a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values (...) for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference. (shrink)

It is often claimed that, because of semantic underdetermination, one can determine the content of an utterance only by appealing to pragmatic considerations concerning what the speaker means, what his intentions are. This supports ‘inferentialism' : the view that, in contrast to perceptual content, communicational content is accessed indirectly, via an inference. As against this view, I argue that primary pragmatic processes (the pragmatic processes that are involved in the determination of truth-conditional content) need not involve an inference from premisses (...) concerning what the speaker can possibly intend by his utterance. Indeed, they need not involve any inference at all : communication, I argue, is as direct as perception. (shrink)

It is a common wisdom that linguistic communication is different from linguistic understanding. However, the distinction between communication and understanding is not as clear as it seems to be. It is argued that the relationship between linguistic communication and understanding depends upon the notions of understanding and communication involved. Thinking along the line of propositional understanding and informative communication, communication can be reduced to mutual understanding. In contrast, operating along the line of hermeneutic understanding and dialogical communication, (...) the process of understanding is in essence a process of communication. However, dialogical communication should not be confused with propositional understanding. Conversely, hermeneutic understanding should not be confused with informative communication either. The former is dialogical in nature while the latter is monological. (shrink)

Methodological nationalism in sociological theory is unfit for the current globalized era, and should be discarded. In light of this contention, the present article discusses Max Weber’s view of language as a way to relativize the frame of the national society. While a “linguistic turn” in sociology since the 1960s has assumed that the sharing of language—linguistic community—stands as an intersubjective foundation for understanding of meaning, Weber saw linguistic community as constructed. From Weber’s rationalist, subjectivist, (...) individualist viewpoint, linguistic community was a result of social actions, not a prior entity as assumed by German metaphysical organicism (and historicist holism). Indeed, Central Europe in Weber’s era was a battlefield of linguistic nationalism(s); in contrast to the national societies of the Cold War period, national borders were unstable and ultimately the multiethnic empires of the region were dismantled after World War I into ethnolinguistic nation-states. Experience of this contemporary reality brought Weber to the core of the relationship between language and politics: A language community is an imaginary one demarcated not by language itself but by conscious opposition against outsiders, with monolingual contexts within borders created artificially by homogenizing policies like linguistic standardization and national education—the first modernity of language. In this way, Weber felt, language can be a means to domination. (shrink)

According to the expressive theory of communication, the primary function of language is to enable speakers to convey the content of their thoughts to hearers. According to Tyler Burge's social externalism, the content of a person's thought is relative to the way words are used in his or her surrounding linguistic community. This paper argues that Burge's social externalism refutes the expressive theory of communication.

The message of the present article is, first, that, besides and below the strictly linguistic aspects of communication through language, of which speakers are in principle fully aware, a great deal of knowledge not carried in virtue of the system of the language in question but rather transmitted by the form of the intended message, is imparted to listeners or readers, without either being in the least aware of this happening. For example, listeners quickly register the social status, regional (...) origin or emotional attitude of speakers and they react to those kinds of ‘paralinguistic’ information, mostly totally unawares. When speaker and listener have a positive attitude with regard to each other, the reaction consists, among other things, in mutual alignment or accommodation of pronunciation features, lexical selections and style of speaking. When the mutual attitude is negative, the opposite happens: speakers accentuate their differences. Then, when this happens not between individual interlocutors but between groups of speakers, such accommodation or divergence phenomena may lead to language change. The main theoretical question raised, but not answered, in this article is how and at what point forms of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, achieve the status of being ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’ in any given community and what it means to say that they are ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’. It is argued that frequency of occurrence is not the main explanatory factor, and that a causal explanation is to be sought rather in the, often unconscious, attitudes of individuals, in particular their desire or need to be integrated members of a community or social group, thus ensuring their safety and asserting their group identity. The question thus belongs to the province of social psychology. Qualms about analyses of this kind being ‘unscientific’ dissipate when it is realized that consciousness phenomena are part of the real world and must therefore be considered to be valid objects of scientific theory formation. Like so many other ill-understood elements in scientific theories, consciousness, though itself unexplained, can be given a place in causal chains of events. (shrink)

