragment. We claim that the advantage of this approach is its reliance upon pragmatic information, including discourse content and conversational goals, rather than upon precise representations of the preceding utterance alone.

Role of inversion in children's question development.

Abstract: Current developmental descriptions of children's Wh-question production are contradictory. One account posits a stage in which the auxiliary verb and subject noun phrase are uninverted, whereas another view offers no empirical support for such a stage. The purpose of the present investigation was to test these divergent developmental descriptions by analyzing children's spontaneously produced questions. Six children at each of three linguistic stages, defined by mean utterance length in morphemes and ranging from 2.50 to 3.99, were selected for study. The children were between 25 and 47 months of age and evidenced no speech, language, or hearing disorders. Although the results replicated the proposed semantic ordering of question types, a stage characterized by uninverted forms was not supported.

Analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining aspects of verbal mother-child interactions

Abstract: Phenomena of language teaching and learning in the course of verbal interactions between one mother and her daughter were analyzed. The daughter was between 18 and 27 months old during the recordings, and her utterance length ranged from 1,5 to 4,0 morphemes. Twenty hours of interactions were analyzed and the emphasis was placed upon sequential aspects and mathemagenic features of the conversations. It was demonstrated that the mother performs much analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining work during these verbal interactions. These maternal instructional activities seem to lead not only to the child's learning of language rules but also to her employment of the abstracting, analytical, and synthetic methodology. It is concluded that the main explanatory focus has to be on the mother in the attempts to explain language transmission and acquisition. Basic similarities to other instructional/skill training situations are suggested. Neither extraordinary complex cognitive nor innate linguistic capacities need to be assumed to explain the phenomena in question.

The function of repetitions in information dialogues

Abstract: An important issue in the an a lysis of utterances in information dialog ues is the assignment of communicative functions to utterances. In this paper we consider the identification of the function of repetitions in a fixed sequence of dialogue acts, namely ' question-answer-repetition of the answer ', We hypothesize that such a repetition can have one or more of the following functions: a) memorize, b) pause, c) acknowledge and d) check. We consider how prosodic, linguistic and situational characteristics of the repetition can cont r ibute to the de termination of the function of the utterance. The fact that the function can not be determined directly from its characteristics is discussed . A dialogue experiment was therefore carried out in which the subjects had to obtain information by telephone, each under four different conditions.

Discrete utterance speech recognition without time alignment

Abstract: Computer speech recognition is a discipline that has been viewed from two diametrically opposed perspectives. One perspective perceives recognition as a purely mathematical process; the other perceives it as an extensive linguistical "knowledge" base. Because each perspective has its own set of limitations, neither approach has been able to achieve a viable machine realization of human auditory capabilities. Mathematical approaches do not perform fine phonetic distinctions well; linguistical approaches are not suitably machine oriented. We, therefore, propose in this paper a hybrid approach, suited both for machine implementation and for perceiving subtle differences in phonetic structure.

A functional view of prosodic timing in speech

Abstract: This paper attempts to explain some aspects of prosodie timing in speech. Current explanatory principles such as ›isochrony‹, ›anticipatory shortenings‹ and ›time compression of motor commands in short-term storage‹ are blamed for begging the question. An alternative, functional, view is proposed, relating prosodie timing to requirements of efficiency in speech communications. It is suggested that a speaker continuously adapts his articulation to what a listener (supposedly) needs at each point in the utterance. Following this general principle, prosodie timing, including the insertion of well formed speech pauses, is related to the time course of word perception in connected speech. It is attempted to demonstrate that a number of well known regularities in prosodie time follow quite naturally from the functional view taken here, if such factors as the local redundancy of the message and the quality of the communication channel are taken into account.

Lending a Helping Hand: Linguistic Input and Sign Language Acquisition in Deaf Children.

Abstract: This study examined the effects of adult “recasting” in sign language on the acquisition of specific syntactic-semantic structures by six deaf children between 9 and 76 months who were primarily at the one-sign utterance stage of development. In “recast” replies in conversation, the child's utterance is redisplayed in an altered sentence structure that still refers to the central meanings of the first sentence. Syntactic-semantic structures targeted for input intervention by teachers and parents using recasts included subject–verb relations, attribution, negation, subject–verb–object relations, conjunction, and conditionality. Recasting triggered the acquisition of new syntactic-semantic structures in American Sign Language and English which were evident in the spontaneous production of previously non-used sign utterances.

Improved dynamic time warping methods for discrete utterance recognition

Abstract: Two modifications of dynamic time warping methods for discrete utterance recognition are proposed. They compensate for inaccurate endpoint detection and emphasize the differentiating regions of similar sounding utterances. The methods proposed are shown to give an increased recognition accuracy on a difficult vocabulary containing many similar sounding words.

