The research study aimed at assessing the various difficulties that speech teachers had in delivering lessons during the distance learning era. The various phenomena and themes that emerged from the survey were determined using a descriptive research design. The survey was conducted to collect information about the various characteristics and behavior of speech teachers. It also explored the factors that influenced their decisions and actions when it came to addressing the pandemic. The repeated themes that emerged, include low (...) motivation, altered activities, unstable internet connection, comprehension, questionable output integrity, delayed submissions, in-person monitoring, and the system of communicating with inactive students in online mode. (shrink)

In free speech theory ‘speech’ has to be defined as a special term of art. I argue that much free speech discourse comes with a tacit commitment to a ‘Subtractive Approach’ to defining speech. As an initial default, all communicative acts are assumed to qualify as speech, before exceptions are made to ‘subtract’ those acts that don’t warrant the special legal protections owed to ‘speech’. I examine how different versions of the Subtractive Approach operate, (...) and criticise them in terms of their ability to yield a substantive definition of speech which covers all and only those forms of communicative action that – so our arguments for free speech indicate – really do merit special legal protection. In exploring alternative definitional approaches, I argue that what ultimately compromises definitional adequacy in this arena is a theoretical commitment to the significance of a single unified class of privileged communicative acts. I then propose an approach to free speech theory that eschews this theoretical commitment. (shrink)

Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a homogeneous (...) class of linguistic action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation. (shrink)

Procedures were designed to test for the effects of working-memory training on children at risk of fluency difficulty that apply to English and to many of the languages spoken by children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) in UK schools. Working-memory training should: (1) improve speech fluency in high-risk children; (2) enhance non-word repetition (NWR) (phonological) skills for all children; (3) not affect word-finding abilities. Children starting general education (N = 232) were screened to identify those at risk (...) of fluency difficulty. Children were selected who were at high-risk (12), or low-risk (27) of fluency difficulty. For the low-risk children 10 received, and 17 did not receive, the working-memory training. All children in the treatment groups received working-memory training over a 2-week period. For the high-risk group, fluency improved and lasted for at least a week after the end of the study. Phonological skills improved in this group and in the low-risk group who received the training and the improvements continued for at least a week. The low-risk group who did not receive working-memory training showed no improvements, and no group improved word-finding ability. (shrink)

Applying a medical conception of toxicity to speech practices, this paper calls for an epidemiology of discursive toxicity. Toxicity highlights the mechanisms by which speech acts and discursive practices can inflict harm, making sense of claims about harms arising from speech devoid of slurs, epithets, or a narrower class I call ‘deeply derogatory terms.’ Further, it highlights the role of uptake and susceptibility, and so suggests a framework for thinking about damage variation. Toxic effects vary depending on (...) one’s epistemic position, access, and authority. An inferentialist account of discursive practice plus a dynamic view of the power of language games offers tools to analyze the toxic power of speech acts. A simple account of language games helps track changes in our discursive practices. Identifying patterns contributes to an epidemiology of toxic speech, which might include tracking increasing use of derogatory terms, us/them dichotomization, terms of isolation, new essentialisms, and more. Using this framework, I analyze some examples of speech already said to be toxic, working with a rough concept of toxicity as poison. Finally, exploring discursive toxicity pushes us to find ways that certain discursive practices might “inoculate” one to absorbing toxic messages, or less metaphorically, block one’s capacity to make toxic inferences, take deontic stances that foster toxicity, etc. (shrink)

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in (...) Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars-on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness-just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual. (shrink)

Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task of ensuring that the right sorts of information gets to the right sorts of people remains. We argue that the many efforts underway to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations. This in turn requires that the management of information and knowledge within healthcare (...) organizations be combined with models of resources and processes of patient care that are based on a general ontology of social interaction. The Health Level 7 (HL7) is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. HL7 has advanced a widely used messaging standard that enables healthcare applications to exchange clinical and administrative data in digital form. HL7 focuses on the interface requirements of the entire healthcare system and not exclusively on the requirements of one area of healthcare such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. This has inspired the development of a powerful abstract model of patient care called the Reference Information Model (RIM). The present paper begins with an overview of the core classes of the HL7 (Version 3) RIM and a brief discussion of its “actcentered” view of healthcare. Central to this account is what is called the life cycle of events. A clinical action may progress from defined, through planned and ordered, to executed. These modalities of an action are represented as the mood of the act. We then outline the basis of an ontology of organizations, starting from the theory of speech Acts, and apply this ontology to the HL7 RIM. Special attention is given to the sorts of preconditions that must be satisfied for the successful performance of a speech act and to the sorts of entities to which speech acts give rise (e.g. obligations, claims, commitments, etc.). Finally we draw conclusions for the efficient communication and management of medical information and knowledge within and between healthcare organizations, paying special attention to the role that medical documents play in such organizations. (shrink)

There is a thriving debate over what aspects of our capacity to produce and understand language are special. My concern here is a key part of this wider debate: Is speech special? In particular, my focus is on speech perception, and whether it is special. This isn’t just one but a number of different questions. Too frequently, these very different questions are not clearly distinguished and kept apart. I discuss a framework for distinguishing various versions of the question, (...) Is speech perceptually special? Focusing on a particular class of questions, I make a proposal about the sense in which speech is perceptually special. According to this account, the capacity to perceive speech is an acquired perceptual skill, and involves learning to hear language-specific types of biologically-significant sounds. This account illuminates the significance of interlocution in understanding what makes the perception of speech distinctive. (shrink)

The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach to speech acts. By gathering original essays from a world-class lineup of philosophers of language, linguists, social epistemologists, action theorists, and communication scholars, the collection provides the first comprehensive critical treatment of Sbisa’s outstanding contribution to speech act theory.

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in (...) 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997. (shrink)

They will make some comments whenever we talk about the class line, but they deserve that! Speaking of class line, we are "people with vested interest.".

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been successful for modelling the dynamics of carefully dictated speech, but their performance degrades severely when used to model conversational speech. Since speech is produced by a system of loosely coupled articulators, stochastic models explicitly representing this parallelism may have advantages for automatic speech recognition (ASR), particularly when trying to model the phonological effects inherent in casual spontaneous speech. This paper presents a preliminary feasibility study of one such model class: (...) loosely coupled HMMs. Exact model estimation and decoding is potentially expensive, so possible approximate algorithms are also discussed. Comparison of one particular loosely coupled model on an isolated word task suggests loosely coupled HMMs merit further investigation. An approximate algorithm giving performance which is almost always statistically indistinguishable from the exact algorithm is also identified, making more extensive research computationally feasible. (shrink)

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners (...) and L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

Why is freedom of speech so seldom raised as an issue in philosophy of education? In assessing this question, it is important to distinguish (i) between a freedom and its exercise, and (ii) between different philosophies of education. Western philosophies of education may be broadly divided into classes derived from theories of knowledge first articulated in ancient Greece. Freedom of speech is in principle inimical to some of these, while being essential to the objectives of others.

The fundamental thesis of David Lewis's "Parts of Classes" is that the nonempty subsets of a set are mereological parts of it. This paper shows that Lewis's considerations in favor of this thesis are unpersuasive. First, common speech provides no support. Second, the formal analogy between mereology and the Boolean algebra of sets can be explained without accepting the thesis. Third, it is very doubtful that the thesis is fruitful. Certainly, Lewis's claim that it helps us understand set (...) theory is unwarranted. (shrink)

In the Spring of 2012, fans of the Gonzaga University basketball team used hate speech on social media site Twitter to express their frustration at losing a game to the Brigham Young University team. In response, the students in the Hate Studies in Business course started a student-led movement to “Take the Hate Out of Hoops.” The students applied their lessons in virtue ethics and leveraged the experiential structure of the course to create a positive response to a negative (...) event. It was through the unique study of hate, the recognition that membership in a community implies responsibility for harms perpetuated by that community, and the action-oriented nature of this class that students were moved to respond to this instance of injustice. This paper describes the course, the incident of hate speech, the students’ response, and the lessons learned by the four instructors of the course. (shrink)

Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Lukman Adegboyega Abioye This study discusses brown envelope syndrome as it is used to promote hate speech and fake news with negative effect on the practice of journalism in Nigeria. Various reasons were advanced from the study why the menace of brown envelope syndrome on hate speech and fake news persists and solutions to it were also explored. Two theories were used in (...) putting the study in proper perspectives. The theories are Agenda Setting and Dependency Theory. The two theories recognize the role of mass media in mobilizing, educating and entertaining the public on vital, social economic and political issues. The study recognizes the role of journalists in promoting hate speech and fake news in order to advance the interest of certain political class. Hate speech and fake news consists of lies and vulgar languages against a particular section of the society. The study found out that journalists use both print and electronic media to spread fake news and hate speech which however has significant effect on the political development of the country. The study recognizes that poor remuneration, inadequate training, job insecurity as well as general economic down turn in Nigeria have been responsible for brown envelope syndrome. Media researchers are of the opinion that proprietors of media houses, and the government should take the welfare of journalists’ very important if journalistic code of ethics and practice would be applied on any erring journalist. The study recommends regular training and staff motivation as necessary for eradicating the menace of brown envelope syndrome, fake news and hate speech among practicing journalists in Nigeria. Appropriate legislation must be put in place by the legislatures to discourage hate speech and fake news in the country. Erring journalist and the media house he or she represents must be sanctioned accordingly to serve as deterrent to others. (shrink)

This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech that (...) is both embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour. (shrink)

“ 'Free speech' is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance”—or so literary theorist and professor of law Stanley Fish has claimed. This cynical dictum is one of several skeptical challenges to freedom of speech that have been extremely influential in the American academy. I will follow the skeptics' lead by distinguishing between two broad styles of critique: the progressive and the postmodern. Fish's dictum, however, like many of (...) the bluntest charges, belongs to neither class exclusively. As an initial characterization of the distinction between these critiques, progressive skepticism claims that freedom of speech is a bad thing, while postmodernist skepticism claims it to be conceptually impossible. Both forms of skepticism hold the classical liberal endorsement of free speech and condemnation of censorship to be both naive and reactionary. Skepticism about free speech flourishes at universities in the United States and is especially well represented among professors at the country's most prestigious law schools. As legal scholar Robert Post approvingly observes: “Liberated from traditional inhibitions against official suppression of speech, the left has mobilized to pursue a rich variety of political agendas.”. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, “ I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did” would be “absurd”. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore’s discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates “the (...) logic of assertion”. Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation of assertion to belief in terms of the idea that one “expresses belief” that is consistent with the spirit of Moore’s failed attempt to explain the absurdity. Wittgenstein also observes that “under unusual circumstances”, the sentence, “It’s raining but I don’t believe it” could be given “a clear sense”. Why does the absurdity disappear from speech in such cases? Wittgenstein further suggests that analogous absurdity may be found in terms of desire, rather than belief. In what follows I develop an account of Moorean absurdity that, with the exception of Wittgenstein’s last suggestion, is broadly consistent with both Moore’s approach and Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

Speeches delivered by the author at Lucknow on 2nd April 1968, and, Hyderabad on 26th March 1977; previously serialized in the Prabuddha Bharata issues of August, September, and October 1968, and, March and April 1978.

