Papers by Thorstein Fretheim
The proper role of intonation in utterance interpretation should be assessed in terms of the way ... more The proper role of intonation in utterance interpretation should be assessed in terms of the way that intonation interacts with other linguistic phenomena, notably with syntactic form and with grammatically encoded meaning, whether conceptual meaning of a compositional nature or procedural meaning that constrains the way in which an addressee will perform deductive inferences over conceptual representations in a bid to recover the contextual effects that make the utterance relevant to her or him. The intonation of a given utterance facilitates the addressee's selection of the context (= set of activated assumptions) that constrains the relevance of the utterance in a way intended by the communicator. Direct coding of conventional meaning by means of intonation plays a rather marginal role in processes of utterance interpretation. This is particularly true of a prosodic system like that of Norwegian, the language providing the data to be discussed in this paper, because in Norweg...
The semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian concessive marker likevel is investigated in a cont... more The semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian concessive marker likevel is investigated in a contrastive perspective, based on material from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. Likevel has a wide range of English correspondences. It is claimed that likevel is semantically underspecified, and the range of its uses is accounted for in terms of a context-dependent inferential enrichment of the linguistically encoded sentence structure, taking into account features such as syntactic position and prosody. Special attention is given to after all , anyway , and zero correspondences, i.e. cases where the English text has no concessive marker corresponding to likevel in Norwegian. Initial likevel typically corresponds to concessive adverbs like nevertheless , still and yet , which all point backwards toward a local discourse antecedent. Final likevel typically corresponds to focal after all , which points to a long-distance link between itself and a contextually retrievable antecedent pro...
Proceedings of a Workshop on Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts - ANARESOLUTION '97, 1997
... While the distinction between accented and unaccented sentence pronouns almost led to opposit... more ... While the distinction between accented and unaccented sentence pronouns almost led to opposite results for (5) and (6), there was a small number of subjects who chose Gro as the referent of henne in the version with the unaccented det. ...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999
Production and understanding of different pronouns referring to higher order entities is sensitiv... more Production and understanding of different pronouns referring to higher order entities is sensitive to the distinction between entities assumed to be in focus for the addressee and those that are activated, but not in focus. Our study reveals that this distinction is influenced by the number of times an entity has been processed, regardless of whether such processing is triggered
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 1991
... took utterance I to be literally a denial of'She is more than eleven'and utterance ... more ... took utterance I to be literally a denial of'She is more than eleven'and utterance II to be consistent with I. We cannot account for the high number of acceptances of that realization of I unless we assume that the speaker of I and II has not revealed the age of the girl until the ...
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 2003
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999
Abstract. In Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT), the relevance of a given utterance ... more Abstract. In Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT), the relevance of a given utterance in discourse is treated as given, while the context which the relevance of the utterance depends on is treated as a variable to be actively sought and selected by the hearer. This paper ...
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 2000
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 2007
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 1998
Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, 2011
ABSTRACT A singular term in pronominal form does not survive the hearer's pragmatic proce... more ABSTRACT A singular term in pronominal form does not survive the hearer's pragmatic processing but undergoes saturation and delivers what is understood to be its referent to the propositional content of the utterance. This chapter argues that the concepts encoded by the descriptive material of a referentially used definite description or a demonstrative description are also not entered into the content. The communicative function of such conceptual material is oftentimes to constrain the hearer's inference needed to identify the referent but descriptive meaning in referential terms does not necessarily facilitate reference resolution, it may instead direct the hearer to information that goes beyond the truth-conditional content. Linguistic data to be discussed and offered as support for my arguments include descriptive material used for metacommunicative pointing to antecedent information, description that may be relevant even though it does not facilitate reference resolution, and description intended to direct the hearer's attention to an extralinguistic stimulus. Descriptive terms used referentially are obviously not specialized for the expression of procedural meaning, but procedural information that constrains the hearer's computation is sometimes more effectively conveyed by means of a description than by means of an indexical or other context-sensitive lexical item that encodes procedural meaning.
Historical and Comparative Perspectives, 1997
... We shall call altsa an" inference particle" when it appears in requests for confirm... more ... We shall call altsa an" inference particle" when it appears in requests for confirmation, and a" context-adjusting" par-ticle, or" premise-providing" particle when the illocutionary act is as-sertive. Section 2 of this paper is devoted to altsa, and Section 3 to nemlig. ...
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 1996
... The linguistic role of the accent on the pronoun is to upgrade the cognitive status of the re... more ... The linguistic role of the accent on the pronoun is to upgrade the cognitive status of the referent from activated to in focus (cf. ... An unaccented pronoun can thus only refer to Astrid and an accentedpronoun implicates conversationally that the referent is not in focus (cf. ...
The Handbook of Pragmatics, 2006
The Linguistic Review, 2000
The intonation system of East Norwegian (EN) is such that a statement o en sounds more like a que... more The intonation system of East Norwegian (EN) is such that a statement o en sounds more like a question to a non-native listener. While it may be easy for a phonetically trained person to hear that a nal pitch movement of an EN utterance is either a rise to a high, or a fall to a low target tone, such a perceived di erence has no phonological signi cance unless it is exploited systematically for a communicative purpose. Imperative sentences are used for the performance of a variety of speech acts ranging from orders to o ers. We carried out a listening comprehension test with imperatives produced with systematically varied intonation contours. Our hypothesis was that an imperative is generally so ened by a perceived Low boundary tone but is heard as peremptory if the boundary tone is High. This hypothesis was borne out. Having established the existence of a phonological contrast between a Low and a High terminal boundary tone in EN utterance-nal syllables, we argue that a phonologically Low boundary tone is even a grammatical property of EN utterances whose low-pitched nal syllable is the result of a global intonation contour that simply precludes a nal rise.
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 1981
ABSTRACT
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2000
ABSTRACT This study is a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian right-detached particle... more ABSTRACT This study is a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian right-detached particle så, which occurs exclusively with sentence fragments. The framework of description is relevance theory, a cognitively based theory of communication whose objective is to account for how we are able to understand utterances and to make ourselves understood, in spite of the fact that the linguistic code that we use vastly underdetermines what we mean, and even what we say in the strict sense (truth conditions). It is argued that så encodes a procedure for the addressee to follow in his inferential processing of the linguistic signal. The lexical entry for så contains an instruction to the addressee to contextually activate one or more positive propositions which resemble the one asserted by the utterance of the så-fragment, and to arrange them mentally on a scale whose lower bound is represented by the så-fragment proposition. The speaker implicitly communicates her lack of commitment to the more highly ranked propositions on the scale. The principle behind the scalar ranking is argued to be highly context-dependent.
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Papers by Thorstein Fretheim