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This thesis represents an attempt to show how recent research in pragmatic theory can contribute to our understanding of humour. Two inferential theories have been selected: speech act theory and relevance theory. In addition, I have looked at the modification of the speech act model proposed by Leech. An exposition of each theory is followed by an account of how these theories can be applied to humour. Some research into humour has already been carried out using the speech act model. This is described and evaluated. For Leech's extension of that model, and for the relevance-theoretic model, there is virtually no existing research on which to draw. Consequently, both the application of these theories to humour, and their evaluation thereof, are my own. Speech act accounts of humour are based on the notion that humorous utterances are unconventional and unpredictable. One way of exploiting our expectations, and thereby creating a condo effect, it is argued, is to violate the norms of conversation (that is to say, Grice's maxims and Searle's conditions). This analysis is found to be insufficient, on its own, to distinguish between the humorous and the non-humorous utterance. I will show how the unpredictable, unconventional remark can be used to create a number of different effects, some humorous, some nonhumorous. Maxim violation is thus seen to be inadequate, both as a descriptive and as an explanatory tool. Relevance theory constitutes a radical departure from the whole maxim-based framework. Adopting this approach to the analysis of verbal humour, I will try to find out exactly what is going on in our minds when we interpret humorously intended utterances. I will identify the various processes which I believe are employed in the appreciation of verbal jokes, and will conclude that these processes are not unique to humour. In spite of this, I will claim that there is a sense in which verbal humour can be said to be unique.

This thesis describes a theoretical framework for modelling cooperative dialogue. The linguistic theory is a version of speech act theory adopted from Cohen and Levesque, in which dialogue utterances are generated and interpreted pragmatically in the context of a theory of rational interaction. The latter is expressed as explicitly and formally represented principles of rational agenthood and cooperative interaction. The focus is the development of strategic principles of multi-agent interaction as such a basis for cooperative dialogue. In contrast to the majority of existing work, these acknowledge the Positive role of conflict to multi-agent cooperation. and make no assumptions regarding the benevolence and sincerity of agents. The result is a framework wherein agents can resolve conflicts by negotiation. It is a preliminary stage to the future building of computer models of cooperative dialogue for both HCI and DAI, which will therefore be more widely and generally applicable than those currently in existence. The theory of conflict and cooperation is expressed in the different patterns of mental states which characterise multi-agent conflict, cooperation and indifference as three alternative postural relations. Agents can recognise and potentially create these. Dialogue actions are the strategic tools with which mental states can be manipulated, whilst acknowledging that agents are autonomous over their mental states; they have control over what they acquire and reveal in dialogue. Strategic principles of belief and goal adoption are described in terms of the relationships between autonomous agents' beliefs, goals, preferences, and interests, and the relation of these to action. Veracity, mendacity, concealing and revealing are defined as properties of acts. The role of all these elements in reasoning about dialogue action and conflict resolution, is tester in analyses of two example dialogues; a record of a real trade union negotiation and an extract from "Othello" by Shakespeare.

In this project, I analyze women's humor in three of Jane Austen's novels: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Using speech-act theory, I specifically examine Elizabeth's, Emma's, and Mary's utterances to demonstrate that in order for humorous utterances to be subversive, they must challenge societal or patriarchal constructs (religion, misogynist men, marriage, the feminine ideal) and do so artfully. An indirect speech act--a play on words, an insult, even a laugh--is often far more effective than a more direct one, especially when wielded by characters for whom a direct antagonistic speech act would have severe social consequences. When those socially-sanctioned and highly-regulated speech acts--marriages, wills, introductions, invitations, letters, titles--are less accessible or less beneficial to women, only indirect speech acts remain a viable option. / Master of Arts

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This dissertation proposes that the church plays an active role in the salvation of its members through the proclamation of the gospel. Chapter 1 introduces the topic of the dissertation by positioning it within its current academic and nonacademic context. It then details the thesis and methodology of the dissertation. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the church is viewed as playing an active role in the salvation of believers in church history. It examines the relationship between the soteriology and ecclesiology of four theologians who have significantly influenced the protestant reformed trajectory: Cyprian, Augustine, Luther, Calvin. It argues that through their usage of the "church as mother motif," Cyprian, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin view the church as having an active role in salvation. Chapter 3 provides working definitions of the gospel and the church. It defines the gospel as the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sin based upon 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. Chapter 3 proceeds by defining the church as the regenerate people of God who have accepted the gospel message by faith in Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. Chapter 4 contends through scriptural exegesis that the proclamation of the gospel creates members of the church. The scriptural exegesis in this chapter goes in canonical order and focuses on exegeting passages that are recognized as being important in understanding the church's formation. It concludes with a summary of the scriptural data. Chapter 5 also argues through scriptural exegesis the church is the instrument that God uses to proclaim the gospel. Like Chapter 4, it focuses on exegeting recognized passages that indicate the church's instrumental role in the proclamation of the gospel. It also concludes with a summary of the scriptural data. Chapter 6 formulates systematically the scriptural data from Chapters 4 and 5 into a reciprocal relationship between the gospel and the church. Chapter 6 then frames the reciprocal relationship between the gospel and the church in terms of speech act theory. First, it briefly defines speech act theory and discusses why it can be applied to the reciprocal relationship between the gospel and the church. It then develops a speech act formulation of the reciprocal relationship in which the church proclaims both the locution and illocution of the gospel message and the Spirit creates the church, which is the perlocutionary effect of the church's gospel proclamation. It concludes by briefly detailing some of the theological implications of this formulation. Chapter 7 offers a conclusion to the dissertation in which the arguments from Chapters 1 to 6 are summarized. It then proposes areas for further research. It concludes by offering some potential applications of the speech act formulation of the reciprocal relationship between the gospel and the church to the current evangelical church.

