Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Pragmatics — language in use — speech acts and illocutionary force, assertion and common ground, presupposition, dynamic and update semantics, footing and stance in discourse, and probabilistic models of speakers and listeners (rational speech acts); what an utterance does, beyond what it says (ADR-034).
25 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-038 v2 | TV Tropes: a community-curated catalogue of narrative tropes and their instances, such as the Gilligan Cut | The owner proposed it at U44 as a reference case. A155 read a trope as a relational pattern recognized across changes of characters, medium and wording, and pointed to Gala et al.’s dataset as a large set of instances already annotated. A191 §8 added five manipulations of one trope, the Gilligan Cut. v7 (A178) makes it Study B, and A218 keeps it as Study 5. The first time the thing turns up in the record. The catalogue is documented; the experiments on it are proposals. | Active |
| CASE-040 | Topic and act crossed: a factorial design that decorrelates what a text is about from what it does | A214 §8’s design, which A218 names as the first experiment to run: topic (spending, relationships) crossed with act (teasing, reprimand), with lexical, judgement, uptake and intervention data, several factorizations, and four outcomes reported separately. A210 §5 gives a cross-corpus version. Proposed by the assistant; not run. | Active |
| CASE-043 | Data written for a future reader and never read | The owner’s variant of the tree in the woods (2026-10-11). Someone writes a record (a note, a log, a letter, a backup) for a reader they expect, and it is never read. Unlike the tree, the write was made for someone. Used to separate when a message’s intended meaning is fixed from when its fidelity is measured. | Active |
| CASE-048 v2 | The same film joke, seen as a child and again as an adult | The owner’s case (2026-10-11): one person watches a scene in a family film or show as a child and again as an adult, and the joke means something different the second time. The artefact is unchanged, and so is the person in the sense of numerical identity. Only the receiver’s state has changed. It is a test for whether meaning is fixed at the write or made at the read. | Active |
| CASE-049 | A tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it | The old puzzle, filed so its variants have something to vary. A physical event happens with no perceiver. Whether it “made a sound” turns on whether sound means the vibration or the hearing. Nothing in it was made for anyone, and that is the respect the storage variant changes. | Active |
| CASE-052 | Stokely Carmichael’s two speaking styles, kept apart by audience and collapsed by broadcast | As boyd (2008) reports it after Meyrowitz (1985: 43): the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael used very different rhetorical styles with black and with white audiences. While the audiences were separate the two styles did not conflict. Television and radio put both audiences in front of one speech, there was no neutral style, and his choice of one alienated the other audience. The roles did not change. The cover did. | Active |
| CASE-053 | Contextuality tests on human meaning and judgement data: a held null, and positive results that miss pragmatic content or power | The published tests of contextuality proper on elicited human judgements, read together. The null that meets every condition is the record’s own LIT-264: attitudinal and lexical data, none contextual under Contextuality-by-Default. Wang’s thesis adds a Bell-type null on meaning judgements. The positive results miss a condition: Cervantes and Dzhafarov’s “Snow Queen” is contextual with high reliability but its content is instructed attribute matching, and Lo, Sadrzadeh and Mansfield’s Winograd schemas have the right content but a violation of about one standard deviation. No contextual pragmatic data are documented; “none in behavioural data” is too broad. | Active |
| CASE-054 v2 | Joking relationships: one kind among the Crow and in Africa with no route between them, descended between Crow and Hidatsa, and a transported tale beside them | Radcliffe-Brown defined the joking relationship as one comparative kind and placed the Crow joking-relative and Dogon and Thonga joking in it; no historical route joins the Crow to West or South-East Africa. Lowie records the same institution among the Hidatsa, a division of the Crow’s parent tribe, and Tehrani’s phylogeny confirms an Ibo “Little Red Riding Hood” as an oral translation of the European tale. Kind without transport, kind with descent, and a transport, on documented material, for CLAIM-210. Partial: independence is a fact of geography no source states, and the kind is an analyst’s. | Active |
| CASE-055 | The discriminating fidelity study: renderings built to dissociate wording, proposition, static stance and transport structure, judged by named populations in two languages on stated tasks | A proposed study, filed on 2026-10-10 as the record’s repair of CLAIM-233, CLAIM-232, CLAIM-244, CLAIM-226, CLAIM-222 and CLAIM-227. It restores CASE-005’s three-way selection with human receivers, and adds a proposition-plus-force rival, a behavioural task-indexed criterion, predictors rated by other raters, named populations, an interlingual arm and a measurement stage. It has not been run, and its margins are not yet fixed. | Active |
