In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.

<p>  </p> <p>This study addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by investigating the manifestation of impoliteness through the use of emojis within the online Vietnamese community on social media. The research is guided by three central questions: (1) How do Vietnamese Facebook users use emojis in their posts and comments? (2) How do Vietnamese Facebook users perceive impolite behaviors in cyberspace? and (3). What strategies do Vietnamese speakers employ to express impoliteness with emojis on social media? Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on a corpus of posts and comments on a Facebook showbiz confession page. Results show that facial emojis, particularly those forming homogeneous sequences, are preferred, with laughter-related emojis prominently featured. Additionally, emotive particles, together with expletives, frequently co-occur with emojis, compensating for absent extralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication. By administering checks using dictionaries, mutual information scores, collocation visualizations, and cosine similarity, a nuanced understanding of impoliteness in CMC was achieved. Religious influences, particularly from Buddhism, were found to play a significant role in shaping Vietnamese impoliteness perception, exemplified by terms such as <em>vô duyên</em> and <em>sân si</em>. A coding scheme informed by findings from the second research question on a sample of 100 first posts and comments in the main corpus was used. The study further substantiates the hypothesis that Vietnamese speakers predominantly employ implicational impoliteness strategies, particularly through multimodal mismatches facilitated by emojis. Conventionalized formulas featuring emojis were infrequent, suggesting a preference for more dynamic and context-specific impoliteness expressions. This research contributes to the refinement of impoliteness theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as providing a foundation for further studies in online discourse and natural language processing. </p>

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that addresses the relationship between language and its external environment – in particular the communicative context. Social evolution (or sociobiology) is the branch of the biological sciences that studies the social behaviour of organisms, particularly with respect to the ecological and evolutionary forces with which it must interact. These two disciplines thus share a natural epistemic link, one that is concerned with the relationship between behaviour and the environment. There has, however, historically been no dialogue between them. This thesis attempts to fill that void: it examines pragmatics from the perspective of social evolution theory. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the two fields and their key ideas, and also discusses why an evolutionary understanding of pragmatics is crucial to the study of language origins. In chapter 2 the vexed question of the biological function of language is discussed. Responses are given to the claims, common in the evolutionary linguistics literature, that the processes of exaptation, self‑organisation and cultural transmission provide alternatives to natural selection as a source of design in nature. The intuitive conclusion that the function of language is communication is provisionally supported, subject to a proper definition of communication. Chapter 3 reviews previous definitions and consequently argues for an account predicated on the designedness of signals and responses. This definition is then used to argue that an evolutionarily coherent model of language should recognise the pragmatic realities of ostension and inference and reject the code‑like idealisation that is often used in its place. Chapter 4 observes that this fits the argument that the biological function of language is communication and then addresses the key question faced by all evolved communication systems – that of evolutionary stability. The human capacity to record and remember the past behaviour of others is seen to be critical. Chapter 5 uses the definition of communication from chapter 3 to describe a very general model of evolved communication, and then uses the constraints of that model to argue that Relevance Theory, or at least some theory of pragmatics with a very similar logical structure, must be correct. Chapter 6 then applies the theoretical apparatus constructed in chapters 2 to 5 to a crucial and topical issue in evolutionary linguistics: the emergence of learnt, symbolic communication. It introduces the Embodied Communication Game, an experimental tool whose basic structure is significantly informed by both social evolutionary and, in particular, pragmatic theory. The novelty of the game is that participants must find a way to communicate not just the content that they wish to convey, but also the very fact that a given behaviour is communicative in nature, and this constraint is found to fundamentally influence the type of system that emerges. Chapter 7, which concludes the thesis, recounts and clarifies what it tells us about the origins and evolution of language, and suggests a number of possible avenues for future research.

The speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that receive the least attention in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, in terms of both linguistic and non-linguistic realization of disagreement strategies. The present study was aimed to investigate how Chinese EFL learners perform the speech act of disagreement in English by comparing SRQ and DCT data from four groups of speakers, including 60 native speakers of Chinese, 60 native speakers of English, 30 EFL-low proficiency speakers, and 30 EFL-high proficiency speakers. The speakers¡¦ language performance in variation with several contextual factors, such as formality of context, social distance, social status, speaker gender, interlocutor gender and topic, was also examined. The data on linguistic strategies showed that the Chinese speakers avoided disagreement more often while the English speakers frequently used direct disagreement characterized by various and original positive remarks as softening devices. It was also found that the perception data, from the SRQ and the opt-out reasons, suggests rich ¡¥sociopragmatic judgments and motivating factors that have explanatory power in describing products of pragmalinguistic decisions¡¦ (Bonikowska, 1988: 173). Therefore, as evidenced by the perception data and supported by sociological theories, the individualistic culture¡¦s emphasis on ¡¥I¡¦ consciousness might have promoted the English speakers¡¦ bald verbal expressions while the collectivistic culture¡¦s priority of ¡¥we¡¦ concept and face concern have explained the Chinese speakers¡¦ harmony orientation in disagreement. Moreover, cultural difference in distinction between in-group and out-group signified differences in language performance when the speakers were disagreeing with the interlocutor at the longest distance, that is, the stranger or the clerk. As for the interlanguage, the EFL-low speakers behaved closer to the Chinese native speakers in using such strategies as ¡¥avoidance¡¦ and ¡¥contradiction¡¦. The EFL-high speakers overperformed ¡¥challenge to the interlocutor¡¦ when disagreeing with the close friend in order to demonstrate their English proficiency. In addition, both the EFL groups performed non target-like linguistic features partly due to pragmatic transfer from Chinese. In the future, more interlanguage research could elicit the speakers¡¦ perception of the speech act under study, which would supply abundant evidence of cross-cultural differences in social values and other motivating factors that could help interpret the EFL learners¡¦ realization of speech acts.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-76).

Thesis--Gothenburg. Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-246) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-311). Also available in print.

This dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion. / text

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts