Locutions in medical discourse in Southwestern Nigeria

Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and …, 2010

Until fairly recently, linguistics has been classified as a 'science' by definition, averral, and ideology rather than because of the uniformity of its practices across its many schools of thought. It is seldom the case in any discipline that a particular phenomenon begins to question that discipline's raison d'etre, withdraw the option and luxury of its often directionless and eclectic practices and proceed to force unwelcome and sweeping changes upon the discipline by beginning to dictate its method. This paper re-states its author's earlier proofs as claims that collocation as instrumentation for meaning is a scientific fact. The burden of this proof has acquired renewed urgency of an interdisciplinary nature that makes this paper both timely and necessary. The claim for collocation as science is reinforced by a number of new discoveries: the fact that all devices are brought about by relexicalisation as a marked form rather than the purported markedness that is mentalist and hence, merely averred.

2008

realism (1980) is an example of the latter. While the position we will be arguing for is pragmatist, it shares little with Rorty's position except for the name. Instead, it should be viewed as falling in the broadly Peircean tradition. I Formal pragmatics plays an important, though secondary, role in modern analytical philosophy of language: its aim is to explain how context can affect the meaning of certain special kinds of utterances. During recent years, the adequacy of formal tools has come under attack, often leading to one or another form of relativism or antirealism. 1 Our aim will be to extend the critique to formal pragmatics while showing that sceptical conclusions can be avoided by developing a different approach to the issues. In particular, we will show that formal pragmatics cannot provide a complete account of how context affects the meaning of utterances, both on its own terms and when faced with evidence of important aspects of natural languages. The focal issue...

Linguistics, 2017

Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987; Clausner and Croft 1997) while in the experimental psycholinguistic tradition their role has been to challenge the basis of conceptual metaphor in " priming " figurative language (Glucksberg et al. 1993; McGlone 2007). It is, moreover, broadly assumed that criteria defining grammatical properties of idioms are limited to their morphological and syntactic behavior (Nunberg et al. 1994). While the pragmatic properties of idioms have been described informally (Glucksberg 2001), there are few studies which systematically contrast the behavior of nouns in literal vs. idiomatic expressions in discourse. Using a battery of criteria which has been developed to study discourse properties of subjects in spoken Arabic (Owens et al. 2013), we show that keyword nouns in Nigerian Arabic are significantly different according to whether they are idiomatic or literal. The basis of the conclusion is the statistical analysis of 1403 tokens derived from a large corpus of natural Nigerian Arabic texts. Nouns in idiomatic expressions are opaque to discourse in a way those in literal ones are not. To explain the statistical results we argue that idioms partake in a 'semantic mapping' which incorporates the noun and its collocate in the idiom into a word-like unit, rendering it largely invisible to subsequent discourse. Since Nigerian Arabic idiomatic nouns, as is shown, display no clause-internal syntactic constraints, exhibit no cross-clausal syntactic dependencies, and show no significant interactions with possessive pronouns which ostensibly appear to mark the discourse argument of the keyword they are suffixed to, it is concluded that the mapping is of semantic nature. Other than exemplifying basic facts obtained via elicitation, the entire argument hinges on an examination of nouns in actual spoken discourse. The article establishes that large corpora coupled with multivariate statistical treatment contribute directly to understanding semantic factors difficult to evaluate via direct elicitation or examination of individual examples, in this case the sensitivity of cross-clausal referentiality to idiomatic contextualization. 1 The problem 1 In Nigerian Arabic there is a class of nouns in the configuration, [Pssd N-Pssr] with Pssr = N or possessor pronoun, which display contrasting referential properties clause internally as opposed to inter-clausal behavior. Clause internally any reference to a Pssd N in the unit [Pssd N-Pssr] must be to the possessed head N. The possessor may occur in situ, or be extraposed to another clausal function, usually a topic, leaving behind a pronoun possessor trace. In (1) below, naas (> naaz via assimilation) is extraposed to Topic function, and its possessor position is marked by the possessor pronoun trace –hǝm (> tǝm via assimilation) on iid (> iit * 1 Abbreviations and phonetic symbols are standard ones, except DEF = 'definite', ID = 'ideophone', and /ď/ = voiced emphatic implosive stop. In the transcription no attempt is made to separate out epenthetic vowels. They are parsed with the following morpheme. Examples from texts are identified by a key which can be used to find the audio and transcript at the online data base resource listed in the bibliography.

