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Question Under Discussion
In semantics (linguistics), semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutor (linguistics), interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal linguistics, formal and computational linguistics, 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 Cooperative principle#Maxim of relation (relevance), conversational relevance and explain its consequences for information structure and focus (linguistics), 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 * Focu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantics (linguistics)
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication. Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics (natural language), Formal semantics relies o ... [...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: In other words: say what you need to say, when you need to say it, and how it should be said. These are Grice's four maxims of conversation or Gricean maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. They describe the rules followed by people in conversation. 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 McIntyre (2010) describe Grice's maxims as "encapsulating the assumpt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ..., focus ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English language, English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed Prosody (linguistics), prosodically by a pitch accent (intonation), pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom 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 (linguistics), semantics, pr ... [...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 work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into Power (social and political), 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 these 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 i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Common Ground (linguistics)
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, the common ground of a conversation is the set of propositions that the interlocutors have agreed to treat as true. For a proposition to be in the common ground, it must be 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 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 pragmatic, the framework of dynamic semantics treats the semantic denotation In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Presupposition
In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition 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 is information that is linguistically presented as being mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee. This may be required for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context, but it is not uncommon for new information to be encoded in presuppositions without disrupting the flow of conversation (see accommodation below). A presupposition remains mutually known by the speaker and addressee whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donkey Anaphora
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. In order to explain how speakers are able to understand them, semanticists have proposed a variety of formalisms including systems of dynamic semantics such as Discourse representation theory. Their name comes from the example sentence "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it", in which "it" acts as a donkey pronoun because it is semantically but not syntactically bound by the indefinite noun phrase "a donkey". The phenomenon is known as donkey anaphora. Examples The following sentences are examples of donkey sentences. * ("Every man who owns a donkey sees it") — Walter Burley (1328), *Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. *If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ..., focus ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English language, English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed Prosody (linguistics), prosodically by a pitch accent (intonation), pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom 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 (linguistics), semantics, pr ... [...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 Formal semantics (natural language), formally packaged within a Sentence (linguistics), 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''). Th ... [...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 the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), 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. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance theory, relevance and Conversation analysis, 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''. In 1938 ... [...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 La ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
