Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2005

The paper investigates the acquisition of the semantics/pragmatics of two Modern Greek evidential markers taha (‘supposedly’) and dithen (‘as if’, ‘so-called’) and possible correlations with children’s mind-reading abilities. Between (a) an evidential–ironical interpretation and (b) a pretence interpretation, earliest uses of these particles (in spontaneous children’s speech) suggest that pretence-interpretations, rather than evidential ones, are the first to develop (Ifantidou, to appear). This production finding is mapped onto input occurrences of taha and dithen in (i) children’s readers, (ii) adults’ prose, and (iii) adults’ speech. High prevalence of pretence interpretations is observed in (i), with high prevalence of evidential interpretations in (ii) and (iii). These findings are cross-checked by linguistic tasks run with nursery (4–5 years old) and 6–12 year-old children. The results also point to an early acquisition of the pretence-interpretation and a later acquisition of the particles’ evidential uses. Finally, non-linguistic experiments are run with the nursery (4–5 year-old) children to assess their evidential cognitive abilities. Two questions arise: (1) If children lack the semantics/pragmatics of evidential taha and dithen, do they also lack the relevant mind-reading abilities? (2) If children exhibit an earlier working capacity of pretence-interpretations, is there an explanation for why this is so? In addressing these issues, I will explore the possibility that availability of evidential lexical items in language presupposes availability of relevant concepts, and suggest, in turn, a degree of developmental interdependence between cognition and language.

This paper presents a model of persuasion in terms of goals and beliefs. Among the various ways to influence people, that is, to raise or lower the likelihood for them to pursue some goal, ranging from threat to suggestion, persuasion is viewed as a case of communicative non-coercive goal hooking. A persuader leads a persuadee to pursue some goal out of a free choice, i.e., by convincing him/her that the proposed goal is useful for some other goal that the persuadee already has. It is argued that the Aristotelian persuasive strategies of logos, ethos and pathos (rational argumentation, the speaker’s credibility and reliability, and the appeal to emotion) are always present in every persuasive discourse, and that they are exploited to raise the value of the goal proposed and to strengthen the believability of the link between it and the persuadee’s previous goals. The paper proposes an analysis of discourse in terms of a hierarchy of goals as a tool to single out these strategies within the discourse structure. By applying this model to different kinds of persuasive messages (political discourse, advertising, dialogues in the health domain), it shows how, in the fragments presented, this kind of analysis allows to clarify the relationships between the persuader’s and the persuadee’s goals and to elucidate how much and how directly the persuader appeals to logos, ethos and pathos in his/her discourse.

This study is as an attempt to explicate the Persian cultural schema of shekasteh-nafsi ‘modesty’. The schema motivates the speakers to downplay their talents, skills, achievements, etc. while praising a similar trait in their interlocutors. The schema also encourages the speakers to reassign the compliment to the giver of the compliment, a family member, a friend, or another associate. This paper explicates the schema in an ethnographic fashion and also makes use of empirical data to further explore how the schema may be represented in Persian speakers’ replies to compliments. A Discourse Completion Test and its translated version in English were used to collect Persian and English data from two groups of Iranian and Australian participants. The Australian group mainly served as a reference group. The results revealed that speakers of Persian largely instantiated the cultural schema of shekasteh-nafsi in their responses to compliments. The data from the Australians did not reflect a similar schema but showed a certain degree of overlap with the Persian responses in downplaying the trait that was the target of the compliment. The study is hoped to increase intercultural understanding, a phenomenon that needs desperate attention and exploration, perhaps more than ever in the history of human interaction.

P.F. Strawson proposed in the early seventies a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of ‘what is said’ when a sentence is uttered. The proposal was somewhat tentative and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various questions to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review Strawson’s scheme, note his concerns, and add some of our own. We also defend its essence and recommend it as an insightful entry point re the interplay of intended meaning and context.

Recanati (2004), Literal Meaning argues against what he calls “literalism” and for what he calls “contextualism”. He considers a wide spectrum of positions and arguments from relevance theory to hidden variables theory. In the end, however, he seems to hold that semantic and pragmatic theorizing must answer to broadly introspective or folk psychological constraints — they don’t exist in “heaven”. After surveying Recanati’s wide-ranging and provocative discussion of these issues, we wonder why parity of reasoning does not condemn syntax and phonology, as customarily practiced.