Стаття присвячена питанню, як native speaker реалізує свою владу над non-native speaker. Дослідження виконано в рамках теорії лінгвістичного імперіалізму. Для розкриття цих відносин вводиться концепт права на корегування. Для описання фігур native speaker та non-native speaker звертаємося до дослідників лінгвістичного імперіалізму, зокрема Р. Філліпсона, Ю. Цуди тощо. Вказується, що стандартним поглядом на панування native speaker є соціально-економічний, де native speaker постає як фігура, довкола якої концентруються можливості економічної взаємодії та економічний профіт. Натомість, право на (...) корегування демонструє владу native speaker на комунікативному рівні. Суть права на корегування наступна: native speaker як той, хто первісно занурений у мову і краще розуміє її, має право корегувати/виправляти мову non-native speaker. Для розкриття цього концепту звертаємося до концепту соціолектів Р. Барта та стратегій виключення, описаних Ж. Рансьєром. Основною для права на корегування виступає ідея, що мову найкраще може знати той, хто укорінений у мовне і культурне середовище, звідки походить мова – ця ідея є фігурою системності у розумінні Р. Барта. Право на корегування виконує декілька функцій. По-перше, це практика дискредитації мовлення non-native speaker, маркування його як шуму. По-друге, це практика інтерпеляції та формування non-native speaker як об’єкту мовлення, а native speaker – на Суб’єкта. По-третє, це можливість привласнення мовлення non-native speaker, а отже, позбавлення цього мовлення властивості імперативності, влади. Метою лінгвістичного імперіалізму є створення єдиної (глобальної) логіки виключення non-native speakers з (глобального) комунікативного простору. В цій логіці мова виступає як код, подібний до того коду, що описував Ж. Дельоз. (shrink)

This paper examines group speech acts to argue against the view, here called speaker intentionalism, that one is a speaker behind a speech act in virtue of having the relevant communicative illocutionary intention. An alternative view is presented called speaker responsibilism according to which one is a speaker in virtue of having certain responsibilities. Complexities are considered which arise from the kinds of responsibilities the speaker has and the specific ways in which they are acquired.

Context-sensitivity raises a metasemantic question: what determines the value of a context-sensitive expression in context? Taking gradable adjectives as a case study, this paper argues against various forms of intentionalist metasemantics, i.e. that speaker intentions determine values for context-sensitive expressions in context, including the coordination account recently defended by King :219–237, 2014a; in: Burgess, Sherman Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 97–118, 2014b). The paper argues that all intentionalist accounts face the (...) class='Hi'>speaker authority problem, that speaker intentions are just the wrong sorts of things to determine the standards for gradable adjectives in context. The problem comes to light when we look at cases in which speakers have idiosyncratic, false beliefs that cause their proper communicative intentions to come apart from the non-intentional features of context like the question under discussion, facts about the world, practical goals, and prior linguistic discourse. (shrink)

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech, not without speech. We ask whether the cross-linguistic similarity in silent gesture is driven by the visuospatial structure of the event. We compared 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English or Turkish to 80 sighted adult speakers as they described three-dimensional (...) motion scenes. We found an effect of language on co-speech gesture, not on silent gesture—blind speakers of both languages organized their silent gestures as sighted speakers do. Humans may have a natural semantic organization that they impose on events when conveying them in gesture without language—an organization that relies on neither visuospatial cues nor language structure. (shrink)

. Speaker recognition has been an active research area for many years. Methods to represent and quantify information embedded in speech signal are termed as features of the signal. The features are obtained, modeled and stored for further reference when the system is to be tested. Decision whether to accept or reject speakers are taken based on parameters of the data modeling techniques. Real world offers various degradations to the signal that hamper the signal quality. The degradations may be (...) due to ambient background noise, reverberation or multispeaker scenario. This paper presents a survey of various feature extraction, data modeling methods, metrics that are used to take the decisions and methods that can be used to preprocess the degraded data that have been used to perform the task of speaker recognition. (shrink)

This note offers two related arguments. First, I supplement the existing scholarly consensus that the speaker of Sophocles’ Tereus fr. 588 Radt is Procne by suggesting that her addressee is a shepherd, whose existence was recently discovered and confirmed by a new papyrus for fr. 583. Second, I attempt to contextualize P.J. Finglass's placement of fr. 583 in the first episode of the play and to respond to the ‘internment’ problem posited by David Fitzpatrick by suggesting that the play (...) takes place on an anniversary or some sort of commemoration of Philomela's supposed death. This proposal justifies the doleful tenor of the fragment and its generalizing subject-matter, the lonely plight of married women torn from their natal families, and resolves the question of Procne's state of knowledge about her sister's fate; and it allows for the internment of Philomela to figure into the play's plot by making Philomela's ‘death’ an established event before the play begins, as Gregory Dobrov suggests. (shrink)