Bertrand Russell introduced several novel ideas in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics that he later gave up and never went back to in his subsequent work. Two of these are the related notions of denoting concepts and classes as many. In this paper we reconstruct each of these notions in the framework of conceptual realism and connect them through a logic of names that encompasses both proper and common names, and among the latter, complex as well as simple common (...) names. Names, proper or common, and simple or complex, occur as parts of quantifier phrases, which in conceptual realism stand for referential concepts, i.e., cognitive capacities that inform our speech and mental acts with a referential nature and account for the intentionality, or directedness, of those acts. In Russell’s theory, quantifier phrases express denoting concepts (which do not include proper names). In conceptual realism, names, as well as predicates, can be nominalized and allowed to occur as "singular terms", i.e., as arguments of predicates. Occurring as a singular term, a name denotes, if it denotes at all, a class as many, where, as in Russell’s theory, a class as many of one object is identical with that one object, and a class as many of more than one object is a plurality, i.e., a plural object that we call a group. Also, as in Russell’s theory, there is no empty class as many. When nominalized, proper names function as "singular terms" just the way they do in so-called free logic. Leśniewski’s ontology, which is also called a logic of names can be completely interpreted within this conceptualist framework, and the well-known oddities of Leśniewski’s system are shown not to be odd at all when his system is so interpreted. Finally, we show how the pluralities, or groups, of the logic of classes as many can be used as the semantic basis of plural reference and predication. We explain in this way Russell’s "fundamental doctrine upon which all rests", i.e., "the doctrine that the subject of a proposition may be plural, and that such plural subjects are what is meant by classes [as many] which have more than one term" (Russell 1938, p. 517). (shrink)

This paper offers a close analysis of the usage of the term circulus to refer to groups of Romans gathered together for various reasons. I identify such groupings as primarily non-elite in character and suggest that examination of their representation in our sources offers insight into popular sociability and communication at Rome. While circuli and the related figure of the circulator are often associated with what is considered to be a debased popular culture, they can also be seen as part (...) of a more general culture of popular sociability which is politically threatening to a Roman governing class that desired to monopolize and control speech and communication and in whose interest it was to channel popular political participation into the official political institutions of the city. This paper also looks at some of the strategies developed by Roman elites to maintain, in response to such unauthorized activity, their moral, intellectual, and political hegemony over the rest of the population. (shrink)

