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Question Under Discussion
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation. Craige Roberts introduced the concept of a QUD in 1996 in order to formalize conversational relevance and explain its consequences for information structure and focus marking. It has subsequently become a staple of work in semantics and pragmatics, playing a role in analyses of disparate phenomena including donkey anaphora and presupposition projection. See also * Common ground (linguistics) * Cooperative principle * Discourse * Focus (linguistics) In linguistics, focus ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantics (linguistics)
Semantics (from grc, wikt:σημαντικός, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, Meaning (philosophy), meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science. History In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token"). In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'': The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikí'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also , Logick. In 1831, the term is suggested for the third branch of division of knowledge akin to Locke; the "signs of our knowledge". In 1857, the term ''semasiology'' (borrowed from German langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cooperative Principle
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. The philosopher of language Paul Grice introduced the concept in his pragmatic theory, argued such: Accordingly, the cooperative principle is divided into Grice's four maxims of conversation, called the Gricean maxims—quantity, quality, relation, and manner. These four maxims describe specific rational principles observed by people who follow the cooperative principle in pursuit of effective communication. Applying the Gricean maxims is a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them. Though phrased as a prescriptive command, the principle is intended as a description of how people normally behave in conversation. Lesley Jeffries and Daniel McIntyr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics, focus (abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Functional approaches Information structure has been described at length by a number of linguists as a grammatical phenomenon. Lexicogrammatical structures that code prominence, or focus, of some information over other information has a particularly significant history dating back to the 19th century. Recent attempts to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context. Social theory In the humanities and social sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourse is a soci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Common Ground (linguistics)
In semantics (linguistics), semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, the common ground of a conversation is the set of propositions that the interlocutor (linguistics), interlocutors have agreed to treat as true. For a proposition to be in the common ground, it must be common knowledge (logic), common knowledge in the conversational context. The set of possible worlds compatible with the common ground is often called the ''context set''. The concept is fundamental to many theories of discourse. In such theories, the speech act of Logical assertion, assertion is often analyzed as a proposal to add an additional proposition to the common ground. Similarly, presuppositions are taken to be licensed when they are already established in the common ground. While such approaches are typically construed as pragmatics, pragmatic, the framework of dynamic semantics treats the semantic denotations of sentences as functions which update the common ground. In many theories, the common gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Presupposition
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include: * ''Jane no longer writes fiction.'' ** Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction. * ''Have you stopped eating meat?'' ** Presupposition: you had once eaten meat. * ''Have you talked to Hans?'' ** Presupposition: Hans exists. A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance. Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its presuppositions: ''I want to do it again'' and ''I don't want to do it again'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donkey Anaphora
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is Bound variable pronoun, bound semantics, semantically) but whose syntax, syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to Linguist, grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parsing, parse such sentences. Chris Barker (linguist), Barker and Shan define a donkey pronoun as "a pronoun that lies outside the restrictor of a Quantification (linguistics), quantifier or the if-clause of a Conditional clause, conditional, yet covariance, covaries with some Quantification (linguistics), quantificational element inside it, usually an indefinite article, indefinite." The pronoun in question is sometimes termed a donkey pronoun or donkey anaphora (linguistics), anaphora. The following sentences are examples of donkey sentences. *"" ("Every man who owns a donkey sees it") — Walter Burley (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics, focus (abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Functional approaches Information structure has been described at length by a number of linguists as a grammatical phenomenon. Lexicogrammatical structures that code prominence, or focus, of some information over other information has a particularly significant history dating back to the 19th century. Recent attempts to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Structure
In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Information structure and sentence form.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This generally includes only those aspects of information that “respond to the temporary state of the addressee’s mind”, and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge, choice of style, politeness, and so forth. For example, the difference between an active clause (e.g., ''the police want him'') and a corresponding passive (e.g., ''he is wanted by police'') is a syntactic difference, but one motivated by information structuring considerations. Other structures motivated by information structure include preposing (e.g., ''that one I don't like'') and inversion (e.g., ''"the end", said the man''). The basic notions of information structure are focus, giv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Craige Roberts
Craige Roberts (born February 20, 1949) is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics. Education and career Roberts earned her A.B. at Indiana University in 1979. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, under the supervision of Barbara Partee. She is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University. Her work in the areas of pragmatics and formal semantics explores how meaning is conveyed through anaphora, definiteness, and specificity of referring expressions, the modeling of presupposition and implicature, and methods for capturing modality, mood, tense, and aspect of verbs in language. Awards and distinctions In 2015 Roberts and co-investigators David Beaver, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Collaborative Grant for the project “What’s the question? A cross-linguistic investigation into compositional and pragmatic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation,Mey, Jacob L. (1993) ''Pragmatics: An Introduction''. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001). as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called ''pragmatic competence''. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice. Origin of the field Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conversational Scoreboard
In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors. Most theories of conversational scorekeeping take one of the scoreboard's elements to be a common ground, which represents the propositional information mutually agreed upon by the interlocutors. When an interlocutor makes a successful assertion, its content is added to the common ground. Once in the common ground, that information can then be presupposed by future utterances. Depending on the particular theory of scorekeeping, additional elements of the scoreboard may include a stack of questions under discussion, a list of discourse referents available for anaphora, among other categories of contextual information. The notion of a conversational scoreboard was introduced by David Lewis in his most-cited paper ''Scorekeeping in a Lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
