Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2003
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Sessi... more Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)
Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon eith... more Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.
Retrieving from context is an essential part of discourse interpretation. According to Relevance ... more Retrieving from context is an essential part of discourse interpretation. According to Relevance theory, i' is a precondition on the establishment of utterance Relevance. This paper analyzes the system of marking syntactically independent propositions as background for other, usually adjacent utterances. The propositions thus modified are those which are assumed to be accessible to the addressee, and are presented in order :o support an original proposition.
Abstract The alternatives introduced by or constructions are typically distinct from each other. ... more Abstract The alternatives introduced by or constructions are typically distinct from each other. Hurford's (1974) constraint dictates that disjuncts must not entail each other, which defines Distinctness as mutual nonentailment. In agreement with Simons (2001) , I first argue that this constraint is too strong and too semantic, but relying on the Relevance-theoretic concept of contextual adjustment ( Carston, 2002 ), I call for a more radical pragmatic shift. I include a discussion of Equivalence or constructions, where the alternatives are not referentially distinct, arguing that again, it is pragmatic considerations that determine whether to impose Distinctness or not. The take-home message is that pragmatics governs the variable application of the Distinctness constraint.
The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The firs... more The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The first includes theories of definite descriptions and proper names. The key to the riddle of the appropriate use of such expressions, it was thought, is the notion of presupposition: existence and/or uniqueness. Indeed, this was the question that dominated the literature for many years, starting with the early philosophical analyses of Frege (1982), Russell (1919) and Strawson (1956, 1964), and ending with the much later pragmatically oriented linguistic analyses, such as Liberman (1973), Kempson (1975), Prince (1978, 1981b), Gazdar (1979), McCawley (1979), Hawkins (1974, 1984) and even Loftus (1972, 1974, 1975), although this last approach is more psychological. The second branch of research totally neglected the question of presupposition. Non-syntactic/semantic theories of anaphoric expressions, pronouns especially, were psychologically oriented, and hence saw the issue to be accounted for...
Generativist pragmatists and discourse grammarians both subscribe to a functional view of languag... more Generativist pragmatists and discourse grammarians both subscribe to a functional view of language, but they do not agree on the nature of pragmatic principles. Prince (1988a,b) has argued that form-function correlations are arbitrary and language specific. Discourse ...
Levinson (1985, 1987a & b, 1991) and Arie... more Levinson (1985, 1987a & b, 1991) and Ariel (1985a & b, 1987, 1988a & b, 1990a, 1991) have each proposed to anchor discourse and sentential anaphora within a more general theory of communication. Levinson chose a general, extra-linguistic pragmatic theory. He uses Grice's Quantity maxim to account for the distribution of zeros, reflexives, pronouns and lexical NPs, claiming that coreferent readings are preferred, unless a disjoint reading is implicated (by the revised Gricean maxims he offers). I have proposed a specifically linguistic, cognitive theory, whereby speakers guide addressees' retrievals of mental representations corresponding to all definite NPs (coreferent as well as disjoint) by signalling to them the degree of Accessibility associated with the intended mental entity in their memory. An examination of actual data reveals that Levinson's predictions regarding definite NP interpretations are often not borne out. In addition, his proposals cannot account for many anaphoric patterns actually found in natural discourse. Accessibility theory, it is argued, can account for both types of problematic data.
this paper will mean an expression which is said to prototypically refer to the speech situation.... more this paper will mean an expression which is said to prototypically refer to the speech situation. Whether a gesture accompanies it or not is determined by a variety of considerations, degree of accessibility as discussed below, being one of them. of classifying under one concept (deixis) a heterogenous set of markings. The fact that linguistic communication makes crucial use of various aspects of the speech situation does not automatically imply that such uses are LINGUISTICALLY UNIFORM, or even DISTINCT from other contextual retrievals. In other words, I suggest linguists should always set out from a LINGUISTIC expression and examine its use, rather than proceed from some use we assume is natural or even necessary in communication to forcing a linguistic analysis for it. I believe that linguistic coding systems show that the connections between the various deictic markers listed above are far weaker than the connections between the Givenness markers associated with the three contex...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2003
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Sessi... more Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)
Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon eith... more Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.
