pragmatics.
27 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-590 | The stance triangle | Stance is one act with three aspects: in taking a stance a speaker evaluates an object, thereby positions a subject (usually the self), and thereby aligns with other subjects. The triangle’s nodes are two subjects and a shared object; its sides are directed vectors of evaluation (two) and alignment, with positioning reflected back on each subject. Stance belongs to utterances in dialogic context, not to sentences, and needs an object even when none is spoken. A stance follow that resonates with a stance lead must mark the relation (too, either). Argued from Santa Barbara Corpus excerpts; no counts are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-602 | Performative updates | Makes the performative/constative distinction a difference between two operations on a context set: informative update eliminates indices, performative update changes them minimally so that a proposition holds. Declarations are purely performative; an assertion is a performative truth guarantee by the speaker plus a negotiable informative update; the same declarative sentence can be either. Argued from linguistic evidence, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-606 | Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference | States the rational speech act framework (a listener inverting a softmax speaker whose utility is the log-probability a literal listener assigns to the intended world) and its uncertain extension (a joint posterior over the world and the speaker’s topic, knowledge or lexicon), and reviews evidence that these predict reference-game judgements, cost and knowledge effects, scalar and embedded implicature, hyperbole, irony, metaphor and vague adjectives. | Read |
| NOTE-608 | The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases | Argues that indefinites (and definites) are variables without quantificational force, bound by the nearest operator, which yields donkey-sentence readings; then recasts semantics as file change: each sentence updates a structured common ground of numbered cards, truth of a file supplies existential force, and the definite/indefinite contrast reduces to one felicity condition (new card versus familiar card), from which binding, presupposition projection and, with accommodation, narrow-scope definites follow. | Read |
| NOTE-613 | That’s what she (could have) said | Recursive Bayesian speaker–listener reasoning yields specificity implicatures but cannot derive Horn’s principle from utterance costs alone; letting the agents be uncertain about the lexicon breaks the symmetry, so costlier signals go to less likely meanings in one-shot games without equilibrium refinements, and two online games with novel symbols show people drawing both implicatures without prior conventions. | Read |
| NOTE-617 | Defaults in Update Semantics | Sets out update semantics (meaning as change of information state), proves a dynamic system reduces to static propositions exactly when updates are total, idempotent, persistent, monotone and strengthening, and shows epistemic “might” and “presumably” are tests that fail persistence. Gives a decidable non-monotonic logic of default rules in which specificity and other priorities follow from coherence and applicability conditions, with predictions that differ from Reiter’s, Delgrande’s, Asher and Morreau’s and inheritance-net theories. | Read |
| NOTE-622 | Making It Explicit | In the core of chapter 3, asserting undertakes a commitment, licenses others to reassert it and takes on a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged. Entitlement passes by justification (across contents) and by deferral (between people), and holds by default until challenged. Each interlocutor keeps score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so scorekeeping is doubly perspectival. A speech act’s significance is the change it makes to the scores, determined by its content’s inferential role. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-627 | Informative communication in word production and word learning | Writes the informative speaker down: utility is −D_KL(intended meaning ‖ literal word meaning), so a speaker referring to one object picks a true word with probability ∝ |extension|^(−α), the size principle from communicative premises. Learners who know the referent and invert this speaker bet on novel-word meanings as predicted (r = .93); speakers’ free descriptions follow informativeness only weakly (r = .19), and colour terms not at all. | Read |
| NOTE-634 | Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games | A listener who inverts, by Bayes’ rule, a speaker choosing words by informativeness to a literal listener, combined with an empirically measured salience prior, predicts mean listener bets in simple three-object reference games at r = .99 with no fitted parameters, and the speaker model predicts speaker bets at r = .98. | Read |
