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).
32 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-779 | The stance triangle | Du Bois (2007), in Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse, pp. 139–182. Stance as one act with three sides: a speaker evaluates an object, thereby positions themselves, and thereby aligns with other speakers, as three aspects of one dialogic act. Read in full. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-590), in full, from the author’s posted scan of the published chapter; worth reading as the unifying model of stance in conversation: evaluation, positioning and alignment are not kinds of stance but three aspects of one act (“I evaluate something, and thereby position myself, and thereby align with you”), structured as two subjects and a shared object joined by directed vectors. Stance belongs to utterances in dialogic context, takes an object even when none is spoken, and a resonant stance follow must mark itself with too or either. Argued from Santa Barbara Corpus excerpts, with no counts. |
| LIT-780 v3 | Forms of Talk | Goffman (1981), University of Pennsylvania Press. Five essays on talk, including “Footing”: a speaker’s role decomposes into animator, author and principal, and hearers into ratified and unratified participants, so who is speaking is not one thing. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The Internet Archive holds the 1981 edition only as a controlled-lending item, and the essay “Footing” in its first publication (Semiotica 25, 1979, DOI 10.1515/semi.1979.25.1-2.1) is closed access with no repository copy. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-785 v3 | How to Do Things with Words | Austin (1962), Clarendon Press. The William James Lectures that founded speech-act theory: some utterances do things rather than describe them, and every utterance has locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The Internet Archive holds the 1962 Harvard and 1975 Clarendon editions only as controlled-lending items (access-restricted), and the unrestricted copies there are uploads by individuals of an in-copyright book, not lawful sources; the publishers offer no open access. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-794 v2 | Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment | Brandom (1994), Harvard University Press. Explains meaning by use in normative terms. Asserting is undertaking a commitment, licensing others’ reassertion and taking on responsibility to show entitlement; interlocutors keep score of one another’s commitments and entitlements; a claim’s content is its inferential role (what it follows from, what follows from it, what it rules out). Logical vocabulary makes these implicit proprieties explicit. Skimmed: the Preface and the core of chapter 3 only. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-09 (NOTE-622); the Preface and the core of chapter 3 (pp. 141–157 and 172–193) were read, the rest of the 741 pages not. Worth reading as the source of the deontic scorekeeping model of assertion. Asserting undertakes a commitment, authorizes others to reassert it, and takes on a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged. Every interlocutor keeps a score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so the score is doubly perspectival, and an assertion’s significance is the change it makes to each score, fixed by the content’s inferential role. Read it with the caveat that the reading covers the model, not the book’s arguments for it (chapters 1–2, 4–9). |
| LIT-809 v2 | That’s what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use | Bergen, Goodman & Levy (2012), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 120–125. Recursive speaker–listener reasoning yields specificity implicatures, but cannot derive Horn’s principle from costs alone; adding uncertainty over the lexicon does, in one-shot signalling games, without equilibrium refinements. Two online games with novel symbols find both implicatures drawn without prior conventions. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-613); worth reading as the paper in which the RSA recursion is made to derive Horn’s division of pragmatic labour (costlier forms for less likely meanings) in one-shot signalling games with no prior conventions: the basic recursion cannot break the symmetry between equally meaningless costly and cheap signals, but a listener and speaker uncertain about the lexicon, marginalizing over every lexicon that could assign the signals meanings, converge on the efficient mapping without an equilibrium-selection rule. Two small Mechanical Turk games (40 and 140 participants) show people drawing specificity and Horn implicatures among novel symbols in five rounds, with no first-round difference. Source, with LIT-821 and LIT-816, of THEORY-172. |