Speakers’ intuitive judgements about meaning provide important data for many debates in philosophy of language and pragmatics, including contextualism vs. relativism in semantics; ‘faultless’ disagreement; the limits of truth-conditional semantics; vagueness; and the status of figurative utterances. Is the use of speakers intuitive judgments about meaning justified? Michael Devitt has argued that their use in philosophy of language is problematic because they are fallible empirical judgements about language that reflect speakers’ folk theories about meaning rather than meaning itself. In this (...) paper I respond to Devitt’s criticism and propose a positive account explaining the nature and evidential status of such judgements. I argue that speakers’ intuitive judgements about meanings of utterances provide valuable evidence for various debates in philosophy of language because they are importantly connected to the linguistic performance of speakers. Arguably, the connection is reliable due to a constant monitoring of the interpretations ascribed to linguistic utterances. I call this the voice of performance view. My account restores prominence to speakers’ intuitive judgements about meaning while avoiding Devitt’s worries. (shrink)

The various conclusions reached in this paper can be drawn together and briefly summarised in the following thesis: It is necessary to use variables ranging over times explicitly in the object language in the logical analysis of temporal reference in English. A discussion of Arthur Prior ideas, which are in direct opposition to those encompassed here, focuses on the principle that the point of view of the speaker dominates all subordinate clauses, which I maintain and Prior rejects. This leads (...) me to oppose the Priorean approach of considering tenses along the lines of propositional modal operators and in particular to criticise the notion of a proposition with variable truth value. My discussion concerns not only tenses, but also dates, and seeks to provide an account of tenses and dates together in a unified framework. (shrink)

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color (...) adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative. (shrink)

In this work, the significance of combining the evidence from multitaper mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear prediction residual, and linear prediction residual phase features for multilingual speaker identification with the constraint of limited data condition is demonstrated. The LPR is derived from linear prediction analysis, and LPRP is obtained by dividing the LPR using its Hilbert envelope. The sine-weighted cepstrum estimators with six tapers are considered for multitaper MFCC feature extraction. The Gaussian mixture model–universal background model is used for modeling (...) each speaker for different evidence. The evidence is then combined at scoring level to improve the performance. The monolingual, crosslingual, and multilingual speaker identification studies were conducted using 30 randomly selected speakers from the IITG multivariability speaker recognition database. The experimental results show that the combined evidence improves the performance by nearly 8–10% compared with individual evidence. (shrink)

Speakers often overspecify by encoding more information than is necessary when referring to an object (e.g., “the blue mug” for the only mug in a group of objects). We investigated the role of a partner's linguistic behavior (whether or not they overspecify) on a speaker's own tendency to overspecify. We used a director–matcher task in which speakers interacted with a partner who either consistently overspecified or minimally specified in the color/size dimension (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), as well as (...) with a partner who switched behaviors midway through interaction (Experiments 4 and 5). We found that speakers aligned with their partner's linguistic behavior to produce overspecific or minimally specific descriptions, and we saw little evidence that the alignment was enhanced by lexical or semantic repetition across prime and target trials. Time‐course analyses showed that alignment increased over the course of the interaction, and speakers appeared to track a change in the partner's linguistic behavior, altering their reference strategy to continue matching that of their partner's. These results demonstrate the persistent influence of a partner's behavior on speakers across the duration of an interaction. (shrink)

In Kourken Michaelian questions the basic tenets of our article (Sperber et al. 2010). Here I defend against Michaelian's criticisms the view that epistemic vigilance plays a major role in explaining the evolutionary stability of communication and that the honesty of speakers and the reliability of their testimony are, to a large extent, an effect of hearers' vigilance.