En el siglo XX, se ha intentado articular el convencionalismo lingüístico de maneras distintas. Uno de los enfoques más prometedores fue el que propuso David Lewis a finales de los años 60 e inicio de los 70. Lewis subsume las regularidades convencionales que subyacen a la actividad de hablar un lenguaje bajo los estados de equilibrio más generales que resultan de cualquier tipo de comportamiento cooperativo racional. En este artículo propongo que, pese a su atractivo, las convenciones lewisianas deberían ser (...) abandonadas a favor del convencionalismo lingüístico del segundo Wittgenstein. Mi motivación para recomendar tal giro es que la propuesta de Lewis no es capaz de ofrecer una respuesta satisfactoria a la objeción de Donald Davidson, de acuerdo con la cual la teoría convencionalista de Lewis no puede explicar la ocurrencia sistemática de malapropismos en nuestro uso ordinario del lenguaje. En las últimas secciones del artículo, me dedico a mostrar cómo las convenciones wittgensteinianas sí pueden explicar el fenómeno de los malapropismos. (shrink)

Darwin’s theory predicts that linguistic behavior gradually evolved out of animal forms of communication. However, this prediction is confronted by the conceptual problem that there is an essential difference between signaling and linguistic behavior: using words is a normative practice. It is argued that we can resolve this problem if we note that language evolution is the outcome of an evolutionary transition, and observe that the use of words evolves during ontogenesis out of babbling. It is discussed that (...) language evolved as the result of an expansion of the vocalizing powers of our ancestors. This involved an increase in the volitional control of our speech apparatus, but also the evolution of socially guided learning. It resulted in unique human abilities, namely doing things with words and later reasoning and giving reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Quine’s views on language sharing and linguistic communities. It is sometimes explicitly and often implicitly taken for granted that Quine believes that speakers can form communities in which they share a language. The aim of the paper is to show that this is a misinterpretation and, on the contrary, Quine is closer to linguistic individualism – the view according to which there is no guarantee that speakers within a community share a language (...) and the notion of idiolect is more fundamental than the notion of shared language. (shrink)

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the „recognitive attitudes‟ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it (...) explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the 'recognitive attitudes' of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores the possibility (...) that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground, then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. On this account (...) then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

There has been much philosophical interest in the role of luck in ethics and epistemology; now this volume brings the topic to the fore in philosophy of language. Eleven new essays explore the diversity, scope, and mode of operation of luck-reducing mechanisms in language, without which linguistic communication would be impossible.

What is it to understand a sentence of a language? This question lies at the very heart of philosophy of language due to its intimate connections with two other issues: the nature of linguistic meaning and the workings of linguistic communication. This book presents a systematic attempt to explicate the concept of sentence understanding, guided by two questions: What exactly is the role played by states of sentence understanding in enabling linguistic communication? And what do such states (...) have to be in order to play that role? Adopting a broadly Gricean picture of communication as background, the book reviews some main proposals from the literature and then develops an original line of Argument for a non-standard version of the view that understanding a sentence consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. A key to a satisfactory account of this sort, it is argued, lies in a particular view of the nature of propositional attitude states. Apart from dealing successfully with a number of challenges, the resulting account also forms part of an attractive general picture of how philosophers of language may go about explaining our use and interpretation of language. (shrink)

The present study explores the idea that human linguistic communication co-opted a pre-existing population-wide behavioural system that was shared among social group members and whose structure reflected the structure of the environment. This system is hypothesized to have emerged from interactions among individuals who had evolved the capacity to imitate arbitrary, functionless behaviour. A series of agent-based computer simulations test the separate and joint effects of imitation, pattern completion behaviour, environment structure and level of social interaction on such a (...) population-wide behavioural system. The results support the view that a system that could be co-opted for linguistic communication might arise in a population of agents equipped with arbitrary imitation for the purposes of pattern completion interacting in certain kinds of structured environments. Such pre-linguistic behavioural system could have bootstrapped communication and paved the way for biological capacities widely believed to be necessary for communication, such as shared intentionality and symbolicity, to evolve. (shrink)

The present study explores the idea that human linguistic communication co-opted a pre-existing population-wide behavioural system that was shared among social group members and whose structure reflected the structure of the environment. This system is hypothesized to have emerged from interactions among individuals who had evolved the capacity to imitate arbitrary, functionless behaviour. A series of agent-based computer simulations test the separate and joint effects of imitation, pattern completion behaviour, environment structure and level of social interaction on such a (...) population-wide behavioural system. The results support the view that a system that could be co-opted for linguistic communication might arise in a population of agents equipped with arbitrary imitation for the purposes of pattern completion interacting in certain kinds of structured environments. Such pre-linguistic behavioural system could have bootstrapped communication and paved the way for biological capacities widely believed to be necessary for communication, such as shared intentionality and symbolicity, to evolve. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's notorious sample of a ‘complete primitive language’ is often thought to be closer in kind to animal forms of communication than human language. Indeed, it has been criticised on precisely these grounds. But such debates make little sense if we take seriously Wittgenstein's idea that language is a family resemblance concept. So, rather than argue that the builders’ game ‘really is a language’, I propose to turn the debate on its head and welcome the comparison. By changing our perspective (...) in this way, I suggest that we can see that the learning of language is crucially dependent on forms of communication that are animal in nature. I then discuss how these lessons might shed light on empirical research into both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of linguistic communication. (shrink)