| LIT-811 v2 | Assertion | Stalnaker (1978), in P. Cole (ed.), Pragmatics (Syntax and Semantics 9), Academic Press, 315–332. The source of the context set: the common ground as the set of possibilities compatible with what the participants presuppose, and an assertion’s essential effect as removing the possibilities incompatible with what is said. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The chapter is in Syntax and Semantics 9 (Academic Press, 1978), now digitised by Brill, whose chapter page and PDF refused access (HTTP 403); the reprint in Stalnaker’s Context and Content (Oxford, 1999) is lending-only at the Internet Archive; no author or institutional copy was found. What it says is known here only through the three readings of the same day that state or quote it (Heim, LIT-838, who quotes it at length; Krifka, LIT-835; Veltman, LIT-818), and is labelled as theirs. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-816 | Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference | Goodman & Frank (2016), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(11):818–829. The review that names and states the rational speech act framework: a listener interprets an utterance by Bayesian inversion of an approximately rational speaker who values informativeness to a literal listener, replacing Grice’s maxims with one utility-theoretic cooperative principle; joint inference over the speaker’s topic, knowledge or lexicon (uRSA) extends it to non-literal language, vagueness and embedded implicature. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-606), from the authors’ manuscript; worth reading as the standard statement of the rational speech act (RSA) framework: a pragmatic listener P_L(w|u) ∝ P_S(u|w)P(w) inverting a softmax speaker whose utility is log P_Lit(w|u), with a literal listener conditioning the prior on the utterance’s truth. Its uncertain-RSA extension, a joint posterior over the world and the speaker’s type, topic or lexicon, is what carries hyperbole, irony, metaphor, vague adjectives and embedded implicature. A review: the empirical support it cites is summarized, not shown, and its claims of near-ceiling fits rest on the cited papers. Source, with LIT-821 and LIT-809, of THEORY-172. |
| LIT-818 | Defaults in Update Semantics | Veltman (1996), J. Philos. Logic 25(3):221–261. Defines an update system (a sentence’s meaning is an operation on information states), proves it reduces to static propositions exactly when it is additive, and shows epistemic “might” and “presumably” are non-persistent tests. Builds a decidable non-monotonic logic of default rules (“if φ, normally ψ”) in which specificity and other priorities between conflicting defaults follow from coherence and applicability conditions on expectation frames. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-617); worth reading as the programmatic statement of update semantics: the meaning of a sentence is the change it makes to an information state, and an update system is “additive”, so reducible to static propositions, exactly when updates are total, idempotent, persistent, monotone and strengthening. “Might” and “presumably” fail persistence: they are tests on a state, not information about the world. Its second half is a theory of defaults in which priority between conflicting rules (“more specific wins”, the Nixon diamond left open) follows from a coherence and an applicability criterion rather than being stipulated. Read the default theory as one formalisation the author himself hopes will be bettered; the framework is the lasting part. |
| LIT-821 | Predicting Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Games | Frank & Goodman (2012), Science 336(6084):998. In one-shot three-object reference games on Mechanical Turk, speakers’ word bets match a speaker who chooses words in proportion to their specificity (r = .98), and listeners’ referent bets match the Bayesian inversion of that speaker with an empirically measured salience prior (r = .99), though salience and listener bets alone are uncorrelated (r = .19). The founding quantitative test of what was later called the rational speech act model. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-634); worth reading as the one-page origin of the rational speech act model’s quantitative test: a listener who inverts, by Bayes’ rule, a speaker who chooses words in proportion to their informativeness (exp of minus surprisal under a literal listener, which reduces to the size principle |w|⁻¹), combined with an empirically measured salience prior, predicts mean listener bets in three-object reference games at r = .99 with no fitted parameters (α set to 1). Read it knowing that the fit is to means over seven context types, that the prior is measured in a separate group, and that the speaker and listener groups never interact. Source of THEORY-172. |