| NOTE-644 | Semantic Unification | Puts basic DRT into sheaf form: a DRS is a section of a presheaf of consistent literals, an anaphoric resolution is a cover by variable maps, and the discourse’s meaning is the gluing, unique if it exists (Proposition 1). All the interpretive work is in choosing the cover; the only obstruction to gluing shown is inconsistency, so the paper models context dependence and ambiguity, not contextuality in the Abramsky–Brandenburger sense. Its probabilistic section ranks covers by summed corpus counts, not by gluing distributions. | Read |
| NOTE-648 | Quantum-Like Contextuality in Large Language Models | Builds a three-sentence anaphora schema with the support of the PR prism, instantiates it 51,966,480 times from Simple English Wikipedia, and takes one referent probability per sentence from BERT: 0.148% of the models pass a signalling-corrected sheaf test and 71.1% the CbD test. Because the schema fixes the support, both verdicts depend only on how uncertain BERT is in the three sentences; the tie to embedding distance is a softmax identity with weak correlations. | Read |
| NOTE-710 | boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: collapsed contexts | Networked publics remove the boundaries that kept a person’s social contexts apart. Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist while the audiences are segmented, and collide when the medium brings them together. People manage the collision by scripting it (a wedding), by noticing it (meeting the boss while out with friends), or by rebuilding walls (privacy settings, false details). Online, the collision often goes unseen by the person it happens to. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-734 | Grice — Logic and Conversation | pp. 45–47 only: conversational implicatures are to be tied to a Cooperative Principle (contribute what the accepted purpose of the talk exchange requires) and to maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. Grice flags the second Quantity maxim as disputable, defers Relation, and calls the information-exchange framing too narrow. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-735 | Grice — Meaning | Speaker meaning is analysed as an intention to produce an effect in an audience by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention; the effect must be one recognition can give a reason for, not merely cause. Timeless meaning is to be explained from occasion meaning. It is an analysis of meaning, offered “roughly”, not of illocutionary acts. | Read |
| NOTE-736 | Strawson — Intention and Convention in Speech Acts | Austin’s thesis that illocutions are conventional fails for warnings, entreaties and objections. Their force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention: Grice’s three intentions plus a fourth, with uptake as the audience’s grasp of it. The scheme strains on orders and fails on institutional acts. What all illocutions share is an overt intention meant to be understood. | Read |
| NOTE-750 | Abdulhai et al. — How LLMs Distort Our Written Language | Three studies of LLM-assisted writing. Heavy LLM use in an essay task made judge-labelled neutral stances 68.9% more common. LLM revisions of 2021 student essays moved them further, and all in one direction, in sentence-embedding space than the students’ own revisions did. LLM-written ICLR 2026 reviews named clarity and relevance less often. “Meaning” is measured by embedding position and by an LLM judge, never by the writers. | Read |
| NOTE-803 | Davidson et al. — Do different prompting methods yield a common task representation? | Function vectors extracted from short instructions raise zero-shot accuracy, but they are built from mostly different attention heads than demonstration function vectors (4 to 7 of the top 20 shared), the two add rather than substitute, and swapping heads and activations between them costs accuracy asymmetrically. Under this method there is no common task representation across the two presentations, only partly overlapping mechanisms; the authors note they cannot prove the negative. | Read |
| NOTE-1007 | Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma — Putting pain in its proper place | Three online studies on the “pain is in my fingertip, the fingertip is in my mouth” argument. People reject its conclusion for pain about as much as for tissue damage and inflammation, and accept it for a paper-clip; across fourteen items, acceptance tracks how misleading the conclusion is rated; and “technically speaking” wording raises acceptance. The authors explain the argument’s failure by implicature, not by an intensional “pain” or a non-spatial “in”, and conclude that the data favour a bodily conception of pain. | Read |
| NOTE-1338 | Ward & Marco — pragmatic-similarity judgments | The first set of human pragmatic-similarity ratings: 693 pairs of a spoken dialog utterance and a re-enactment of it, made six ways so that similarity varies, rated on a 1–5 slider by 6–9 judges in three four-hour sessions, two English and one Spanish, 5,532 ratings in all. Mean pairwise Pearson correlation between judges was 0.45, 0.72 and 0.66 by session. It rose with experience and fell for pairs that differ in wording (0.80 in Session 2 without them). The 0.45 the record cites is the first session’s single-judge figure. A nine-judge mean at that level has an estimated reliability near 0.88. | Read |