Our main aim in this paper is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. After considering some of the difficulties raised by Grice’s three-clause definition of speaker’s meaning, we argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both ‘showing that’ and ‘telling that’, and (...) with both determinate and indeterminate import. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker always focuses on the hearer in her account of testimonial injustice. It is the hearer who, in virtue of a prejudice, commits testimonial injustice against the speaker by giving her less credibility than she deserves. My purpose in this paper is to analyse a parallel type of testimonial injustice that runs in the opposite di- rection, from the speaker to the hearer. I characterise the inner structure of this type of injustice and sketch some of the (...) forms it can take. Then I explore some consequences of this kind of testimonial injustice by the speaker. (shrink)

The performance of most of the state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems deteriorates under degraded conditions, owing to mismatch between the training and testing sessions. This study focuses on the front end of the speaker verification system to reduce the mismatch between training and testing. An adaptive voice activity detection algorithm using zero-frequency filter assisted peaking resonator was integrated into the front end of the SV system. The performance of this proposed SV system was studied under degraded conditions with 50 (...) selected speakers from the NIST 2003 database. The degraded condition was simulated by adding different types of noises to the original speech utterances. The different types of noises were chosen from the NOISEX-92 database to simulate degraded conditions at signal-to-noise ratio levels from 0 to 20 dB. In this study, widely used 39-dimension Mel frequency cepstral coefficient features were used, and Gaussian mixture model–universal background model was used for speaker modeling. The proposed system’s performance was studied against the energy-based VAD used as the front end of the SV system. The proposed SV system showed some encouraging results when EMD-based VAD was used at its front end. (shrink)

Advocates of conceptual engineering as a method of philosophy face a dilemma: either they are ignorant of how conceptual engineering can be implemented, or else it is trivial to implement but of very little value, representing no new or especially fruitful method of philosophizing. Two key distinctions frame this dilemma and explain its two horns. First, the distinction between speaker’s meaning and reference and semantic meaning and reference reveals a severe implementation problem for one construal of conceptual engineering. Second, (...) the distinction between stipulating meanings and conceptually analyzing allows us to see why, on another construal of what conceptual engineering involves, the practice is neither a new nor neglected philosophical methodology. The article also argues that semantic externalism is not the root of the implementation problem for conceptual engineering, and that the usual rationale for adopting the practice, one that ties its value to the amelioration of “conceptual defects”, is unsound. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, exemplified by gestures, are similar to utterances which generate the communicator's what is said and/or conversational implicatures, together with their different subtypes and manifestations. Both of these objectives necessitate a critical (...) overview of Grice's work on the focal aspects of meaning and communication, also on the strength of neo-Gricean research. (shrink)

According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or (...) what I call “sneaky reference.” I close by reflecting on the ramifications of these arguments for the theory of meaning more broadly. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, (...) in other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly (...) should not, play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results. (shrink)

The strongest objection to (15) is that speaker's meaning is defined in terms of commitment, a notion which is itself something of a challenge and for which no definition has been given. This would be a strong reason to prefer a definition in terms of some more tractable concept, all things being equal; but it does not lessen the probability that commitment or some similar notion is indispensable to the definition of speaker's meaning.The philosophical writings discussed in this (...) paper all proceed something like this: Particular cases are discussed and a description is given of the mechanisms by which communication takes place. An attempt is made to say something that applies to all instances of speaker's meaning. Words like ‘analysis’, ‘account’ ‘explanation’, ‘explication’, and ‘theory’ are used here, the suggestion being that the objective is to provide for all cases at once what has already been provided for particular cases-an explanation of how meaning works. What is produced, however, looks like adefinition of speaker's meaning, a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. This definition is then evaluated largely in terms of what counterexamples it does or does not allow.It seems that there is some tendency to conflate two quite distinct objectives: (i) a theory of speaker's meaning-a general description of how it is that speakers are able to communicate; and (ii) a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions for speaker's meaning. Objective (i) might plausibly be regarded as the goal of the study of communication. Objective (ii) is the definition of a certain intuitive, pretheoretical concept of meaning, which might or might not prove to be an important concept with respect to objective (i). The Gricean mechanism and the notion of conventional meaning, on the other hand, are indispensable to (i)-few instances of speaker's meaning could be adequately described without recourse to at least one of these notions. Thus nothing in this paper should be construed as trying to downgrade the importance of the Gricean mechanism for the theory of communication. If objective (ii) and the Gricean mechanism are not as closely associated as has been claimed, this is, if anything, a reason to doubt the importance of (ii) for the theory of communication. (shrink)