| LIT-824 | Informative Communication in Word Production and Word Learning | Frank, Goodman, Lai & Tenenbaum (2009), Proceedings of CogSci 31, pp. 1228–1233. A speaker who chooses words to minimise the KL divergence between her intended meaning and a word’s literal meaning picks, for a known referent, a true word with probability ∝ |w|^(−α): the size principle, derived from communication. Word learners’ bets about a novel word’s meaning fit the inverted model at r = .93; speakers’ free descriptions follow it only weakly (r = .19, and not at all for colour terms). | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-627); worth reading as the paper that first writes the informative speaker down: a speaker soft-maximises the utility −D_KL(M_S ‖ w̃), the information lost about her intended meaning when it is replaced by the uniform distribution over a word’s extension, so for a known referent she picks a true word with probability ∝ |w|^(−α), the size principle derived from communicative premises. A learner who knows the referent inverts that speaker to infer what a novel word means; 700 web participants’ bets track the model’s predictions (r = .93). In a free-description task speakers’ use of Flickr tag-words correlates only weakly with informativeness (r = .19 overall, .51 without colour terms, .02 for colour terms). It has no listener inferring a referent and no recursion: that step is Frank and Goodman 2012 (LIT-821). |
| LIT-826 v2 | Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language | Searle (1969), Cambridge University Press. The systematic development of Austin’s speech-act theory around the hypothesis that speaking a language is engaging in rule-governed behaviour: illocutionary acts analysed by constitutive rules, with reference and predication treated as speech acts. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records and the publisher’s contents, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The 1969 Cambridge edition is lending-only at the Internet Archive (access-restricted), Cambridge Core offers the book only to subscribers, and HathiTrust has no full-view copy. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-835 | Performative updates and the modeling of speech acts | Krifka (2024), Synthese 203:31. Adds to Stalnaker’s informative update, which filters a context set, a performative update that changes each index minimally so a proposition becomes true. Declarations are purely performative; assertions are a performative guarantee by the speaker followed by a negotiable informative update; commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, definitions and the locutionary act itself are modelled as index changes, and hereby marks a proposition made true by the utterance. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-602); worth reading as the dynamic-semantic statement of the performative/constative distinction: an informative update removes indices from a context set (Stalnaker), a performative update changes them minimally so that a proposition holds (after Szabolcsi 1982), and so can add indices the context did not contain. A declaration is a pure performative update; an assertion is a performative update (the speaker publicly guarantees the proposition) followed by an informative update that the addressee may refuse. The same declarative sentence is structurally ambiguous between the two. Read it as a formal proposal argued from linguistic evidence (hereby, hedges, tense across languages), not as a tested theory, and note that commitment spaces, which carry the negotiation, are Krifka’s other papers, not this one. |
| LIT-838 | The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases | Heim (1982), Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Garland, 1988). Indefinites and definites are variables with no quantificational force; indefinites are bound by the nearest operator, which explains donkey anaphora. Meaning is recast as file change potential on a common ground of numbered cards, and the definite/indefinite contrast becomes one felicity condition (new card versus familiar card), from which binding, existential readings, presupposition projection and narrow-scope definites follow. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-608); worth reading as the founding statement of file change semantics and of the variable analysis of indefinites: an indefinite has no quantificational force of its own and is bound by whatever operator is nearest (an adverb of quantification, a determiner, the unpronounced necessity operator of a bare conditional), which is what makes donkey sentences come out right. Its third chapter replaces truth conditions by file change potentials, operations on a structured common ground of numbered cards, and derives the definite/indefinite contrast from one felicity condition: an indefinite opens a new card, a definite must update a familiar one. Read it as an argued theory with worked examples and stated open problems (specific indefinites, weak crossover, accommodation), not as a closed system. |