In terms of classical tafsir literature, it is possible that the speeches made to a person or group in the Qurʾān carry messages for other individuals or groups. According to some approaches that emerged in the modern period, when the speech was made and to whom it was directed not only determine the meaning, but also limits it. This dilemma has to be based on the theoretical dimension. The most obvious example of the transition of the speech from (...) direct counterpart to the other is the transition of the speeches made to the unbelievers to the believers. Therefore, in this study, the possibility of the transcendence of the speech in the Qurʾān will be handled in the context of the messages for believers in the speeches directed to the unbelievers. One aspect of the issue of the transcendence of the speech in the Qurʾān can be explained by the style that the Qurʾān follows. However, the subject should also be based on linguistic aspects. As a matter of fact, the expansion of the speech can sometimes be related to the meanings of words and sometimes with the possibilities and literary aspects of language, and sometimes with an analytical effort. In this study, the related examples will be analyzed and it will be revealed that the transition between the speeches in the Qurʾān is possible in terms of the style of the Qurʾān. In the study, the methodological findings related to the linguistic aspects of the issue will also be studied.Summary: The discourse that the Qurʾān is an address by God makes different associations in terms of classical literature and some modern methods of understanding. In the works of classical method and rhetoric, a theoretical framework is drawn around the nature, arbitrariness, conditions and types of the book. In this context, the varieties, indications and scopes of the addresses in the Qurʾān are discussed. While it is emphasized that the Qurʾān is an address in modernist contextualist approaches, it is stated that understanding the address requires having contextual information, therefore reading the address as a book evaporates meaning. Because, according to these approaches, the meaning is sought in the text with the transformation of address to book (verbal culture to written culture), thus the Qurʾān is converted from a literal meaning into a system. Knowing what the Qurʾān tells and why it tells that, depends on the comprehension of all the contextual elements of the Qurʾān, which was sent as an address. In fact, knowledge of when, where and when the Qurʾān was sent about what events and to whom it is addressed, is the data that is primarily considered in the comprehension of the verses, as emphasized by the classical interpretation literature. However, the perception of the classical interpretation evaluates these data in different categories in terms of the integrity of religion, judgment and experience. For example, the narrations on the reason of sending and the Makki-Madani information are only examples of the meanings of the verses. They sometimes serve as elements that contribute to the comprehension of the verses, while sometimes with the help of other chapters they can narrow the meanings of the verses. The realist-methodological basis of the method science provides the emergence of this holistic-categorical perspective.It is difficult to justify the claim that there is an absolute relationship between the address and the addressee in terms of the classical literature. In the classical literature, the expressions, which come in the form of an address and have a mandatory relationship with addressees, are dealt with the concept of direct address. Direct addresses are binding for the first addressees. Because when an address is mentioned, it is mandatory to have an addressee. It can be assumed that this discourse has the same position with the context theories considering its premises. However, it is not possible to compare these theories with each other in terms of the scope of the address. Classical theories of reasoning consider that direct addresses cover indirect addressees by methods, such as shar’i (legal) necessity or analogy (qiyas), while contextualists and historians can convert the text beyond the virtual level by identifying what a command means within the context of the address-addressee relationship. When the Qurʾān is completely considered as an address, or when direct addresses are taken into consideration, it is very difficult for the modern period's comprehension methods that the verses, which mention or address the disbelievers-polytheists, can also address Muslims. In fact, the dialectic of the address-addressee requires this. Moreover, the addressees (polytheists-Muslims) who are spoken within the context of the verses have two different beliefs that cannot be dealt with at the same time and mentioned in the same verse. Therefore, it is not possible to direct the messages given to the polytheists to the believers and to attribute the qualities in these verses to Muslims.However, the classical literature did not even consider as a problem to address Muslims with the verses that directly addressing unbelievers-polytheists. It is because both linguistics and facts requires this. The method practitioners and interpreters discussed this issue in a very wide range. They examined the transitivity of the book between parties, such as people of the book-Muslims, Muslims-unbelievers, Prophet-ummah. In the context of the interpretation literature and the perception of modern-day interpretation, the possibility of the transitivity of the book can be clarified in the context of the inclusiveness of a verse that speaks of polytheists-disbelievers to include Muslims, or the conversion of an address to polytheists-unbelievers to Muslims. Classical literature explains this point sometimes with the literal indication (circularization) and the circumstance of literary use of language (rhetoric) and sometimes with the possibility of the address (stylistic features).In verses and hadiths, belief bases categorical classes, such as believers, unbelievers, polytheists, hypocrites, people of the book are mentioned, as well as descriptions of the characteristic-practical dimensions of these classes. In this context, commands sometimes refer to the practices that need to be performed in order to be a believer, sometimes works that must not be performed by the believer, and sometimes matters that might put the believer's faith-practice integrity at risk when it is done. In the Qurʾān, in some of the addresses to the believers, it is apparent that they are prohibited from being like unbelievers or having unbeliever-like qualities. Moreover, sometimes negative results that may arise for Muslims when they act like unbelievers are cited in the verses. Sometimes at the end of the verses that address and mention Muslims, information is included on situations involving unbelievers and the torment they will encounter. In addition, in cases where adjectives belonging to opposing belief profiles are mentioned, the address to non-Muslims expresses warning, evaluation, gratitude and perseverance in faith for Muslims, while the address to Muslims contains elements of incentive and opportunity for non-Muslim groups. It is possible to justify this matter with the style of the Qurʾān. However, it can be said that the transitivity of the address in the Qurʾān takes place in two theoretical aspects. The first of these is related to linguistic-rhetoric premises and it is used in antithesis, allusion, metaphor etc. The second one is the similitude-comparison. Here, the comparison is a phenomenon that occurs in the mind without the need for propositions. Because when the mind hears these statements, it can instantly reach a stronger meaning than the literal wording. In this study, it is discussed whether it is possible to transition from direct addresses to indirect addressees, with reference to the problems of the modern period. In this context, the study primarily focuses on the fact that the Qurʾān sometimes transmits its messages and teachings to addressees through opposing belief systems. Thus, the manner adopted by the Qurʾān while directing certain commands and negations, not directly but through the opposing side, has been presented. In this study, the possibility of the verses that only mentions polytheists-unbelievers to also addressing Muslims was analyzed and these verses were compared with addresses to Muslims on the same matters. In the last part of the study, a theoretical framework was drawn on the subject and the method of interdisciplinary transitivity was determined. (shrink)