| CASE-056 v2 | J. B. Phillips’s “hearty handshake all round” for Paul’s “holy kiss”, and Nida’s judgement that it keeps the greeting | Phillips renders all five New Testament “holy kiss” directives (Romans 16:16 and four parallels) as handshakes, which changes what the congregation is told to do; Nida (1964, p. 160) holds this up as equivalent effect, and the UBS handbooks call it a brave attempt. The documented case for the necessity half of CLAIM-061, on expert judgement rather than reader evidence. The same handbooks document the sufficiency half: where kissing is amorous, a literal “kiss” changes the act. | Active |
| CASE-057 | Swapping the two persons of a dyad: nonreciprocal T/V address is changed by the swap and reciprocal address is not, with a constructed French–English dyad and a three-person teasing round | Built on a documented distinction. In Brown and Gilman’s account of T/V address, power address is nonreciprocal (the superior says T and receives V) and solidarity address is reciprocal, so swapping the two persons changes the first act and leaves the second fixed. Two constructions extend it. A master-and-servant dyad in French and in modern English is changed by the swap in one realization and fixed by it in the other. A three-person teasing round gives a group whose automorphism can swap characters, so the anchoring of CLAIM-249 has work to do. | Active |
| CASE-058 | FactBank’s source-relative factuality labels and Kiesling et al.’s stance-triangle annotation: one stance construct annotated reliably, the interpersonal ones not | FactBank labels one event’s factuality separately for each source that reports it, so a proposition held fixed gets different commitment labels by source, and trained annotators agree at κ = 0.82. Kiesling et al. annotate Du Bois’s stance triangle in Reddit threads, including an investment dimension defined as the split of animator from principal, and reach only α = 0.40 to 0.57, with investment and alignment below 0.4 outside one community. Together they bracket an answer to QUESTION-076: commitment relative to a source is annotatable when defined by tests, interpersonal stance only moderately. | Active |
| CASE-059 | Tatiana’s letter in Eugene Onegin III: вы to ты and back, lost in Kline and half kept in Spalding | Tatiana’s letter to Onegin opens with the formal вы, breaks into the intimate ты at “я твоя”, and returns to вы in its last lines; only the pronouns mark the moves. Kline (2009) has “you” throughout, so neither move is in the English; Spalding (1881) switches to “thou” and never returns. A documented candidate for the half of a change of cover in which the source decides a relational question that a rendering makes undecidable. The texts are attested and the loss is visible; native attestation is thin and there is no evidence on English readers. | Active |
| CASE-061 v2 | Wonder-working power: one hymn phrase in a national address, heard as faith by those who sing it and as boilerplate by others | In the State of the Union of 28 January 2003 George W. Bush said “there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”, lifting the refrain of an 1899 gospel hymn verbatim. Churchgoers who knew the hymn heard the power of Christ; others heard boilerplate; an experiment with an ingroup and a religiously diverse outgroup measured the split. The same-wording variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224 without translation. | Active |
| CASE-063 | The English localization of Ace Attorney: a Japanese courtroom game moved to an alternate Los Angeles, with “textually accurate” set against “emotionally accurate” by its localizer | Capcom’s Gyakuten Saiban (2001) became Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2005) by moving the courtroom from Japan to Los Angeles. Its second localizer, Janet Hsu, names two fidelity targets in print, “textually accurate” against “emotionally accurate”, and states the correspondence of situations she works to, an alternate Los Angeles where the California Alien Land Law of 1913 “was never passed”. The first, Alexander O. Smith, states the criterion for re-performance. The reception is contested on record. No reader has been asked a report question and a re-performance question about the same lines. | Active |
| CASE-064 | Lindsey Stone’s Arlington photograph: one post, taken by friends as a tasteless in-joke and by strangers as contempt | In 2012 Lindsey Stone posed at Arlington National Cemetery mock-shouting and giving the finger beside a “Silence And Respect” sign, part of a running joke of photos that disobeyed signs. Friends who knew the joke called it tasteless; four weeks later strangers read the same post as contempt for the war dead, and she lost her job. A change of audience with no translation and the token unchanged, illustrating CLAIM-224. Partial: the token is a photograph, not wording. | Active |
| CASE-065 | Two satisfaction questions in German and in a back-translated Chinese version: an order effect that reverses across a rendering, with the Clinton–Gore poll as the scale of the 2ε bound | Haberstroh, Oyserman, Schwarz, Kühnen and Ji (2002), Experiment 2, asked German and Chinese students the same two satisfaction questions, in a back-translated Chinese version, in both orders. The part–whole correlation depends on order in the German administration and reverses in the Chinese one, and the authors explain it by a pragmatic mechanism. Only correlations are reported, so the case shows the bound’s contrapositive in kind, not in number. Moore’s Clinton–Gore poll, held through LIT-834, supplies the number: an order effect of total variation about 0.095, against a sampling floor of about 0.03 per order at poll sizes, so 2ε is about as large as the effect it would certify. | Active |