| LIT-841 | Semantic Unification: A Sheaf Theoretic Approach to Natural Language | Abramsky & Sadrzadeh (2014), ARXIV-1403.3351, in the Lambek Festschrift (LNCS 8222, pp. 1–13). Models basic Discourse Representation Structures as sections of a presheaf of consistent literals over (vocabulary, variables), an anaphoric resolution as a cover by variable maps, and the meaning of a discourse as the gluing of its sentences’ sections, unique when it exists. Failure to glue is inconsistency, not contextuality in the Abramsky–Brandenburger sense; competing resolutions are competing covers, ranked in the probabilistic section by corpus counts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-644); worth reading as the first paper to model discourse meaning as sheaf-theoretic gluing, and as the record’s earliest bridge between the Abramsky–Brandenburger framework and natural-language semantics. A basic Discourse Representation Structure is a section of a presheaf of consistent literals; a choice of anaphoric resolution is a cover, a jointly surjective family of variable maps; and the meaning of the discourse is the gluing, which is unique when it exists (Proposition 1, its only result). Its “contextuality” is context dependence, not the failure of a compatible family to glue: the only obstruction it exhibits is inconsistency of literals. Its probabilistic section ranks candidate covers by summed corpus counts rather than gluing distributions. Short and preliminary by its own account. |
| LIT-844 | Quantum-Like Contextuality in Large Language Models | Lo, Sadrzadeh & Mansfield (2024), ARXIV-2412.16806, Proc. R. Soc. A 481:20240399 (2025). Instantiates a three-sentence anaphora schema with the support of a PR prism 51,966,480 times from Simple English Wikipedia and takes referent probabilities from BERT: 0.148% of the models are sheaf-contextual by a signalling-corrected test and 71.1% are CbD-contextual. The support is fixed by the schema, so each verdict turns on how uncertain BERT is in three sentences. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-648) from the arXiv preprint (the journal version could not be reached); worth reading as the large-scale test of language-model output for contextuality, and for what its numbers rest on. A PR-prism schema of three sentences (“It is X1 and the same one is X2”, ”… X2 … same … X3”, ”… X3 and the other one is X1”) is instantiated with 866,108 Simple English Wikipedia noun pairs and their adjectives; BERT gives one referent probability per sentence, and the support is fixed by the schema. Of 51,966,480 models, 77,118 (0.148%) pass the signalling-corrected sheaf test (SF < 1/6) and 36,938,948 (71.1%) the CbD test (Δ < 2). Both verdicts are fixed by three numbers per instance; the CbD one holds whenever BERT is uncertain and roughly consistent across the three sentences. The link to embedding distance is a softmax identity plus weak correlations (R² ≤ 0.08). |
| LIT-942 v2 | Do different prompting methods yield a common task representation in language models? | Davidson et al. (2025), NeurIPS 2025. The paper extends function vectors from few-shot demonstrations to short instruction prompts and extracts instruction function vectors that improve zero-shot accuracy. Demonstration and instruction function vectors share only 4 to 7 of their top 20 attention heads, add rather than substitute, and lose accuracy when their heads and activations are swapped. It concludes that the two prompting forms do not induce a common task representation but partly overlapping mechanisms, and that the instruction route is built by post-training. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-803) in full; worth reading as the direct test of whether a task given by demonstrations and the same task given by an instruction share one internal representation. Under function vectors they do not: mostly different heads, vectors that add, and an asymmetric cost to swapping them. Read it knowing that it tests prompt forms, not paraphrase or stance, on simple lexical tasks in small models, and that the authors say they cannot prove the negative. Filed THEORY-264; bears on QUESTION-024 without answering it. |
| LIT-997 v3 | How LLMs Distort Our Written Language | Abdulhai et al. (2026). Three studies of LLM-assisted writing. In a randomized essay study, heavy LLM users rated their essays less in their own voice, and an LLM judge labelled 66.7% of their essays neutral against 39.5% of controls. LLM revisions of 86 essays from 2021 moved further, and in one shared direction, in embedding space than the authors’ own revisions, under every prompt including “Revise this essay for grammar”. LLM-written ICLR 2026 reviews named clarity and relevance less often and reproducibility more. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-750) in full; worth reading as a measured case of rewriting that keeps topic and genre and moves stance, voice and evaluative emphasis. Heavy LLM use in an essay task made judge-labelled neutral stances 68.9% more common, and LLM revisions of 2021 student essays moved them further, and in one shared direction, in embedding space than the students’ own revisions did. Read it knowing that meaning is measured by sentence-embedding position and an LLM judge, never by the writers; that the “grammar” prompt was “Revise this essay for grammar” given with content feedback; and that the main semantic result is shown in plots without statistics. Its abstract’s “full point higher” review scores are 4.43 against 4.13 in the body. |