Varieties of Poetic Utterance: Quotation in the Brothers Karamazov

Abstract: By applying several aspects of Mikhail Bahktin's discourse-utterance theory, the author examines the use of quotation in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. All ideological pronouncements made by the heroes of the book are classified into two types of poetic utterance: authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.

A theory of scalar implicature (natural languages, pragmatics, inference)

Abstract: Speakers may convey many sorts of 'meaning' via an utterance. While each of these contributes to the utterance's overall communi- cative effect, many are not captured by a truth-functional semantics. One class of non-truth-functional, context-dependent meanings, has been identified by Grice Grice 75 as CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES. This thesis presents a formal account of one type of conversational implicature, termed here SCALAR IMPLICATURE, identified from a study of a large corpus of naturally occurring data collected by the author and others from 1982 through 1985. Scalar implicatures rely for their generation and interpretation upon the assumption that cooperative speakers will say as much as they truthfully can that is relevant to a conversational exchange. For example, B's utterance of (1a) (UNFORMATTED TABLE FOLLOWS) (1) A: How was the party last night? a. B: Some people left early. b. Not all people left early.^(TABLE ENDS) may convey to A that, as far as B knows, (1b) also holds--even though the truth of (1b) clearly does not follow from the truth of (1a). Scalar implicatures may be distinguished from other conversa- tional implicatures in that their generation and interpretation is dependent upon the identification of some salient relation that orders a concept referred to in an utterance with other concepts. In 1, for example, the salience of an inclusion relation between 'some people' and 'all people' in the discourse is prerequisite to B's implicating that (1b)--and to A's understanding that (1b) has in fact been implicated. To illustrate potential applications of the theory presented, a module of a natural-language interface, QUASI, is described. QUASI calculates scalar implicatures that might be licensed by simple direct responses to yes-no questions. Where licenseable implicatures are not consistent with the system's knowledge base, QUASI proposes alternative responses. This system demonstrates how natural language interfaces can use the calculation of implicit meanings to avoid conveying misinformation and to convey desired information more succinctly.

Sentences, utterance boundaries, personal deixis and the e-hypothesis

Abstract: It is commonly assumed that the reference of deictic pronouns must be consistent for each sentence. Banfield builds this assumption into the syntax by the principle 1 E(xpression)/! /, which entails 1 S(entence)/! /. The paper presents examples of a) mixed direct and indirect speech, and b) two-speaker utterances of one sentence, in both of which the principle is violated. In the light of these data it is argued that, since sentence and utterance boundaries need not coincide, there can be no rule of person agreement between pronouns and their antecedents, and that some classic examples of allegedly ill-formed strings turn out to be grammatical sentences.

Response to Commentators

Abstract: The comments on my paper do not give much occasion for counter-arguments, controversy, or defense. However, the paper needs clarification on several complicated theoretical issues which I carefully tried to avoid or even to sweep under the rug. The points 1, 2, and 4 relate to the comments of James Schmidt; the points 3 and 5 to the comments of Ruth Wallace. 1) The argument that religion "whatever this means" is unavoidable remains ambiguous. I should have been more explicit about the distinction of operation and observation which plays a fundamental role in recent research on self-referential systems. At the operational level systems are closed. Social systems use communication to provide an occasion for further communication and, at this level, nothing else can be done with communications. At this level, the distinction of information, utterance, and understanding is essential. At the observational level the communication is seen with respect to the distinction between system and environment. Here you can see (and communicate about, closing your own system, e.g. sociology) input and output, unintended meanings, latent structures, adaptive functions. Social systems are not only autopoietic but also self-observing systems.' They observe ongoing communications, communicate about communication, and can differentiate subsystems specialized in observing communication. At the operational level religion is neither avoidable nor unavoidable. It is presupposed as a meaningful context for choosing further communications and, of course, we can choose communications without touching religious meanings. Only for an observer (and particularly for sociologists) the question may arise whether or not religion is avoidable, i.e. whether or not it fulfills a necessary function-whatever religion means on the operational level. 2) Professionals of the religious systems, theologians or "divine detectives," are observers too. They also contribute to the processes of self-observation of the society within the society. My point is: If this group would accept the theory that religion has its special function in handling the paradoxes of self-reference, they could discover hidden religious premises in apparently secularized codes.2 Since most functional subsystems of modern society rely on binary codes to deparadoxize their operations and observations, a critique of coding as a technique of deparadoxification could launch a movement of "religious enlightenment."

Utterance Interpretation and the Role of the Analyst

Abstract: This paper is addressed to analysts of speech in social scenes and asks for a theory of utterance interpretation that incorporates the listener's point of view By comparing the analyses of two pro