Pragmatics PDF

Pragmatics and implicature processing
Language and Psycholinguistics

BCS 152 / LIN 217 / ASL 260 / PSY 152
October 12, 2011
Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)
October 12, 2011
1 / 36
Pragmatics
Cooperative dialogue and conversational maxims
Scalar implicatures
Common ground
October 12, 2011
2 / 36
Levels of linguistic processing
phonology morphology syntax: sentence structure semantics: sentence meaning (propositions) pragmatics:
utterance meaning language in context interaction of sentence meaning, speaker intentions, discourse context, common ground, world knowledge
October 12, 2011
3 / 36
(1) Al: What time is it? Trixie: Some of the guests are already leaving. Its late.
October 12, 2011
4 / 36
(1) Al: What time is it? Trixie: Some of the guests are already leaving. Its late. (2) Al: Is the party fun? Trixie: Some of the guests are already leaving. The party is boring.
October 12, 2011
4 / 36
(1) Al: What time is it? Trixie: Some of the guests are already leaving. Its late. (2) Al: Is the party fun? Trixie: Some of the guests are already leaving. The party is boring. How do we infer what speakers mean when they produce an utterance?
October 12, 2011
4 / 36
Speaker-dependent meaning of utterances
example: yes, no, perhaps
October 12, 2011
5 / 36
Speaker-dependent meaning of utterances
example: yes, no, perhaps Attributed to Voltaire (in Spanish): When a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps; when he says perhaps, he means no; when he says no, he is not a diplomat. When a lady says no, she means perhaps; when she says perhaps, she means yes; when she says yes, she is not a lady.
October 12, 2011
5 / 36
Context-dependent meaning of utterances
(3) John: Do you want to go skiing? Mary: Its snowing! a. No. (because Mary only skis when its sunny) b. Yes. (because the snow is better and there are less people on the slopes)
October 12, 2011
6 / 36
How do we infer what the speaker meant?

Grice (1967): sentence meaning (what is said) vs. speaker meaning (what is meant) speaker meaning consists of conversational implicatures in addition to sentence meaning NB: an implicature is not to be confused with an implication! implicatures are defeasible, implications are not. Compare: (4) a. John: Do you want to go skiing? Mary: Its snowing ( no). . . but I didnt mean to say that I dont want to go skiing. In fact, I love skiing when it snows. ne b. John: Theres a red cube on the table ( there is a cube on the table). . . but there is no cube on the table. strange
Pragmatics and implicature processing October 12, 2011 7 / 36
Factors that determine which implicatures arise
Who is the speaker? When and where did the utterance occur? What are the speakers intentions? (What does he intend to achieve by saying what he does?) What are the speakers and hearers beliefs? What is in the common ground (shared beliefs)? What is the focus of the conversation or the question under discussion (QUD)?
October 12, 2011
8 / 36
When Harry met Sally. . .
(Loading movie...)
October 12, 2011
9 / 36
How do we infer what the speaker meant?
(5) Jess: When someones not that attractive theyre ALWAYS described as having a good personality. Harry: Look, if you were to ask me what does she look like and I said she has a good personality, that means shes not attractive. But just because I happen to mention that she has a good personality, she could be either. Jess assumes Harry is implicating that Sally isnt attractive Harry makes reference to the QUD to explain away the potential implicature the QUD sets the level of informativeness expected of the speaker
October 12, 2011
10 / 36
How do we compute implicatures?
assumption that interlocutors are

rational cooperative
The Cooperative Principle (Grice) Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
October 12, 2011
11 / 36
The conversational maxims: Quality
Try to make your contribution one that is true. Truthfulness Do not say what you believe to be false. Evidencedness Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
October 12, 2011
12 / 36
The conversational maxims: Quantity and Relation
Quantity-1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Quantity-2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Relation Be relevant.
October 12, 2011
13 / 36
The conversational maxims: Manner