Email, chat, instant messaging, blogs, and newsgroups are now common ways for people to interact. Along with these new ways for sending, receiving, and storing messages comes the challenge of organizing, filtering, and understanding them, for which text mining has been shown to be useful. Additionally, it has done so using both content-dependent and content-independent methods.Unfortunately, computer-mediated communication has also provided criminals, terrorists, spies, and other threats to security a means of efficient communication. However, the often textual encoding of these communications may also provide for the possibility of detecting and tracking those who are deceptive. Two methods for organizing, filtering, understanding, and detecting deception in text-based computer-mediated communication are presented.First, message feature mining uses message features or cues in CMC messages combined with machine learning techniques to classify messages according to the sender's intent. The method utilizes common classification methods coupled with linguistic analysis of messages for extraction of a number of content-independent input features. A study using message feature mining to classify deceptive and non-deceptive email messages attained classification accuracy between 60\% and 80\%.Second, speech act profiling is a method for evaluating and visualizing synchronous CMC by creating profiles of conversations and their participants using speech act theory and probabilistic classification methods. Transcripts from a large corpus of speech act annotated conversations are used to train language models and a modified hidden Markov model (HMM) to obtain probable speech acts for sentences, which are aggregated for each conversation participant creating a set of speech act profiles. Three studies for validating the profiles are detailed as well as two studies showing speech act profiling's ability to uncover uncertainty related to deception.The methods introduced here are two content-independent methods that represent a possible new direction in text analysis. Both have possible applications outside the context of deception. In addition to aiding deception detection, these methods may also be applicable in information retrieval, technical support training, GSS facilitation support, transportation security, and information assurance.

In this thesis, I ask about the descriptive purchase on discursive events of some accounts of speech as action. To do so, I turn to speech act theory, which I read at first restrictively, and later more broadly, moving from John Langshaw Austin to John Rogers Searle to Judith Butler, appealing along the way to Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. In so doing, I construe speech act theory as a genre (or set of genres) of theoretico-critical inquiry. By genre I mean a set of differentiated, recurrent forms of practice which have their own functions or ends, their own means, protocols and postulates: their own speaking positions and objects of representation or inquiry. For my purposes, then, speech act theory denotes a capacious genre of inquiry turning on the topic of speech as action. I take this topic to raise a range of rhetorical issues concerning the pragmatic question of discursive linking. To talk of discursive linking, I suggest, is minimally to presuppose notions of semiosis, of rhetorical situation or occasion and of rhetorical agency, with its attendant postulates of intention and responsibility. I thus read speech act theory rhetorically, as an open set of engagements with the question of how we do things with words: how utterances come to count as action, and how utterance action is described as having determinate consequences and effects. I begin in chapter 1 by reading Austin for his two tensively related, if not countervailing, descriptive tendencies: those of illocution and perlocution. In chapter 2, I attend to Searle as an exemplary development of an illocutionary inquiry, before examining Butler’s work on hate speech and performativity as a type of perlocutionary inquiry in chapter 3. Illocution and perlocution, I suggest, comprise distinct engagements with the questions of speech as action and discursive linking. Although postulates of semiosis and situation, and figures of responsibility, intention and agency are put to work in both illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries, in each they work differently. This differential work, I argue, marks the differing capacities of illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries adequately to describe a discursive event. Different construals of speech as action tell different tales of uptake or linking, enabling and constraining different accounts of discursive events. With this in mind, I turn by way of an extended example in chapter 4 to the caso Belsunce, a high-profile homicide case begun in Argentina in 2002. I do so to suggest that a focus on utterance actions as semio-discursive events relates the perlocutionary concerns discussed in chapters 1 – 3 to postulates of cultural memory-work, kairos and rhetorical community. Taken together, this range of concerns helps us to describe the mediatic uptake of the Belsunce case as a particular, complex semio-discursive event. But a description of a discursive event is of course itself a sign, something which, as Peirce notes, ‘stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ and which strives, in turn, to determine subsequent interpretant effects. In this respect, the critical description of discursive events is itself an instance of speech as action which cannot but continue to raise hermeneutic, rhetorical and semiotic questions of discursive upshot or uptake.

abstract: The current landscape of political speech is ripe for deep philosophical analysis yet has not been thoroughly investigated through the lens of speech-act theory. In this space, I believe I contribute something novel to the area, namely a notion of campaign promises that differs from standard promises that enables a new way of interpreting this kind of speech. Over the course of this paper, it is argued that Campaign Promises (CP) are non-trivially and philosophically distinct from the notion of Standard Promises (SP). There are many philosophical distinctions to draw, including moral, political and logical, but my focus is largely in philosophy of language. I engage the work of Searle, Austin and Wittgenstein among others to investigate what I take to be the following important differences from CP and SP: First, that CP and SP differ in the “best interest” condition, of the condition that a promise must be in the best interest of the promisee in order for that promise to obtain, which in turn, produces the effect of threatening those who do not want the promise to come about. Secondly, that CP serve to reinforce world views in a way that is non-trivially different from SP. To do this, I employ Wittgensteinian language game theory to bridge the gap between traditional Searlian speech act theory to more modern McGowan-style oppressive language models. Through this process I develop and defend this alternative way of understanding and evaluating CP and political speech. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Philosophy 2019