| LIT-1001 v2 | Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics | danah boyd (2008), PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. An ethnography of American teenagers on MySpace and Facebook. Networked publics have four properties (persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability) and three dynamics: invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private. Collapsed contexts make it hard to keep distinct social contexts distinct. The analysis of self-presentation builds on Goffman (1959) and Meyrowitz (1985). | Active — read in part 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1432, Skimmed) from the author’s copy at danah.org (www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf), licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Appendix 3): Chapter 1 on networked publics, Chapter 4 on self-presentation and context, and Chapter 7 in full, with the passages on collapse elsewhere; Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 were not read in full. This extends the reading of 2026-10-12 (NOTE-710). Worth reading for its account of collapsed contexts: distinct social contexts are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and networked media remove them, so audiences a person keeps apart are brought together, often without the person seeing it. Its examples, after Meyrowitz (1985), show contradictory self-presentations doing no harm while the audiences stay segmented, and trouble when they meet. Read it knowing that the evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict between segmented and collapsed audiences, and that the teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation misread by an unintended audience. |
| LIT-1040 | Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts | Bach and Harnish (1979), MIT Press. A theory of speech acts built on Grice’s speaker meaning and Strawson’s distinction between communicative and conventional illocutions: the hearer infers the speaker’s communicative intention from what is said and mutually held beliefs about the context. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The Internet Archive holds the 1979 and 1982 MIT Press printings only as controlled-lending items (access-restricted), and MIT Press offers no open access. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied: a lawful copy exists, as lending items, but this client could not borrow it (ADR-041). The last of the four works that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing. |
| LIT-1041 | Logic and Conversation | Grice (1975), in Cole and Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41–58. What a speaker implicates is separated from what is said, and conversational implicatures are derived from a Cooperative Principle and the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. Read here only at pp. 45–47, where the principle and maxims are stated. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-13 and read only in part: pp. 45–47, the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, from an excerpt on a Simon Fraser University course page (NOTE-734, Skimmed). The rest of the chapter, pp. 41–44 and 47–58, was not reachable from a lawful source: the other copies found are Scribd and PDF-aggregator uploads and a course-licensed reprint on a non-university site. The definition of conversational implicature, its tests and the worked examples are therefore not read here. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only an excerpt was read. The third of the four works that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing. |
| LIT-1042 | Meaning | Grice (1957), The Philosophical Review 66(3):377–388. Separates natural meaning (“Those spots mean (meant) measles”, which entails its content) from non-natural meaning (meaningNN). “A meantNN something by x” is roughly “A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention”. Timeless and sentence meaning are to be explained from it. The founding text of the intention-based line of meaning and illocution. | Active — read 2026-10-13 (NOTE-735) in full; worth reading as the origin of the intention-based account of speaker meaning: A meant something by x if A intended the utterance of x to produce an effect in an audience by means of the recognition of that intention. Read it knowing that it analyses meaning, not illocutionary acts, so the step to individuating teasing or reproach by intention is Strawson’s (1964), not Grice’s; and that the account is stated as “roughly” and “a first shot” throughout. The first of the four works that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing. |