How good are we at understanding what others communicate? It often seems to us, at least, that we understand quite well what others convey when speaking in a familiar language. However, a growing body of evidence from the psychology of language suggests that in various communicative settings comprehenders routinely form linguistic representations that are underdetermined, “sketchy”, “shallow” or imprecise, often without noticing it. The paper discusses some important consequences of this evidence. Following recent discussions in this strand of research, (...) I outline how the evidence is currently best interpreted as supporting a view on which operating at a certain level of imprecision and underdetermination is a functional feature of the system responsible for comprehension of linguistic utterances in humans. That this kind of imprecision and underdetermination is part and parcel of linguistic interactions, makes the exact success rate of comprehension particularly hard to estimate. This poses a unique and interesting challenge for assessing the quality of linguistic comprehension. Understanding what a speaker intended to convey with a linguistic utterance may be less transparent than it appears to us. I will discuss the extent to which this evidence may lead to pessimism about how good we are at comprehending what others communicate. However, as I will argue in the last part of the paper, in various cases language users can be sensitive to some types of imprecision and underdetermination in comprehension and make up for it by means of various forms of post hoc deliberation. I will describe some such clarificatory contexts and end by charting a map of important issues that require further investigation. (shrink)

Although we applaud the interactivist approach to language and communication taken in the target article, we notice that Shanker & King (S&K) give little attention to the theoretical frameworks developed by dynamical system theorists. We point out how the dynamical idea of causality, viewed as multidirectional across multiple scales of organization, could further strengthen the position taken in the target article.

Bestial banter -- Homo risus : making light of animal language -- Warming savage hearts and heating eloquent tongues -- From savage orators to savage languages -- French levity -- English energy.

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery (...) of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning). (shrink)

Philosophers of action have rarely systematically thought about acts of communication as special sorts of actions, nor have speech act theorists looked on the bearings of the general theory to action on linguistic acts. This dissertation represents an attempt to work seriously within precisely that intersection of action theory and speech act theory. Some problematic issues in both areas can, from this combined perspective, be reformulated more clearly than they have been previously articulated. ;The first part of the thesis (...) examines linguistic communication as a subspecies of action, formulating a unifying theoretical description of speech and action. The distinction between constitutive rules and regulative rules turns out to parallel a distinction between basic actions and nonbasic actions; I explore the usefulness of the concept of level-generation and basic actions in the context of the theory of linguistic communication, arguing for a conception of basic speech acts. ;The second part of the thesis provides a theory of demonstrative utterances. A demonstrative utterance is simply an utterance accompanied by a demonstrative gesture. The account offered supplies a speech act-like analysis of demonstrative as well as an action-theoretical analysis of the gestures which accompany demonstrative utterances. This theory addresses and answers many of the questions raised by Kaplan and passes beyond them to offer insight into the communicative aspects of demonstrative uses of expressions. I extend this analysis to cover the wider class of all utterances accompanied by relevant gestures as a prologue to the more comprehensive study of nonverbal communicative behavior. ;In the third part I show how the concepts of the unified theory developed in parts I and II, form the building blocks of a general theory of nonverbal communicative behavior. I examine the structure of statements about meaningful action and nonverbal behavior as well as the properties of the behavior itself. I argue that only accounts which include elements of both action theory and the theory of communication can successfully explain the nature of nonverbal communicative behavior as the sort of action that is properly said to be meaningful. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 603-618.

The manuscript presents a summary of the results of the linguistic semantics study of Covid-19 related quarantine. Research conducted on a sample of Russian speaking Ukrainians. Found content and structure of the respective discursive field. Described features of inter-discourse connections. Established that the actualization of some discourses is accompanied by the deactivation of others, what makes quarantine semantics biased. Also, it was suggested that some of the discourses are indirectly positively associated and form the semantic core of the quarantine (...) concept. (shrink)