The aim of this treatise is to set the foundation for a large-scale Ph.D study focused on inter-cultural and ethnopragmatic analysis of (apologetic) speech acts, the notion of context from an interdisciplinary perspective, and how these fit into the Bakhtin-Vygotskian theory of dialogic verbal communication. The main focus shall, therefore, be placed on the theoretical analysis of the above mentioned aspects in general, and cultural and contextual underpinnings of language formulas - speech acts, in particular. Given that the study itself will involve a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the aforementioned particular speech acts from three distinct cultures/languages - Serbian, Austrian German and Australian English, the rationale underlying their choice shall also constitute an important part of this treatise. In addition, due to the immense importance they have for the study itself, as sources of the empirical substance, the treatise will also include an account of and the rationale behind the linguistic tools to be used. More specifically, the enhanced version of the conventional DCT [Discourse Completion Test] method and the NSM [Natural Semantic Metalanguage] & cultural scripts framework. It is the author’s belief that an amalgam of the theoretical and the empirical, such as the one fostered by the study in question, can provide us with extremely valuable insights into the innards of the social and the cultural, and the impact they have on our natural language use and inn(out)er-workings of the mind.

Language and Dialogue, 2013

2019

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context depen

Non-Verbal Predication in Ancient Egyptian, 2017

The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context-or use-dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi-dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context-dependent aspects of content into representations of context-invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy. The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of the semiotics of language. The fact that two separate disciplines have developed for this purpose reflects the complexity of human language as a semiotic system, as well as the debate as to how it should be analyzed. This complexity is of at least four types. First, we use language not only to represent information (or thought) to ourselves and convey it to others, but also to act on and interact with others in ways that do not directly have to do with the transmission of information, such as greetings, exclamations or orders 1,2. Second, language is simultaneously highly systematic and flexible. On the one hand, interlocutors are under strong pressure to be consistent in their use of language to transmit messages; otherwise, communication would be more difficult and less reliable than it is. On the other, they continually innovate in using existing linguistic forms to convey new, and sometimes even radically different, messages via metaphor 3 , irony 4 , and other devices 5. Third, even if we assume a certain stability in the relation between linguistic form and what is communicated, the immediate context of use is Related Articles Article ID Article title COGSCI-086 Lexical Semantics COGSCI-106 Semantics, Acquisition of COGSCI-201 Discourse Processing

S. L. Tsohatzidis (ed.): Interpreting Austin: Critical Essays. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 34-59. , 2017

Austin (1962) introduced not only the notion of an illocutionary act, but also that of a locutionary act, which consists in a rhetic, a phatic, and a phonetic act.This paper will outline a novel semantics of verbs of saying and of quotation based on Austin’s distinction among levels of linguistic acts. It will propose a particular way of understanding the notion of a rhetic act and argue that it is extremely well-reflected in the semantics of natural language. The paper will furthermore outline a novel, unified and compositional semantics of quotation which is guided by two ideas. First, quotations convey properties related to lower-level (phonetic or phatic) linguistic acts; second, such meanings of quotations are strictly based on syntactic structure, namely a lower-level (phonetic, phonological or morpho-syntactic) structure as part of the syntactic structure that is input to semantic interpretation. Such lower-level linguistic structures will contribute properties of utterances to the semantic composition of the sentence, in one way or another.

IGI Global eBooks, 2010

Until fairly recently, linguistics has been classified as a 'science' by definition, averral, and ideology rather than because of the uniformity of its practices across its many schools of thought. It is seldom the case in any discipline that a particular phenomenon begins to question that discipline's raison d'etre, withdraw the option and luxury of its often directionless and eclectic practices and proceed to force unwelcome and sweeping changes upon the discipline by beginning to dictate its method. This paper restates its author's earlier proofs as claims that collocation as instrumentation for meaning is a scientific fact. The burden of this proof has acquired renewed urgency of an interdisciplinary nature that makes this paper both timely and necessary. The claim for collocation as science is reinforced by a number of new discoveries: the fact that all devices are brought about by relexicalisation as a marked form rather than the purported markedness that is mentalist and hence, merely averred.