Retrieving from context is an essential part of discourse interpretation. According to Relevance ... more Retrieving from context is an essential part of discourse interpretation. According to Relevance theory, i' is a precondition on the establishment of utterance Relevance. This paper analyzes the system of marking syntactically independent propositions as background for other, usually adjacent utterances. The propositions thus modified are those which are assumed to be accessible to the addressee, and are presented in order :o support an original proposition.
Abstract The alternatives introduced by or constructions are typically distinct from each other. ... more Abstract The alternatives introduced by or constructions are typically distinct from each other. Hurford's (1974) constraint dictates that disjuncts must not entail each other, which defines Distinctness as mutual nonentailment. In agreement with Simons (2001) , I first argue that this constraint is too strong and too semantic, but relying on the Relevance-theoretic concept of contextual adjustment ( Carston, 2002 ), I call for a more radical pragmatic shift. I include a discussion of Equivalence or constructions, where the alternatives are not referentially distinct, arguing that again, it is pragmatic considerations that determine whether to impose Distinctness or not. The take-home message is that pragmatics governs the variable application of the Distinctness constraint.
The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The firs... more The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The first includes theories of definite descriptions and proper names. The key to the riddle of the appropriate use of such expressions, it was thought, is the notion of presupposition: existence and/or uniqueness. Indeed, this was the question that dominated the literature for many years, starting with the early philosophical analyses of Frege (1982), Russell (1919) and Strawson (1956, 1964), and ending with the much later pragmatically oriented linguistic analyses, such as Liberman (1973), Kempson (1975), Prince (1978, 1981b), Gazdar (1979), McCawley (1979), Hawkins (1974, 1984) and even Loftus (1972, 1974, 1975), although this last approach is more psychological. The second branch of research totally neglected the question of presupposition. Non-syntactic/semantic theories of anaphoric expressions, pronouns especially, were psychologically oriented, and hence saw the issue to be accounted for...
Generativist pragmatists and discourse grammarians both subscribe to a functional view of languag... more Generativist pragmatists and discourse grammarians both subscribe to a functional view of language, but they do not agree on the nature of pragmatic principles. Prince (1988a,b) has argued that form-function correlations are arbitrary and language specific. Discourse ...
Levinson (1985, 1987a & b, 1991) and Arie... more Levinson (1985, 1987a & b, 1991) and Ariel (1985a & b, 1987, 1988a & b, 1990a, 1991) have each proposed to anchor discourse and sentential anaphora within a more general theory of communication. Levinson chose a general, extra-linguistic pragmatic theory. He uses Grice's Quantity maxim to account for the distribution of zeros, reflexives, pronouns and lexical NPs, claiming that coreferent readings are preferred, unless a disjoint reading is implicated (by the revised Gricean maxims he offers). I have proposed a specifically linguistic, cognitive theory, whereby speakers guide addressees' retrievals of mental representations corresponding to all definite NPs (coreferent as well as disjoint) by signalling to them the degree of Accessibility associated with the intended mental entity in their memory. An examination of actual data reveals that Levinson's predictions regarding definite NP interpretations are often not borne out. In addition, his proposals cannot account for many anaphoric patterns actually found in natural discourse. Accessibility theory, it is argued, can account for both types of problematic data.
this paper will mean an expression which is said to prototypically refer to the speech situation.... more this paper will mean an expression which is said to prototypically refer to the speech situation. Whether a gesture accompanies it or not is determined by a variety of considerations, degree of accessibility as discussed below, being one of them. of classifying under one concept (deixis) a heterogenous set of markings. The fact that linguistic communication makes crucial use of various aspects of the speech situation does not automatically imply that such uses are LINGUISTICALLY UNIFORM, or even DISTINCT from other contextual retrievals. In other words, I suggest linguists should always set out from a LINGUISTIC expression and examine its use, rather than proceed from some use we assume is natural or even necessary in communication to forcing a linguistic analysis for it. I believe that linguistic coding systems show that the connections between the various deictic markers listed above are far weaker than the connections between the Givenness markers associated with the three contex...
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Papers by Mira Ariel