The article reveals the problems of listening comprehension in a foreign-language audience, in particular, by students who are non-native speakers. The theoretical part is a brief characteristic of listening as a type of speech activity: the content of the term, its internal components – the psychophysiological mechanisms involved, the difficulties associated with them. In the practical part the authors of the article demonstrate exercises from the purposefully developed lesson on the removal of difficulties in the perception of sounding (...) class='Hi'>speech in non-native speakers children of middle school age, consisting in the systematic development of mechanisms of listening comprehension. Based on the analysis of the experimental lesson, solutions for systematic and consistent work in the classes within the additional remedial course in the Russian language in order to prevent errors and difficulties, as well as to facilitate the process of listening comprehension are proposed. (shrink)

This study attempts to investigate the role of movie and TV series clips in enhancing EFL learners’ pragmatic competence by utilizing an experimental design. The sample of the study was 42 students from the English language department at Cihan University-Duhok, Iraq. The experiment lasted one academic semester. The participants’ English language proficiency, as determined by an IELTS test sample, was intermediate, and then they were randomly split into two groups, namely experimental and control. Before and after the treatment, a Written (...) Discourse Completion Test served as a pre-and post-test given to the two groups to assess statistically significant differences between them. The experimental group received direct instruction on request and suggestion speech acts via the presentation of the carefully chosen movie and TV series clips. In contrast, the control group was exposed to a minimal amount of pragmatics through printed texts. The findings demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group. More precisely, the findings revealed that movie and TV series clips had a significant influence on learners’ production of requests and suggestions. Considering the above findings, the researchers propose EFL teachers apply movie and TV series clips to improve their Students’ pragmatic competence in class. (shrink)

A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken—as an (...) order, a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc.—and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force , and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force , the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same. Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

In June 21, 1990, the Joneses, an African-American family living in the mainly white and working-class neighbourhood of St. Paul in Minnesota, saw a small white cross burning in their yard. By placing the burning cross on the yard, the Minnesota Supreme Court argued that one of the accused, Robert A Viktora, had engaged in ‘fighting words’. However, the US Supreme Court reversed this decision, arguing that the local authority in St Paul only legally banned certain ‘fighting words’, but not (...) others. Judith Butler explores this legal case, R.A.V. v. St. Paul. Judith Butler argues in her earlier work that the Supreme Court in effect represented the burning cross as being non-performative and simply a vehicle of expression rather than a historical symbol of hate speech towards African-Americans. In this paper, I look again at the R.A.V. case. But I do so by both drawing on what Butler explicitly says about the case in her early work and integrating this with her later work on the ethics of grief, state hegemony and public assemblies. Furthermore, I also incorporate some of the insights of the Bakhtin Circle into Butler’s work to strengthen her arguments. The paper then revisits R.A.V. v. St. Paul and shows how Reaganite state hegemony effectively transformed issues of racism surrounding this free speech case into ‘monologic’ and ‘ungrievable’ public matters of concern. The paper concludes by briefly discussing counter-hegemonic politics of free speech. (shrink)

