Papers by Stavros Assimakopoulos
The needs analysis of the UPSKILLS project is the foundation for all subsequent project activitie... more The needs analysis of the UPSKILLS project is the foundation for all subsequent project activities, and the survey of curricula as its first step is designed to provide insights for finetuning the interventions and materials that will be designed during the lifetime of the project, as well as for enlarging the pool of stakeholders to whom the project results will be disseminated. The survey of curricula has several steps: drawing a list of European language and linguistics degrees from international ranking websites, selecting and analyzing a representative sample of degrees based on a set of indicators agreed upon by all partners, and additional studying of a selection of degrees that the partners identified as exemplary in the context of the UPSKILLS project.
In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that wha... more In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that what is communicated through an utterance is not merely an explicature upon which implicature(s) are recovered, but rather a propositional complex that contains both explicit and implicit information. More specifically, I propose that this information is constructed on the fly as the interpreter processes every lexical item in its turn while parsing the utterance in real time, in this way creating a string of ad hoc concepts. While hearing an utterance and incrementally constructing a context, the propositional complex communicated by an utterance is pragmatically narrowed and simultaneously pragmatically broadened in order to incorporate only the set of optimally relevant propositions with respect to a specific point in the interpretation. The narrowing of propositions from the initial context at each stage allows relevant propositions to be carried on to the new level, while their broaden...
Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986, 1995) has been widely accepted as one of the most compreh... more Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986, 1995) has been widely accepted as one of the most comprehensive frameworks in pragmatics. However, as in the case of most theories, it has faced criticism on several occasions. On one of them, Chiappe & Kukla (1996) argued against the relevance-theoretic framework on the grounds that it provides no solution to the Fodorian view of the Frame Problem (Fodor 1987) and accused Sperber & Wilson of disregarding the essential issue of context selection in communication. Sperber & Wilson's response to Chiappe & Kukla (1996) was that Relevance does not provide a solution to this problem because it does not need to do so: in their view, Fodor was wrong to formulate the frame problem in the first place. In this paper, I revise this view and present an argumentation against the Fodorian thesis on the matter. I suggest that his idea on the irrationality of the human cognitive system when it comes to context selection was rightly formulated in the firs...
In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that wha... more In this paper, focusing on the relevance-theoretic view of cognition, I discuss the idea that what is communicated through an utterance is not merely an explicature upon which implicature(s) are recovered, but rather a propositional complex that contains both explicit and implicit information. More specifically, I propose that this information is constructed on the fly as the interpreter processes every lexical item in its turn while parsing the utterance in real time, in this way creating a string of ad hoc concepts. While hearing an utterance and incrementally constructing a context, the propositional complex communicated by an utterance is pragmatically narrowed and simultaneously pragmatically broadened in order to incorporate only the set of optimally relevant propositions with respect to a specific point in the interpretation. The narrowing of propositions from the initial context at each stage allows relevant propositions to be carried on to the new level, while their broaden...
The past few years have seen quite a bit of speculation over relevance theorists’ commitment to F... more The past few years have seen quite a bit of speculation over relevance theorists’ commitment to Fodorian semantics as a means to account for the notion of encoded lexical meaning that they put forth in their framework. In this paper, I take on the issue, arguing that this view of lexical semantics compromises Relevance Theory’s aim of psychological plausibility, since it effectively binds it with the ‘literal first’ hypothesis that has been deemed unrealistic from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. After discussing the incompatibility of Fodor’s philosophical account with the perspective that relevance theorists adopt, I brief ly suggest ways in which further behavioural research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction could help advance more cognitivelyoriented accounts of encoded lexical meaning.
With a view to addressing the non-truth-conditional meaning of discourse connectives from a cogni... more With a view to addressing the non-truth-conditional meaning of discourse connectives from a cognitive perspective, relevance theorists have for long pursued the argument that the relevant expressions do not carry conceptual (≈denotational) meaning, but rather encode procedures, i.e. instructions which guide pragmatic inference by creating cognitive ‘shortcuts’ that the hearer takes advantage of during utterance interpretation. At the same time, they assume that logical connectives are conceptual, rather than procedural encodings. In this paper, I explore the extent to which an analysis of logical connectives along procedural lines is viable, by offering a number of arguments which suggest that logical connectives can and should be studied on a par with discourse ones.