| LIT-1043 | Intention and Convention in Speech Acts | Strawson (1964), The Philosophical Review 73(4):439–460. Against Austin, many illocutions are not conventional: a warning to a skater, an entreaty, an objection. Their force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, analysed by Grice’s speaker meaning plus a fourth intention, and uptake is the audience’s recognition of it. Acts like a verdict or an umpire’s call are essentially conventional, and the scheme cannot hold them. What all illocutions share is an overt intention meant to be understood. | Active — read 2026-10-13 (NOTE-736) in full; worth reading as the step from Grice’s speaker meaning to illocutionary force: an illocution not essentially conventional is an act of communication whose force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, while acts like a verdict or an umpire’s call exist only within rule-governed procedures. Read it knowing that its own scheme strains on orders and fails on institutional acts, and that it individuates request from entreaty by a recognised attitude of the speaker. The second of the four works that CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073 name as missing. |
| LIT-1278 | Putting pain in its proper place | Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma (2018/2019), Analysis 79(1):72–82. Block’s argument “the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth; therefore the pain is in my mouth” seems to fail. Tye says “pain” creates an intensional context; Noordhof says the first “in” is not spatial. The authors say the conclusion carries a misleading implicature that something is wrong with the mouth. Online participants rejected the conclusion for pain (mean 2.43 of 7), tissue damage (2.53) and inflammation (2.86) and accepted it for a paper-clip (6.10); across fourteen items, acceptance tracked rated misleadingness (R² 0.897 over item means); and “technically speaking” wording raised agreement for every item (η² .17). The authors conclude that the data favour a bodily conception of pain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1007) from the authors’ accepted manuscript; worth reading as a short, clean piece of experimental philosophy on how ordinary people read “the pain is in my fingertip”. In three online studies (174, 70 + 560 and 244 participants) people rejected “the pain is in my mouth” after “the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth” about as much as they rejected the same inference for tissue damage and inflammation, and accepted it for a paper-clip; acceptance across fourteen items tracked how misleading the conclusion was rated, and a “technically speaking” rewording raised it. The authors read this as a pragmatic implicature, not an intensional context (Tye) or a non-spatial “in” (Noordhof), and close that “pain is a state of the body, not of the mind”. Read the closing claim as a conditional the data support only in part: they show that “pain” patterns with bodily terms in one inference, not what pain is, and the rewording lifted pain only to the midpoint. It is folk-concept evidence and does not bear on the record’s rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1285 | What’s Wrong with Copying? | Drassinower (2015). Not read. Copyright is reconstructed from inside its doctrine, not from incentives: a work is a communicative act, and infringement is the unauthorized appropriation of another’s speech. The author’s rights reach only communicative uses consistent with others’ rights to respond, so copying needed to answer a work is lawful. | Unavailable — Searched 2026-10-20 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Crossref gives no licence for the DOI, only a De Gruyter Brill text-mining link; De Gruyter Brill answered the DOI page with an empty bot-check response (HTTP 202), and so did the Harvard University Press page for ISBN 9780674743977. Web searches for an open-access edition, a University of Toronto (TSpace) or SSRN deposit of the book, or a CC-licensed copy found none; one library record lists the e-book as licensed to selected US libraries only. Lending-only scans and shadow-library copies were not opened. OpenAlex was not used (out of budget today). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1798 v2 | PETra: A Multilingual Corpus of Pragmatic Explicitation in Translation | Osmelak et al. (2026). A released corpus of about 3,000 English-source sentence pairs from TED-Multi and Europarl in twelve target languages, in which the translation adds or replaces material to make culture-bound knowledge explicit: unit conversions, entity descriptions and specifications, translator glosses, typed under a 19-subtype schema and marked as added or replacing. Candidates come from null alignments next to a named entity; a multilingual BERT classifier trained by active learning on German and Spanish found three quarters of the pairs, its accuracy rising 7–8 points over the cycles. Measurement conversion is the largest category. No inter-annotator agreement is reported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1344) from the LREC 2026 PDF; worth reading as the only multilingual corpus of the additions human translators make for a new audience, with each addition marked in the target, and for what it lacks: no reported annotator agreement. |