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons The aim of the paper is to analyze religious discourse with the use of the instruments of semantics and pragmatics. Essentially, it sets out to identify the linguistic elements which enable the illocutionary force in the Romanian orthodox sermons, especially in the discourse of some important figures which have influenced and still influence the Romanian orthodox theology and the religious life in Romania: (...) Father Cleopa, Father Nicolae Steinhardt, and, nowadays, Father Teofil Pârâianu. It is usually assumed that a sermon implies, on the one hand, a kerugmatik action, that of annunciation, and, on the other hand, a translating action of the biblical induce the human will to practice the words in order to Christian precepts. Mutatis mutandis, the perlocutionary effect depends on the illocutionary act and of the illocutionary force. In theory, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strictly motivated by the pragmatic. But there are linguistic elements which function as efficient markers of the illocutionary force, for example performative verbs, verbal moods and some adverbs. The criteria proposed by Searle in order to differentiate the illocutionary acts resulted in the identification of several types inside this class. Searle's taxonomy serves the research purposes: the identification of illocutionary acts found in this kind of religious discourse and, finally, outlining a pattern of manifestation of the illocutionary force inside the sermon. (shrink)

Perhaps it is best to begin on a semi-autobiographical note. In my liberal days, Mill's arguments in On Liberty for freedom of speech struck me as a paradigm of rationality: the force and eloquence of his presentation, I then thought, could not fail to impress themselves on any mature member of our species. But I am a Marxist now, and more and more of my former political beliefs now strike me as less and less tenable. It was considerations such (...) as the one that follows which have recently led me to modify drastically, and in some cases abandon entirely, my former political views vis à vis the question of freedom of speech.Whenever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emenates from its class interests and its feelings of class superiority. The morality between Spartans and Helots, between planters and negroes, between princes and subjects, between nobles and returiers, between men and women, has been for the most part the creation of these class interests and feelings …. (shrink)

Die „Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre“ bleibt für den, der Fichte im philosophiegeschichtlichen Zusammenhang sehen will, der wichtigste Text; dies gilt auch dann noch, wenn die Akademie-Ausgabe abgeschlossen sein wird. Der Jenaer Fichte hat nicht nur auf seine Zeitgenossen am stärksten gewirkt, er war auch seinerseits damals noch am offensten für Einflüsse. Der vorliegende Kommentar – der erste, der den gesamten deutschen Text behandelt – bietet keine Paraphrase, keine Übersetzung in eine zeitgemäßere Sprache, keine „Darstellung“, die Fichtes Disposition durch eine eigene (...) ersetzt und damit – gewollt oder ungewollt – in Konkurrenz zum Original tritt. Er will vielmehr den Leser auf seinem dornigen Pfad Satz für Satz begleiten und bei keiner Schwierigkeit im Stich lassen. Die konkrete Erforschung literarischer Bezüge und Abhängigkeiten zeigt, wie sehr der „Selbstdenker“ Fichte – unbeschadet seiner Eigenständigkeit – nicht nur in der Philosophie, sondern im ganzen Geistesleben der Epoche verwurzelt ist. Durch die ausgiebigen, mit sprachlichen Erläuterungen versehenen Zitate entlegener Quellen ist der Kommentar zugleich eine Art Lesebuch. (shrink)

Motivated by historical insights, the current study examines whether speech-concomitant nonverbal behavior differs between social classes. On the basisof widely accepted concepts relating to cognitive theories of nonverbal communication and a preliminary outline of a concept of ‘communicative physicality’, a TV corpus of autobiographical narratives is analyzed according to a set of working-hypotheses. The results confirm the leading assumption of class-specific differences.

