Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2001

This study is a semantic analysis of metonymic and metaphoric expressions involving body-part terms for the face in Chinese. These expressions are discussed regarding four perceived roles of face, namely, as highlight of appearance and look, as indicator of emotion and character, as focus of interaction and relationship, and as locus of dignity and prestige. It is argued that the figurative extensions are based on some biological facts about our face: it is the most distinctive part on the interactive side of our body capable of revealing our inner states. Referring to English the study shows that the terms for the face in both languages have developed figurative meanings along similar routes with similar stops. It also shows that the concepts of “face and facework”, admittedly ubiquitous in all cultures, are manifested more richly in Chinese than in English — a reflection of cultural differences in values attached to those concepts. Finally, a hypothetical “Triangle Model” is proposed to account for the relationship between language, culture, body, and cognition.

A dialogue game is presented that enables us to generate coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. Central to this approach is the fact that the cognitive states of players change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and that these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. The rules of the game are roughly based on the Gricean maxims of co-operation — i.e., agents are forbidden to put forward information they do not believe and are forbidden to ask anything they already believe; the Gricean maxim of relevance is determined by a so-called imbalance in the players’ belief and desire states. As in realistic conversational situations, it is assumed that the information needed to answer a question can be present in a distributed manner. Consequently, the structure of the dialogues may become rather complex, and may result in the generation of counter-questions and sub-dialogues. It will be shown that the structure and the coherence of conversational units do not necessarily have to be the product of a complex planning process or a speech act grammar, but can be based on elementary generation rules that take only into account the local context. As a result, the conversational game does not suffer from the same computational complexity as existing planning models for speech act generation. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with dialogue properties found in Conversation Analysis.

In this paper my aim is to approach the referential–attributive distinction in the interpretation of definite descriptions, originally discussed by Donnellan (1966), from a cognitive perspective grounded in Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95). In particular, I argue that definite descriptions encode a procedural semantics, in the sense of Blakemore (1987), which is neutral as between referential and attributive readings (among others). On this account, the distinction between referential and attributive readings arises as a result of the differing links that exist between different types of mental representation and the world, rather than as a result of the differing links between language and mental representations.

Of general interest, this study confirms the syntactic manifestation of the interpersonal dynamics of the participants in discourseand of their high-level cognitive processes therein. More specifically, this study formalizes categories of the Spanish indicativeand subjunctive in a cognitive map based on the deictic organization of the Spanish mood system. This cognitive map, based ona pragmasyntactic approach to mood use, allows us to view mood in Spanish as a mechanism that establishes metaphoricaldistance from the individual’s here and now. This study treats the indicative and subjunctive moods of Spanish withspecial attention to the so-called ‘factive’ clauses [those clauses subordinated to matrices of subjective commentsuch as me alegro que (I am glad that), es bueno que (It is good that), no me gusta que (I don’tlike it that), etc. and mental act matrices such as darse cuenta de que (to realize that), tomar en consideraciónque (to take into account that), etc.]. We propose an approach to analyzing mood use that is based on the information valueof an utterance in discourse. In considering information value we take into account (a) Lambrecht’s (1994) work featuringpresuppositions as inherent parts of certain syntactical structures; (b) Mejías-Bikandi’s (1994) claim that thesubjective comment structure in Spanish (subjective comment + que + clause marked with subjunctive) inherentlycontains a pragmatic presupposition; (c) Mejías-Bikandi’s reaffirmation that assertion is the role of the indicativeand non-assertion is the role of the subjunctive in Spanish; (d) Lunn’s (1988, 1989a & b) suggestion that theindicative is used to assert propositions with high information value while the subjunctive’s role is to not assertpropositions with low information value; and (e) Lambrecht’s (1994) ideas on what constitutes information. We assume thatnon-assertion, including pragmatic presupposition, and asserted propositions work together to create the relative informationvalue of utterances. We show how the information value of utterances can be organized by means of deixis to create a cognitivemap. The graphic design for the three dimensional version, which incorporates the notion of the time line with that ofmetaphorical distance from any individual’s deictic center, was inspired by Langacker’s (1991) Cognitive Gram-mar.