| LIT-1799 v2 | TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages | Srinivasan & Choi (2022). Graded politeness ratings (−3 to +3), three Prolific annotators per item, for 500 Wikipedia talk-page requests in each of Hindi, Korean, Spanish, Tamil, French, Vietnamese, Russian, Afrikaans and Hungarian. Mean pairwise Spearman agreement is 0.46 on own-language items and 0.36 on English items rated by the same bilinguals. On the balanced top-and-bottom-quartile sets, an XLM-R trained on English requests reaches 0.81 zero-shot accuracy, about 10 points below leave-one-out human accuracy (around 90%) in six languages. Annotators were screened for agreement with that classifier. Politeness and formality are shown not to be interchangeable. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1339) from the Findings of EMNLP 2022 PDF; worth reading as a nine-language politeness dataset with human-agreement figures (pairwise Spearman 0.46 own-language, 0.36 English), a reference for a reliability target, with the caveat that its annotators were screened against a classifier. |
| LIT-1812 v2 | A Collection of Pragmatic-Similarity Judgments over Spoken Dialog Utterances | Ward & Marco (2024). The first collection of human pragmatic-similarity ratings: 693 pairs of a spoken dialog utterance and a re-enactment of it, made under six conditions so that similarity varies, rated on a 1–5 slider for “overall feeling, tone, and intent” by 6–9 judges in three sessions, two English and one Spanish, 5,532 ratings in all. Mean pairwise Pearson agreement between judges was 0.45, 0.72 and 0.66 by session, rising with experience and falling for lexically different pairs (0.80 in Session 2 without them). Judges discussed ratings during the sessions, and all pairs are within one language. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1338) from the LREC-COLING 2024 PDF; worth reading as the first collection of human pragmatic-similarity ratings and for its account of what lowers agreement. The 0.45 the record cites is one session’s single-judge figure; the others are 0.72 and 0.66. |
| LIT-1817 v2 | VakyArth: Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in LLMs across Indic Languages | Singh et al. (2026). 578 items written by four native speakers, one per language, in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Malayalam, over deixis, speech acts, implicature, social pragmatics and coherence, as disjoint MCQ, NLI and translation sets. Five LLMs score higher on MCQ than NLI in every model–language pair, and when wrong they pick the literal reading 59.1% of the time against 33.3% by chance. On 416 model translations, COMET correlates with one native rater per language at r = 0.81, better than XCOMET or MetricX, though hand-picked inverted translations score highly. The finding that translation “does not track” pragmatic understanding compares different items, and no inter-rater agreement is given. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1345) from the Findings of EMNLP 2026 PDF, with the released items counted; worth reading for its native-authored, culturally specific pragmatic items in four Indic languages and its evidence that LLM errors lean literal. Its translation and inference tasks use different items, and no agreement between people is reported. |
| LIT-1845 | Translation and Relevance | Gutt (1989), PhD thesis, University College London. Translation needs no theory of its own: it is interlingual interpretive use under Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory. Two utterances interpretively resemble each other to the degree that the explicatures and implicatures each conveys in its own cognitive environment overlap, and a translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it adequately relevant to its audience, at no gratuitous processing cost. Direct translation, which preserves the original’s communicative clues, is the limiting case: complete interpretive resemblance in the cognitive environment the original envisaged. The precursor of the 1991 book (LIT-784). | Active — skimmed 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1435) from the UCL Discovery eprint (discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317504/1/241978.pdf, 309 pp., OCR text layer): the abstract, preface and contents, the critique of functional equivalence (pp. 22–27), the relevance-theoretic chapter’s account of interpretive resemblance (pp. 50–76), the critique of dynamic equivalence (pp. 118–130), all of chapter 5 on faithfulness as optimal resemblance (pp. 160–193), all of chapter 6 on communicative clues (pp. 194–248) and the opening of chapter 7 with its definition of direct translation (pp. 249–257). The rest is unread. Worth reading as the thesis that became Translation and Relevance (LIT-784), and as the only reading of Gutt’s account the record holds. On it, two utterances interpretively resemble each other to the degree that the assumptions each communicates in its own cognitive environment overlap, so resemblance is judged by what is communicated, not by wording or propositional form. A translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it relevant to its audience. Direct translation is the limiting case, complete interpretive resemblance in the context the original envisaged. Read it as the 1989 thesis, not the book: what the book changed is unread. |