This article intends to reveal the unity between intention and other Gricean notions of signification, cancellability, and context. We argue that the total signification of an utterance is ultimately determined by speaker’s intention. We start with Grice’s conception of meaningNN and then proceed to argue that what is actually meant is hard to cancel without rendering the whole utterance self-contradictory. It is noted that cancelling p be differentiated from correcting p. It is also noted that contextual factors do not (...) bear upon implicatures though a hearer or an analyst relies heavily on them for inference or interpretation. We suggest that any Gricean account of meaning be ontologically clear that it is the speaker’s intention that we are really invoking and consequently capture the metaphysics of meaning in order to remove the fallacy that the meaning of an utterance is its interpretation. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to give an account of the moral criticizability of motive by appeal to some insights in semantic theory. I maintain that the actions for which we hold persons responsible cannot strictly be understood as expressive of semantic meaning. However, I argue that morally responsible actions can be understood on analogy with a basic Gricean distinction between speaker's and sentence meaning. The analogy suggests that morally responsible actions require a competent moral agent to operate from (...) within the confines of an interpretive moral framework of action assessment, a framework analogous to the framework required for sentence meaning. (shrink)

Drawing on a corpus of eight task-based interactions involving a map task ), this article seeks to focus on how speakers orient to directional terms in an interactional context, and in so doing, to add to features that can be deemed to characterize this speech exchange system. Analysis of the data using conversation analysis showed that features of the talk were confirmation and clarification checks, which provided an opportunity to check understanding and the accuracy of the instruction leading to a (...) correction, acknowledgement or further information; modulated repair and mitigated criticism, resulting in the maintenance of an affiliative stance towards the other speaker; and avoidance of problems that viewpoints or directional terms might cause. Problems with the directional terms in this corpus confirm prior research that the confusion between east and west, and left and right are the terms that cause problems for speakers. (shrink)

Philosophers of language inspired by Grice have long sought to show how facts about reference boil down to facts about speakers’ communicative intentions. I focus on a recent attempt by Stephen Neale (2016), who argues that referring with an expression requires having a special kind of communicative intention—one that involves representing an occurrence of the expression as standing in some particular relation to its referent. Neale raises a problem for this account: because some referring expressions are unpronounced, most language users (...) don’t realize they exist, and so seemingly don’t have intentions about them. Neale suggests that we might solve this problem by supposing that speakers have nonconscious or “tacit” intentions. I argue that this solution can’t work by arguing that our representations of unpronounced bits of language all occur within a modular component of the mind, and so we can’t have intentions about them. From this line of thought, I draw several conclusions. (i) The semantic value of a referring expression is not its referent, but rather a piece of partial and defeasible evidence about what a speaker refers to when using it literally. (ii) There is no interesting sense in which speakers refer with expressions; referring expressions are used to give evidence about the sort of singular proposition one intends to communicate. (iii) The semantics–pragmatics interface is coincident with the interface between the language module and central cognition. (shrink)

am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest in (...) the substantive issues raised by Donnellan’s paper, and by related literature, my own conclusions will be methodological, not substantive. I can put the matter this way: Donnellan’s paper claims to give decisive objections both to Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (taken as a theory about English) and to Strawson’s. My concem is not primarily with the question; is Donnellan right, or is Russell (or Strawson)? Rather, it is with the question: do the considerations in Donneilarfs paper refute Russell’s theory (or Strawson’s)? For definiteness, I will concentrate on Donnellan versus Russell, leaving Strawson aside. And about this issue I will draw a definite conclusion, one which I think will illuminate a few methodological maxims about language. Namely, I will conclude that the considerations in Donnellan’s paper, by themselves, do not refute Russell’s theory. Any conclusions about Russell’s views per se, or Donnellan’s, must be tentative, IfI were to be asked for a tentative stab about Russell, I would say that although his theory does a far better job of handling ordinary discourse than many have thought, and although many popular arguments against it are inconclusive, probably it ultimately fails. The considerations I have in mind have to do with the existence of “improper” definite descriptions, such as “the table," where uniquely specifying conditions are not contained in the description itself.. (shrink)

I compare the tasks that Noam Chomsky and W. V. Quine assign the grammarian and point out that in many cases where Chomsky sees a question of fact Quine sees only a question of convenience. I argue that these differences are attributable, at least in part, to a difference in view concerning the data. Chomsky relies mostly on a speaker's reports of his linguistic intuitions. Quine finds this source methodologically moot. I develop a series of arguments that draw on (...) Quine's theory of radical translation to defend Quine's doubts. (shrink)

It is widely though not universally accepted what speakers refer to in using demonstratives or “discretionary” (as opposed to “automatic”) indexicals depends on their intentions. Even so, people tend not to appreciate the consequences of this claim for the view that demonstratives and most indexicals refer as a function of context: these expressions suffer from a “character deficiency.” No wonder I am asked from time to time why I resist the temptation to include speaker intentions as a parameter of (...) context. So I thought it would be a good idea to compile some of the scattered statements of my main reasons for this evidently radical view. (shrink)