| NOTE-1339 | Srinivasan & Choi — TyDiP | TyDiP gives graded politeness ratings, three crowd annotators per item, for 500 Wikipedia talk-page requests in each of nine languages. Mean pairwise Spearman agreement is 0.46 for target-language items and 0.36 for English items rated by the same bilinguals. Leave-one-out human accuracy on the binary top-and-bottom-quartile set hovers around 90%, about 10 points above an English-trained XLM-R in six languages. But annotators were screened for agreement with that classifier, and the paper’s “across all nine languages” is false for Tamil. | Read |
| NOTE-1344 | Osmelak et al. — PETra | PETra is a corpus of about 3,000 English-source sentence pairs from TED-Multi and Europarl, in twelve target languages, in which a translation adds or replaces material to make culture-bound knowledge explicit: unit conversions, entity descriptions and specifications, translator glosses. Candidates come from null alignments filtered to pairs with a named entity, and a BERT classifier trained by active learning on German and Spanish finds the rest. Measurement conversion is the largest category. No inter-annotator agreement is reported, the text points to a single annotator, and three quarters of the pairs were found by the classifier, so the labels are not a validated measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1345 | Singh et al. — VakyArth | VakyArth is 578 items written by four native speakers, one per language, for Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Malayalam, over five phenomena and three formats. Five LLMs do better on MCQ than NLI in every model–language pair, and when wrong they lean to the literal reading. COMET tracks one native rater’s pragmatic-adequacy scores at r = 0.81. The translation items are not the MCQ and NLI items: in the release, 1 of 204 translation sources overlaps an inference item. So the finding that translation “does not track” pragmatic understanding compares different items. No agreement between people is reported anywhere. | Read |
| NOTE-1432 | boyd — Taken Out of Context: networked publics and context collapse | In boyd’s full chapters on networked publics, collapsed contexts are one of three dynamics produced by four properties of networked media: without spatial, social and temporal boundaries, distinct contexts are hard to keep apart, and a performer may not see the collision. The teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation read by an unintended audience that lacks its context, and their remedy is to control the audience, not to unify the presentation. The evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict when audiences are kept apart against when they meet. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1435 | Gutt — Translation and Relevance (thesis, 1989) | Gutt’s thesis puts translation under Sperber and Wilson’s interpretive use. Utterances resemble each other to the degree that the assumptions each communicates in its own cognitive environment overlap, so identical propositional form does not guarantee identical interpretation. A translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it relevant to its audience, which is a context-dependent standard. Direct translation is complete interpretive resemblance in the context the original envisaged; its communicative clues, from word order to connectives and greetings, are fixed by their effect on interpretation, not by their form. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1445 | Berdini — Rationality as the Normative Dimension of Speech Acts | Berdini rejects Searle’s rule-based account of the deontology of speech acts. Meaning cannot fix which act is performed, so she adopts Bach and Harnish’s inferential model, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s expressed attitude from what is said, mutual beliefs and presumptions. She quotes Bach and Harnish that illocutionary acts at best create mutual beliefs about rights and obligations, which they call a moral question. She proposes, without argument, that the presumption of the interlocutor’s rationality is the basic normativity of communication. | Read |
| NOTE-1453 | Harnish — Commitments and Speech Acts | Harnish sets the Gricean expressed-attitude theory against normative theories of illocution. On Bach and Harnish, communicative acts are individuated by the attitude the speaker expresses, that is, reflexively intends the hearer to take the utterance as reason to ascribe. Institutional acts are a separate class. Searle’s account of how speech creates commitment is unexplained, and Alston’s rule-subjection analysis fails. Expressing the belief that P and taking responsibility for P may be equivalent, so the normative theory may be the same facts redescribed. Teasing and the audience’s standing are not discussed. | Read |
| NOTE-1487 | Wilhoit — Ventriloquism’s methodological scope | A short reply to Cooren (2014). Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction makes conversation analysis its method of choice, so ventriloquism carries epistemological and methodological commitments that other communication traditions will not share, and it cannot be the open metamodel Craig (1999) called for. Dialogue is instead coming from CCO studies that use other methods. It says nothing about agents being entified. | Read |