| LIT-1850 | Commitments and Speech Acts | Harnish (2005), Philosophica 75:11–41. Speech-act theories add either rules and conventions (Austinian) or expressed attitudes (Gricean) to the utterance. On the Gricean theory of Bach and Harnish, a communicative illocutionary act is individuated by the attitude the speaker expresses, where expressing is reflexively intending the hearer to take the utterance as reason to think the speaker has it. Institutional acts are set apart. Against the normative theories of Searle and Alston, Harnish finds no account of how commitment is created and rejects Alston’s rule-subjection analysis. He argues that expressing the belief that P and taking responsibility for P may coincide, so normative theorists must find other grounds to prefer their theories. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1453) from the journal’s own open-access PDF (philosophica.ugent.be/article/82209/galley/202023/download/, 31 pp.). Worth reading as Harnish’s own account of the expressed-attitude theory of Bach and Harnish (1979, LIT-1040, unread), the record’s nearest first-hand text of it. On that theory communicative illocutionary acts are individuated by the attitude the speaker expresses: the speaker reflexively intends the hearer to take the utterance as reason to think the speaker has that attitude. Communication succeeds when the hearer recognizes it. Conventional, institutional acts are a separate category. Harnish weighs it against the normative theories of Searle and Alston, on which an act is individuated by the commitment or responsibility the speaker takes on. He finds Searle’s account of how commitment is created unexplained and Alston’s rule-subjection analysis false. He argues that expressing a belief that P and taking responsibility for P may be equivalent, so the normative theory may describe the same facts. Teasing, reproach and the audience’s standing are not discussed. |
| LIT-1877 | Rationality as the Normative Dimension of Speech Acts | Berdini (2012), Phenomenology and Mind 2. Against Searle’s view that the deontology of speech acts flows from constitutive rules, it argues with Bach and Harnish that rules and meaning cannot fix which illocutionary act is performed, and adopts their inferential model, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s expressed attitude from what is said, mutual contextual beliefs and shared presumptions. It proposes that the presumption of the interlocutor’s rationality is the basic normativity of communication. It quotes Bach and Harnish (1979, p. 124) that illocutionary acts at best create mutual beliefs about rights and obligations. A short proposal, not an argued theory. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1445) from the publisher’s open-access PDF on Firenze University Press’s journal site (oaj.fupress.net/index.php/pam/article/download/7083/7063/7008, 8 pp.), reached through the DOI. Worth reading for one sentence the record wanted: its quotation of Bach and Harnish (1979, p. 124, LIT-1040, unread) that whether illocutionary acts create a deontology is “a moral question”, and that “at best they create mutual beliefs between speaker and hearer about rights and obligations”. The paper itself is a short programmatic piece. Against Searle’s rule-based account of the deontology of speech acts, it adopts Bach and Harnish’s inferential model, and proposes that the presumption of the interlocutor’s rationality is the basic, “ultra-minimalist” normativity from which commitments and obligations might be built. It calls itself a “quessertion” and argues no further. |
| LIT-1923 | Ventriloquism’s methodological scope | Wilhoit (2016), Language Under Discussion 2:45–49. A response to Cooren (2014): Montréal School CCO is ontologically committed to interaction, so it takes conversation analysis as its method of choice, and a ventriloquism carrying those commitments cannot be the open metamodel Craig (1999) asked for. Dialogue is emerging instead from CCO work that uses other methods. It does not say Cooren’s analyses “entify agents”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1487), from the journal’s open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0). A five-page response to Cooren’s “Pragmatism as ventriloquism” (Language Under Discussion 2014). Its point is about method: Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction makes conversation analysis its method of choice, so ventriloquism cannot be the open metamodel for Craig’s seven traditions that Cooren proposes. Worth knowing chiefly because Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) cite it for a claim it does not make, that Cooren’s analyses “entify agents”. |