| CASE-066 | Dolly’s slip into ты in Anna Karenina I.4, and three English translations that carry it three ways | In Anna Karenina I.4 Dolly says one sentence to Stiva with ты amid вы, and the narrator says so. English has no live T/V pronoun. Dole (1886) keeps the Russian word and glosses it; Garnett (1901) adds “Stiva”; the Maudes (1918) add “our children”. The later two add words not in the Russian to carry the relation. Tolstoy himself says вы and its dictionary equivalent vous differ in coldness. A documented instance of the compensation mechanism; the evidence on what readers recover is translators’ and the author’s, not readers’. | Active |
| CASE-068 | Risk messages passed down diffusion chains: the evaluative signal kept and amplified while the content decays (Moussaïd, Brighton and Gaissmaier; Jagiello and Hills) | In two serial-reproduction experiments on risk messages, each link’s message was coded for content and, on a separate scheme, for the evaluative stance of its statements toward the hazard. Content got shorter, less accurate and more divergent; the evaluative signal survived and drifted negative, and re-exposure to the balanced source did not undo the drift. The transmitters’ own risk perception, measured by questionnaire, predicts the direction of the change. Documented chain evidence for evaluative stance; none for footing. | Active |
| CASE-069 v2 | Labov’s recorded sounding sessions: ritual insult turning personal, with the same exchange shape and a different act | Labov’s team taped sounding among Harlem peer groups. Boot answers David’s taunt with a remark “related to A-5 in exactly the way that one sound is related to another”, yet both are taken as personal insults: denied, objected to, wept over. Labov’s rule puts the difference in a further relation, the shared knowledge before an audience that the proposition is untrue. A documented, non-institutional case for CLAIM-151 in which the act follows a relation among the parties, and for CLAIM-138, since the exchange relations alone match and the acts still differ. | Active |
| CASE-070 | Voita, Sennrich and Titov’s BLEU-tied translation systems that differ on keeping ты or вы across sentences | Two English-to-Russian subtitle translation systems score the same BLEU (32.40 and 32.38, not significantly different). On a contrastive test built from held-out films, which asks whether a system keeps the T or V form of “you” consistent across sentences, one is at chance (50.0%) and the other is right in 81.6% of cases. A documented instance, on a pragmatic distinction, of two realizations equal under a standard probe family and different under an independently built one. An ML paper that neither record holds. | Active |
| CASE-072 | Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” in English: one ungendered beloved rendered as a maid, as God and as a boy | The opening of Hafez’s ghazal 3 names a beloved, “that Shirazi Turk”, whose sex and nature the Persian leaves open. English forces a choice at the first possessive. Jones (1771) and Bell (1897) make the beloved a maid, Clarke (1891) makes it God, and Davis (2012) makes it a boy, and Davis says in print that his choice is arbitrary. A documented instance of the half of a change of cover in which the rendering decides what the source left open. The disagreement on the source is among translators and scholars; no reader agreement has been measured. | Active |
| CASE-073 | The Kia Provo: one concept-car name, a blank coinage to the motor press and taken as honouring the IRA in Northern Ireland | In March 2013 Kia showed a concept car at Geneva named the Provo, “from the word ‘provoke’”. The motor press found no meaning in the name; in Northern Ireland, where “Provo” names a member of the Provisional IRA, six MPs said it “has caused deep offence”. Kia said it meant no offence, and withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland. One name, the speaker’s intention fixed and declared, a new audience, and an unintended reading taken up and acted on: the accidental, verbal variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224. | Active |
| CASE-152 | Absent attempt or unresponsive receiver: with Y ∼ N(ab, 1), a the strength of an attempted influence and b the receiver’s responsiveness, the settings (a, b) = (0, 1) and (1, 0) give the same response distribution; K(a, b) = a²b²/2, the Fisher matrix has rank at most one and vanishes at the origin, and the real log canonical threshold is ½ with multiplicity 2, not the regular d/2 = 1, while changing b with a held fixed separates the two | The construction from the exchange of 2026-10-24 (workbench entry of 2026-10-24, U27), checked when filed. A two-parameter response model in which the observation depends on a product, the smallest singular model with a communicative reading. It shows a missing response failing to say whether nothing was attempted or nothing was taken up. | Active |
| CASE-185 | A proposed study: direct and relay translations of one set of source utterances through three languages, to find whether agreement between the routes, the task-relative loss on each route, and the preservation of response to later framing come apart, and whether correspondences fitted between the communities’ response structures on some items predict receivers’ judgements on held-out items, translators and situations | Put together from A4 §6, A5 §5 and A6’s synthesis of the exchange “Paper assessment” (2026-10-28 to 29), which proposed carrying LIT-1820’s comparison of alternative paths into CASE-055 as independent translation routes. It adds to CASE-055 a relay arm, a path-discrepancy readout set beside the task loss, two negative controls, and an arm that fits correspondences between the communities’ response matrices and scores them on held-out data. Not run; every margin is left to a preregistration. | Active |