This thesis sets out to investigate relevance-theoretic pragmatics and its contribution to the st... more This thesis sets out to investigate relevance-theoretic pragmatics and its contribution to the study of linguistic meaning from a mentalist outlook. Adopting an internalist perspective with respect to the semantics of language seems to create serious problems for traditional accounts, which customarily seek to separate some common core of meaning from contextualisation. Against this background, it is argued that the ways in which an individual's mentally represented linguistic meanings are pervasively affected by his system of beliefs can be realistically addressed from a cognitive point of view through the implementation of the proposals of Relevance Theory regarding the inferential processes involved in the interpretation of utterances. In this setting, linguistic meaning is always provided through inference against the context of utterance and the need for a stable semantic content that is identical across individuals largely evaporates. In pursuit of this argument, the exist...
Pragmatics and Society, 2020
In this paper, we present part of the research carried out at the Institute of Linguistics and La... more In this paper, we present part of the research carried out at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology of the University of Malta under the auspices of the EU-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project. The present study, which followed the common methodology of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. consortium, focuses on the verbal expression of discrimination in Malta. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, we seek to identify the extent to which comments posted online in reaction to news reports in local portals can be found to encompass discriminatory attitudes towards two target minorities: migrants and members of the LGBTIQ community. The obtained results indicate that, while both xenophobia and homophobia can be detected in some of the comments, the former is a much more prevalent than the latter. In an attempt to further probe into the reasons for the emergence of such discriminatory discourse online, we additionally administered an online questionnaire and conducted focus group i...
Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986, 1995) has been widely accepted as one of the most compreh... more Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986, 1995) has been widely accepted as one of the most comprehensive frameworks in pragmatics. However, as in the case of most theories, it has faced criticism on several occasions. On one of them, Chiappe & Kukla (1996) argued against the relevance-theoretic framework on the grounds that it provides no solution to the Fodorian view of the Frame Problem (Fodor 1987) and accused Sperber & Wilson of disregarding the essential issue of context selection in communication. Sperber & Wilson's response to Chiappe & Kukla (1996) was that Relevance does not provide a solution to this problem because it does not need to do so: in their view, Fodor was wrong to formulate the frame problem in the first place. In this paper, I revise this view and present an argumentation against the Fodorian thesis on the matter. I suggest that his idea on the irrationality of the human cognitive system when it comes to context selection was rightly formulated in the first...
Scientific research is by definition anchored towards the discovery of truth and by extension the... more Scientific research is by definition anchored towards the discovery of truth and by extension the improvement of our knowledge about the natural world. Even though interdisciplinarity is generally considered to be beneficial in this respect, it is often resisted on the grounds that it can be disruptive to progress within a field. This effectively renders scientific theorising insular, depriving small scientific communities of the chance to move beyond their methodological boundaries. In this paper, I attempt to provide a naturalistic explanation of why researchers are prone to find unfamiliar territory hostile, using arguments from relevance theory and the argumentative theory of reasoning.
Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2014
Early accounts of politeness have been widely criticised for adopting a universalist stance while... more Early accounts of politeness have been widely criticised for adopting a universalist stance while attempting to account for a phenomenon that is clearly culture-dependent. In reaction to this criticism, Leech (2007/2014) has argued for the necessity of politeness universals, on condition that they allow for the investigation of the relevant cultural variation. This paper sets out to provide additional support for Leech’s claim, by pursuing the argument that even though different societies have in principle different politeness values, all members of the same cultural and/or linguistic group typically accept very similar sets of such values. This argument is theoretically supported by resort to Searle’s notion of the Background, as a body of preintentional mental capacities that safeguards the alignment of our intentional states with that of our peers. Given then the systematicity with which we develop a culturally uniform understanding of politeness, the postulation of politeness un...
The dynamics of pragmatic enrichment during metaphor processing: activation vs. suppression. John... more The dynamics of pragmatic enrichment during metaphor processing: activation vs. suppression. John M. Tomlinson, Jr. ([email protected]) Zentrum fur allegemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) Berlin 10117 Germany Stavros Assimakopoulos ([email protected]) Institute of Linguistics, University of Malta Msida MSD 2080 Malta Abstract Metaphors and language processing In this paper, we test between suppression and activation accounts of metaphor processing by means of a novel metaphor interference paradigm that makes use of mouse-tracking. The goal is to understand how context influences the activation of salient and non-salient features of a concept during the on-line processing of a metaphor. In two mouse-tracking experiments, we examine the activation and availability of conceptual features that were either irrelevant or relevant for understanding a metaphor across various contexts. Our findings support the conclusion that context works primarily by rapidly suppressi...
Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2017
Single-moment studies have traditionally been carried out with the aim of investigating the pragm... more Single-moment studies have traditionally been carried out with the aim of investigating the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills of non-native speakers compared to those of native speakers of a particular language. The present study aims to investigate the parallel skills in expressing politeness of Maltese bilingual speakers rather than differences between native and non-native speakers in this respect. Since the variety of English spoken in Malta has often been characterised as distinct from British English, we used a small-scale spoken discourse completion task to examine the extent to which British English and Maltese affect the expression of politeness in Maltese English, in the context of requests and apologies. To this end, we compared the responses provided by three distinct groups of participants in terms of the use of particular politeness strategies, as well as the frequency and intonation of politeness markers. The results obtained remain largely inconclusive partly due to certain limitations arising from use of the discourse completion task methodology. They nevertheless do provide preliminary evidence, which is, to our mind, worth exploring further, of a close similarity between Maltese English and Maltese in terms of the intonation that accompanies markers of politeness.
Online Hate Speech in the European Union, 2017
Having outlined the common methodological perspective that C.O.N.T.A.C.T. partners adopted for bo... more Having outlined the common methodological perspective that C.O.N.T.A.C.T. partners adopted for both research strands of the project, it is now time to turn to a general discussion of the results obtained. To this end, this chapter will focus on the analysis of the comments corpora that were compiled at the first stage of our investigation; through the application of different techniques and against the background of various theoretical standpoints, the following sections touch on topics of central importance for the discourse-analytic discussion of hate speech, broadly construed. More specifically, Sect. 3.1 discusses categorisation in the context of Othering and its use as a means of defending one's identity against the perceived threat posed by minority groups in the Italian setting, with Sect. 3.2 building up on the topic of categorisation by zooming in on comments related to the LGBTIQ community in Lithuania and discussing stereotyping as another strategy for the expression of hate and discrimination. Moving on to the issue of xenophobia, Sect. 3.3 explores the discursive dynamics of Polish online "patriotism" and its interface with fear-mongering and incitement to hatred, while, remaining on the topic, Sect. 3.4 highlights the use of conceptual metaphors in comments related to migrants in Cyprus. Finally, turning to the discussion of indirectness in discriminatory discourse, Sect. 3.5 focuses on implicitness as a commonly used way of signalling an unfavourable stance towards minorities in Malta, and Sect. 3.6 examines the intricate ways in which constructed and fictive dialogue are used to legitimise xenophobic and homophobic discourse in the Danish context.
Online Hate Speech in the European Union, 2017
As already hinted at in the previous chapter, the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project covered two main strands... more As already hinted at in the previous chapter, the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project covered two main strands of research: the expression of hate speech and its perception. To these ends, a multi-method approach was adopted, encompassing different types of data. In this chapter, we will outline the shared procedures of data collection and analysis in relation to both the production data, i.e. online comments to news reports, and the perceptual data, i.e. interviews.
Pragmatics and Society, 2020
Even though there seem to be no objectively defined criteria about what constitutes hate speech, ... more Even though there seem to be no objectively defined criteria about what constitutes hate speech, a lot of legislation and policy making currently aims at combating it. This paper sets out to define hate speech under its standard legal understanding of ‘incitement to discriminatory hatred’, by adopting a speech-act theoretic perspective. My main proposal is that the Austinian distinction between illocution and perlocution can be pivotal in this process, since hate speech may be an illocutionary act that is typically tied to the recognition of a speaker’s intention to incite discriminatory hatred, but one which can only be defined if one takes into account its speaker’s intended perlocutionary effects; that is, the intention of the speaker to trigger a particular kind of response from some audience. Against this backdrop, I turn to show how a reworked Searlean notion of felicity conditions can be usefully applied in the delineation of hate speech under this legal conception.
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Papers by Stavros Assimakopoulos
To this end, the first aim is the creation of a corpus of anti-racist (multimodal) texts including, on the one hand, media texts such as advertising campaigns, news articles, TV shows, cartoons, and, on the other, institutional texts such as educational material, parliamentary proceedings, and other political and legal texts, which circulate in European countries. This corpus will be annotated and analyzed in order to detect texts indirectly perpetuating social and/or sociolinguistic inequalities: what we tentatively call ‘racist’ anti-racist texts. More specifically, drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis concerns the various linguistic and other semiotic strategies through which racist views infiltrate discourse intended as anti-racist. Through the creation of a critical toolkit (TRACE) based on the findings of the analysis, the main intention is to enhance individuals’ critical awareness so as to be able to detect racism in anti-racist discourse. The ultimate goal of the program is to inform and sensitize the public, particularly educational and institutional bodies, on this kind of latent racism via the use of printed and audio-visual material.