The virtual community under consideration is called theNigerian Village Square, ‘…a marketplace of ideas’. As an online discussion forum, NVS combines the features of listservs and newsgroups with a more elegant and user-friendly interface. While computer-mediated communication technologies augment political discourse in established democracies, new media and mobile technologies create avenues for a virtual sphere among Nigerians. Therefore, the ideal virtual sphere guarantees equal access to all connected netizens, equal right for all languages in netizens’ linguistic repertoire, and (...) it fosters democratic deliberation through policy debates, public dialogues and ‘online polylogues’. By linguistic marketing is meant discourse as a vehicle for ‘promotional acts’ and for ‘selling’ particular cultures and ideologies to multicultural and multilingual readers/audiences. One interpretation of this is in terms of asserting language rights and linguistic equality. The use of Nigerian languages with Nigerian Pidgin online is promotional and forexistential negotiation. This results in language mixture which is an instantiation of freedom of speech, freedom of switch and freedom to switch. The underlying pragmatic motivation for top-down language mixture and alternation in Nigerian virtual discourse is attention-getting with the aim of inducing an interdiscursive writer-reader cognitive as well as communicative interaction. Other pragmatic functions of code switching discussed in the paper include allusive textuality, amusing phaticity, anticipated interactivity, affective expressivity and audience affiliation or alienation, among others. Thus, intertextuality is an explanatory technique for investigating previously unexplored phenomena in digital code switching. (shrink)

Se presenta la dinámica sociolingüística del contacto entre el mapudungun y el castellano de Chile en una comunidad² rural bilingüe mapuche-castellano. Se analiza la interacción lingüística entre los códigos en dominios vinculados con la transmisión intergeneracional, ámbitos de uso y eventos comunicativos que ocurren en la comunidad. La información se obtuvo a partir de la aplicación de un cuestionario sociolingüístico dirigido a 20 habitantes de la zona lafkenche de Isla Huapi, IX Región de La Araucanía. Los datos proporcionados permiten describir (...) los procesos interactivos entre ambos códigos y proyectar la formación de una variedad de castellano particular que se habla en estas comunidades. Lo anterior, bajo el marco de referencia propuesto por Godenzzi (2007), quien valida la formación de variedades singulares, las cuales se originan en situaciones de conflictos sociolingüísticos históricos que operan bajo dinámicas de oposición y complementariedad. This research exposes the sociolinguistic contact between mapudungun and Spanish of Chile inside of a bilingual rural community mapuche/spanish. We review the linguistic interaction between both codes in sociolinguistics domains related with the intergenerational transmission, the sociolinguistic domains and the communicative events. The information has been extracted from a sociolinguistic questionnaire applied to 20 people living in the lafkenche area of Isla Huapi. The collected data allows us to describe the interactive processes between the codes and to predict the formation of a different type of Spanish spoken in these communities. All of this occurs under the framework suggested by Godenzzi (2007) who validates the formation of particular language varieties, which are created in situations of historical sociolinguistic conflicts characterized by dynamics of opposition and complementarity. (shrink)

In this article we offer a detailed assessment of current approaches to the origins of language, with a special foots on their historical and theoretical underpinnings. It is a widely accepted view within evolutionary linguistics that an account of the emergence of human language necessarily involves paying special attention to its communicative function and its relation to other animal communication systems. Ever since Darwin, some variant of this view has constituted the mainstream version in evolutionary linguistics; however, it is our (...) contention in this article that this approach is seriously flawed, and that “animal communication” does not constitute a natural kind on which a sound theoretical model can be built. As a consequence, we argue that this communicative perspective is better abandoned in favor of a structural/formal approach based on the notion of homology, and that some interesting and unexpected similarities may be found by applying this venerable comparative method founded in the 19th century by Richard Owen. (shrink)

In these newly edited, annotated, and contextualized foundational linguistic works, many previously unpublished, the late William Diver of Columbia University radically analyzes language as a structure shaped by communicative function and by characteristics of its human users.

Within some online communities, discussion often centers on issues on which writers take sides, and within some subset of those debate-prone communities, we find over time that particular sets of writers almost always end up on the same side of an issue. These sets we call factions. In this paper, we describe a tool to perform what we call faction discovery on online communities. Generalizing methods developed in the bibliometrics and information retrieval literature, we define a network determined by similarities (...) of content in a community of users and add in direct evidence of online ties between users. We then perform community detection on the network to find factions. Using a set of data collected from science and fantasy blogs, we show that the discovered factions accurately reflect an active conflict in the community leading to significant, politically related social fracture. (shrink)

Although applauding Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) attempt to ground language use in the ideomotor perception-action link, which provides an of embodied social interaction, we suggest that it needs to be complemented by an additional control mechanism that modulates its operation in the service of the language users' communicative intentions. Implications for intergroup relationships and intercultural communication are discussed.

This commentary presents two illustrations, from the world of poker, of the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic communication and expression, in support of Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of the evolution of human expression and communication. I also come across the presumption of relevance in the context of a poker table.