The purpose of the study is to consider the theoretical aspects of innovative education, as well as to analyze the practical application of innovative technologies in foreign language classes for students of engineering specialties. The article notes that innovative educational technologies are based on three interrelated components: competence-based approach; modern teaching methods; modern learning infrastructure. Scientific novelty lies in an attempt to analyze the innovative practice of teachers and determine the main advantages of innovative technologies in teaching a foreign (...) language to students of technical universities. As a result, such advantages of these technologies were identified as the development of all types of speech activity of students, an individual approach to learning, an increase in motivation for learning a language, the ability to express oneself creatively, the formation of a personality capable of solving professionally oriented tasks. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

The New South Wales union movement embraced the principles of heritage and conservationism in the 1970s through the imposing of “green bans” – a strategy wherein union members refused to work on construction projects that were a threat to the state’s natural or built environment. Led by radicals like Builders Labourers’ Federation leader Jack Mundey, the green bans were seen in several sectors as a departure from the traditional “Old Left” priorities of securing workers’ wages and conditions. Rather than a (...) hard shift towards radicalism, this article proposes that the green bans were instead reflective of an already existing conservationist tradition in the New South Wales union movement. This reinterpretation is predicated on a content analysis of extant historical material such as contemporaneous news articles, personal memoirs, transcripts of political speeches and archival documents related to the policing of left-wing activism in the 1960s and 1970s. The results show that an existing tradition of engagement with a broad spectrum of social issues in the New South Wales union movement predates the emergence of the New Left, including the commitment to environmental justice principles that underpinned the green bans. (shrink)

Proposing a novel theory of parts of speech, this book discusses categorization from a methodological and theoretical point a view. It draws on discoveries and insights from a number of approaches - typology, cognitive grammar, notional approaches, and generative grammar - and presents a generative, feature-based theory. Building on up-to-date research and the latest findings and ideas in categorization and word-building, Panagiotidis combines the primacy of categorical features with a syntactic categorization approach, addressing the fundamental, but often overlooked, questions (...) in grammatical theory. Designed for graduate students and researchers studying grammar and syntax, this book is richly illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and explains elements and phenomena central to the nature of human language. (shrink)

How speech sounds are represented in the brain is not fully understood. The mismatch negativity has proven to be a powerful tool in this regard. The MMN event-related potential is elicited by a deviant stimulus embedded within a series of repeating standard stimuli. Listeners construct auditory memory representations of these standards despite acoustic variability. In most designs that test speech sounds, however, this variation is typically intra-category: All standards belong to the same phonetic category. In the current paper, (...) inter-category variation is presented in the standards. These standards vary in manner of articulation but share a common phonetic feature. In the standard retroflex experimental block, Mandarin Chinese speaking participants are presented with a series of “standard” consonants that share the feature [retroflex], interrupted by infrequent non-retroflex deviants. In the non-retroflex standard experimental block, non-retroflex standards are interrupted by infrequent retroflex deviants. The within-block MMN was calculated, as was the identity MMN to account for intrinsic differences in responses to the stimuli. We only observed a within-block MMN to the non-retroflex deviant embedded in the standard retroflex block. This suggests that listeners extract [retroflex] despite significant inter-category variation. In the non-retroflex standard block, because there is little on which to base a coherent auditory memory representation, no within-block MMN was observed. The iMMN to the retroflex was observed in a late time-window at centro-parieto-occipital electrode sites instead of fronto-central electrodes, where the MMN is typically observed, potentially reflecting the increased difficulty posed by the added variation in the standards. In short, participants can construct auditory memory representations despite significant acoustic and inter-category phonological variation so long as a shared phonetic feature binds them together. (shrink)

The present "philological commentary" is directed at those who have decided to take time for reading the original text, at least in an English translation. The first volume "Textual Criticism" is intended to meet the difficulties caused by the fact that our text editions are based on manuscripts separated from the original by more than a millennium.

With the third volume, it is invited to enter the intellectual environment of Aristotle. The most relevant sources are given in full (with English translation), so that the commentary is also a reader documenting the disputationes metaphysicae of the 4th century BC. For the undeniable contradictions in the Metaphysics, a new genetic explanation is offered.

Though since Werner Jaeger's famous Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles of 1912 remarkable observations were made, the topic "Composition of the Metaphysics" almost disappeared from the agenda. As, however, neglect of this philological task results in either selective reading or anachronistic systematization, the author has resumed it, extending it to the internal structure of the singular books.