We may begin with Grice’s view. In an extended series of papers, a number of which are unpublished, Grice sought to explicate what it is for a given utterance to mean something—in the way in which linguistic utterances mean something; and what it is for a given speaker to mean something by his utterance—again, in the way in which speakers mean something in speaking their language. "Utterance" we may understand as neutrally as possible, as a bearer of meaning—in Grice’s (...) sense, "non-natural meaning". One of the distinguishing marks of meaningNN is given as follows: that, of an utterance x, "x means that p and x meant that p do not entail p.". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Learner Student Speaker Coda Notes References.

In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et (...) al hypothesize that the differences in intuitions about reference stem from general psychological differences between Eastern and Western subjects. Machery et al conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis ` a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains. To quote Machery et al, “our data indicate that philosophers must radically revise their methodology” because “the intuitions philosophers pronounce from their armchairs are likely to be a product of their own culture and their academic training” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp.B9). “The evidence suggests that it is wrong for philosophers to assume a priori the universality of their own semantic intuitions” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp. B8). In the following study, I present data incompatible with Machery et al’s results. Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora 1 in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value. This data raises questions about the quality of Machery et al’s study and the conclusions they draw from it. (shrink)

The relevance of smart speakers is steadily increasing, allowing users perform several daily tasks. From a commercial perspective, smart speakers also provide recommendations of products and services that may influence the consumer decision-making process. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the adoption of smart speakers, but there is a lack of proper guidelines that help design the way these devices should offer their consumption recommendations. Based on a stimulus-organism-response approach, we analyze how two features of smart speakers' recommendations influence (...) on the effectiveness of such recommendations through its impact on user engagement and attitude. Data was collected from a sample of undergrad students in Spain using an experiment design that focused on a restaurant recommendation, and analyzed using partial least squares. On the one hand, our results suggests that gender congruence generates user engagement with the smart speaker. On the other hand, message length is positively related to attitudes towards the restaurant, at a declining rate. In addition, while better attitudes lead to higher visiting intentions, the influence of engagement on visiting intentions is partially mediated via attitudes. Thus, our findings contribute to understand the antecedents of users' engagement with smart speakers, as well as its impact on the customers' willingness to follow smart speakers' recommendations, constituting a base to analyze the impact of artificial intelligence solutions aimed to smooth the transitions of a customer through the stages of purchase process. (shrink)

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the (...) class='Hi'>speaker’s and the hearer’s perspective. (shrink)

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the (...) class='Hi'>speaker’s and the hearer’s perspective. (shrink)

It is central to Davidson’s argument in ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’ that a speaker’s utterance can have a non-standard meaning, rather than that the speaker can mean something non-standardly when so uttering. Linguistic conventionalism typically holds that Mrs Malaprop, in uttering ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs’, might mean a nice arrangement of epithets but that her words do not. I suggest that Davidson’s view of language provides him with good grounds to claim that the nonstandard meanings can (...) be attributed to a speaker’s utterances and not merely the speakers themselves. However, I also suggest that in many cases of interpretation of non-standard utterances, communication is successful because an interpreter first grasps the speaker’s relevant intentions, rather than the meaning of the utterance itself. Indeed, in a single communicative exchange containing an innovative utterance successfully interpreted, it is not the meaning of the utterance that one is entitled to say is identified, but what a speaker means to communicate when he produces an utterance. (shrink)

Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of their claims (their “confidence-accuracy calibration”). The present study experimentally examines the interplay between confidence, accuracy and (...) a third factor, namely evidence, in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. Experiment 1 probes the hypothesis that overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate claim is justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be wrong is restored if the confidence expressed is based on strong evidence (good confidence-evidence calibration). Experiment 2 investigates the hypothesis that confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be right is damaged if the confidence expressed is based on weak evidence (bad confidence-evidence calibration). Our results support both hypotheses and thus suggest that “confidence-evidence calibration” plays a crucial role in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. (shrink)