Be perspicuous. Obscurity avoidance Avoid obscurity of expression. Ambiguity avoidance Avoid ambiguity. Brevity Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Orderliness Be orderly.
October 12, 2011
14 / 36
Deriving implicatures - an example
(6)
a. Mary met the love of her life and got married.
(7)
a. Mary got married and met the love of her life.
October 12, 2011
15 / 36
Deriving implicatures - an example
(6)
a. Mary met the love of her life and got married. b. Mary met the love of her life and then got married to that person. a. Mary got married and met the love of her life. b. Mary got married and then met the love of her life (another person).
(7)
A and B is equivalent to B and A - so why the temporal implicature? hearer infers that speaker is following Orderliness and thus is recounting events in the order they occurred
October 12, 2011
15 / 36
A note on the status of the conversational maxims
what they are not:

moral prescriptions on how to communicate descriptive generalizations about speech
what they are:

presumptions about ones interlocutor that can be used in comprehension and production
in comprehension: presumption that the speaker is being cooperative and speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly and otherwise in an appropriate way in production: when we are planning an utterance that will make our communicative intentions evident, we exploit the fact that our listeners presume these things
October 12, 2011
16 / 36
Disrespecting the maxims - Bronston vs. United States
(8)
a. Lawyer: Have you ever had any bank accounts in Swiss banks? Bronston: The company did.
October 12, 2011
17 / 36
(8)
a. Lawyer: Have you ever had any bank accounts in Swiss banks? Bronston: The company did. b. Bronston didnt have bank accounts in Switzerland.
October 12, 2011
17 / 36
(8)
if it is a case of outing (deliberately breaking a conversational maxim while still being cooperative):
October 12, 2011
17 / 36
(8)
Bronston is following Quality he is outing Quantity-1 (being uninformative by not answering the question directly). . . . . .in favor of Relation
October 12, 2011
17 / 36
(8)
Bronston is following Quality he is outing Quantity-1 (being uninformative by not answering the question directly). . . . . .in favor of Relation
else it is a case of maxim violation (resulting in non-cooperative dialogue)
October 12, 2011
17 / 36
Scalar implicatures
(9) Mary: Who has John dated? Sarah: He dated some of the girls on his swim team. He dated some, but not all of the girls on his swim team. (10) Mary: Who went to the party? Sarah: John or Peter did. Either John or Peter, but not both, went to the party. generalization: use of a statement with a weak element (on a scale of a strong and a weak element) implicates the negation of the stronger statement scales:
lexical items ordered according to informativeness (strong items rst) all, some and, or
Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152) Pragmatics and implicature processing October 12, 2011 18 / 36
Hearers reasoning
He dated some of the girls on his swim team. Sarah uttered the statement with some instead of all, which would have been relevant (in compliance with Relation) and more informative (outing of Quantity-1) if Sarah knew that John dated all of the girls on his swim team, she would have said so Sarah is well-informed and complies with Quality (i.e. she is honest) thus, it is not the case that John dated all of the girls on his swim team
October 12, 2011
19 / 36
The nature of scales
dierent kinds of scales:

lexicalized, basically context-independent: all, some , and, or not lexicalized, context-dependent: past Santos, past Santorini On a boat tour of some Greek islands: Mary: Where are you? John: Im past Santos. John is past Santos, but not past Santorini. lexicalized, but context-dependent: beautiful, attractive
October 12, 2011
20 / 36
(Loading movie...)
October 12, 2011
21 / 36
(11) Harry: She could be attractive with a good personality, or not attractive with a good personality. Jess: So which one is she? Harry: Attractive. Jess: But not beautiful, right? accounting for Jesss inference:
scale: beautiful, attractive is attractive is not beautiful note: speaker must intend for his intention to be recognized, otherwise the implicature does not arise
October 12, 2011
22 / 36
The time course of scalar implicatures
evidence for incremental processing and rapid integration of available information from many other domains (e.g. word recognition, syntactic parsing) does this apply to implicature processing, too? is pragmatic information integrated online, in parallel with information from other levels of linguistic processing, or only after the syntax and semantics of the sentence is computed? early studies nd delayed implicatures (Bott & Noveck 2004, Huang & Snedeker 2009) new evidence for rapid integration: visual world study by Grodner et al 2010 testing the implicature of some to some, but not all
October 12, 2011
23 / 36
Grodner et al - scalar implicature processing
Click on the girl who has some of the balls/all of the balloons. semantic interpretation of some (some and possibly all) does not disambiguate pragmatic interpretation of some (some but not all) does all disambiguates (literal control)
(A)
October 12, 2011
24 / 36
Grodner et al - scalar implicature processing
(A)
looks to target increase 200-300ms after quantier onset (both for some and all) rapid computation of the implicature
(B) Figure 1: The displays for (A) the Early-Summa, Alla, and Nunna conditions, and (B) the Late-Summa condition
October 12, 2011
25 / 36
Common ground
essential hearer assumption for deriving scalar implicatures: the speaker knows about whether the stronger statement holds more generally: Gricean reasoning requires taking into account our interlocutors belief state (and vice versa) as well as common ground (shared beliefs) . . .but are we really this sensitive to our interlocutors perspective?
October 12, 2011
26 / 36
Common vs. privileged ground
Common ground: information (direct and inferred propositions and beliefs) assumed by an interlocutor to be shared by the other interlocutor Privileged ground: information that is assumed to be unavailable to the other interlocutor
October 12, 2011
27 / 36
Is language processing egocentric?
if comprehenders treat privileged ground dierently from common ground comprehenders take into consideration the state of their interlocutor language processing would not be egocentric early experiments suggested that listeners are egocentric, but these studies had methodological problems (Keysar et al., 2000, 2002) later experiments provided evidence for non-egocentricity (Hanna et al 2002, 2003; Brown-Schmidt & Tanenhaus 2008, Heller et al 2008)
October 12, 2011
28 / 36
The general framework: Sedivy et al 1999

reference resolution via pragmatic inference (Quantity-2 maxim) size contrast between only one pair of objects makes pre-nominal modication felicitous for that pair (over-informative otherwise) if were aware of the contrast in the display, we should expect pre-nominal modication only for the objects of the contrast pair
Pick up the small basket.
October 12, 2011
29 / 36
One contrast: Point of disambiguation (POD)
Pick up the big duck.
recognition of object already during processing of adjective ( big ) pragmatic inference due to contrast immediately integrated
October 12, 2011
30 / 36
One vs. two contrasts: Heller et al. 2008
prediction: recognition should be delayed until noun because adjective does not carry sucient information to disambiguate
Pick up the small pot.
October 12, 2011
31 / 36
Two contrasts: Point of disambiguation (POD)
Pick up the big duck.
October 12, 2011
32 / 36
One vs. two contrasts

early eect of adjective due to pragmatic inference about adjective choice in one-contrast condition
October 12, 2011
33 / 36
Heller et al. 2008: privileged vs. common ground

Put the big duck on the bottom.
same as just discussed
October 12, 2011
34 / 36
Heller et al. 2008: privileged vs. common ground

Put the big duck on the bottom.
same as just discussed egocentric and non-egocentric view make same predictions egocentric view predicts late POD non-egocentric view predicts early POD
October 12, 2011
34 / 36
Result: xations on target

comprehenders consider what the speaker knows
October 12, 2011
35 / 36
Summary
knowledge of conversational maxims guides comprehenders interpretations of speaker meaning pragmatic information is processed incrementally language processing is non-egocentric: we keep track of the common ground
October 12, 2011
36 / 36

Pragmatics PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Pragmatics PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Pragmatics and implicature processing

Language and Psycholinguistics

October 12, 2011

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Cooperative dialogue and conversational maxims

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Levels of linguistic processing

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Speaker-dependent meaning of utterances

example: yes, no, perhaps

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Speaker-dependent meaning of utterances

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

Context-dependent meaning of utterances

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

How do we infer what the speaker meant?

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Factors that determine which implicatures arise

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

When Harry met Sally. . .

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

How do we infer what the speaker meant?

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

How do we compute implicatures?

assumption that interlocutors are

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

The conversational maxims: Quality

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011

The conversational maxims: Quantity and Relation

Language and Psycholinguistics (BCS 152)

Pragmatics and implicature processing

October 12, 2011