To reduce ambiguity across a conversation, interlocutors reach temporary conventions or referential precedents on how to refer to an entity. Despite their central role in communication, the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of precedents remain unclear, specifically the role and mechanisms by which information related to the speaker is integrated. We contrast predictions of one-stage, original two-stage, and extended two-stage models for the processing of speaker information and provide evidence favoring the latter: we show that both stages are (...) sensitive to speaker-specific information. Using an experimental paradigm based on visual-world eye tracking in the context of a referential communication task, we look at the moment-by-moment interpretation of precedents and focus on the temporal profile of the influence of the speaker and linguistic information when facing ambiguity. We find two clearly identifiable moments where speaker-specific information has its effects on reference resolution. We conclude that these two stages reflect two distinct cognitive mechanisms, with different timings, and rely on different representational formats for encoding and accessing information about the speaker: a cue-driven memory retrieval process that mediates language processing and an inferential mechanism based on perspective-taking abilities. (shrink)

This book considers the semantic and syntactic nature of indexicals - linguistic expressions, as in I, you, this, that, yesterday, tomorrow , whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance.There is a long-standing controversy as to whether the semantic reference point is already present as syntactic material or whether it is introduced post-syntactically by semantic rules of interpretation. Alessandra Giorgi resolves this controversy through an empirically grounded exploration of temporal indexicality, arguing that the speaker's temporal location is specified in the (...) syntactic structure. She supports her analysis with theoretical and empirical arguments based on data from English, Italian, Chinese, and Romanian. Professor Giorgi addresses some difficult and longstanding issues in the analysis of temporal phenomena - including the Italian imperfect indicative, the properties of the so-called future-in-the-past, and the properties of Free Indirect Discourse - and shows that her framework can account elegantly for all of them. Carefully argued, succinct, and clearly written her book will appeal widely to semanticists in linguistics and philosophy from graduate level upwards and to linguists interested in the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)

Speaker recognition under mismatched conditions is a challenging task. Speech signal is nonlinear and nonstationary, and therefore, difficult to analyze under realistic conditions. Also, in real conditions, the nature of the noise present in speech data is not known a priori. In such cases, the performance of speaker identification or speaker verification degrades considerably under realistic conditions. Any SR system uses a voice activity detector as the front-end subsystem of the whole system. The performance of most VADs (...) deteriorates at the front end of the SR task or system under degraded conditions or in realistic conditions where noise plays a major role. Recently, speech data analysis and processing using Norden E. Huang’s empirical mode decomposition combined with Hilbert transform, commonly referred to as Hilbert–Huang transform, has become an emerging trend. EMD is an a posteriori, adaptive, data analysis tool used in time domain that is widely accepted by the research community. Recently, speech data analysis and speech data processing for speech recognition and SR tasks using EMD have been increasing. EMD-based VAD has become an important adaptive subsystem of the SR system that mostly mitigates the effect of mismatch between the training and the testing phase. Recently, we have developed a VAD algorithm using a zero-frequency filter-assisted peaking resonator and EMD. In this article, the efficacy of an EMD-based VAD algorithm is studied at the front end of a text-independent language-independent SI task for the speaker’s data collected in three languages at five different places, such as home, street, laboratory, college campus, and restaurant, under realistic conditions using EDIROL-R09 HR, a 24-bit wav/mp3 recorder. The performance of this proposed SI task is compared against the traditional energy-based VAD in terms of percentage identification rate. In both cases, widely accepted Mel frequency cepstral coefficients are computed by employing frame processing from the extracted voiced speech regions using the respective VAD techniques from the realistic speech utterances, and are used as a feature vector for speaker modeling using popular Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results showed that the proposed SI task with the VAD algorithm using ZFFPR and EMD at its front end performs better than the SI task with short-term energy-based VAD when used at its front end, and is somewhat encouraging. (shrink)

Communication in archaeological artifacts is usually understood in terms of signs or signals, fleshed out under many guises. The notions of signs or signals that archaeologists employ often draw from Saussurean or Peircean semiotic theories from philosophy and linguistics. In this article I consider the consequences of whether we understand archaeological signals in terms of the Saussurean or Peircean framework, and highlight the fact that archaeologists have not always been precise in their use of relevant philosophical machinery. I will argue (...) further that interpretation of archaeological artifacts should be supplemented by a notion of meaning that goes beyond signals and leads us to understand meaning in terms of a specific creator’s communicative intention—which may deviate from how some signal was ordinarily used. This is what I call speaker meaning, drawing from philosophy of language. I then present specific examples from Egypt circa 1300 BC and 3500 BC and from France circa 12,000 BC that I argue are best treated with the proposed notion of speaker meaning. In the course of this discussion I consider questions that arise for current accounts of signals and metaphor in archaeology. Finally, I conclude by considering how my proposal relates to our understanding of decoration and style, humor, the advent of spoken language, and the nature of art. (shrink)