Books on the topic 'Conversation analysis. Speech Act Theory'

The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe explores the complex history of medieval pragmatic theory and ideas and metapragmatic awareness across social discourses. Pragmatic thinking about language and communication is revealed in grammar, semiotics, philosophy, and literature. Part historical reconstruction, part social history, part language theory, Amsler supplements the usual materials for the history of medieval linguistics and discusses the pragmatic implications of grammatical treatises on the interjection, Bacon’s sign theory, logic texts, Chaucer’s poetry, inquisitors’ accounts of heretic speech, and life-writing by William Thorpe and Margery Kempe. Medieval and contemporary pragmatic theory are contrasted in terms of their philosophical and linguistic orientations. Aspects of medieval pragmatic theory and practice, especially polysemy, equivocation, affective speech, and recontextualization, show how pragmatic discourse informed social controversies and attitudes toward sincere, vague, and heretical speech. Relying on Bakhtinian dialogism, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, Amsler situates a key period in the history of linguistics within broader social and discursive fields of practice.

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

This chapter introduces the important concepts of intentionality, ambiguity, deception, institutional power, and the discourse context in the context of the Inverted Pyramid approach in order to reveal the deceptive ambiguity used by police, prosecutors, undercover agents, and complainants in the fifteen criminal cases described in the following chapters. The Inverted Pyramid is a heuristic for analyzing continuous conversation. This chapter introduces and defines the elements of the Inverted Pyramid, noting that it is most useful to begin analysis of criminal case language evidence with the largest language element, the speech event, followed in descending order with the increasingly smaller language elements of the participants’ schemas, their individual agendas (as revealed by topics and responses), their speech acts, conversational strategies used by law representatives of the government, and the lexicon and grammar, which is the language element in which the alleged smoking gun evidence commonly is thought to reside).

This chapter analyses Republican fragments of informal conversations. Elite informal conversations (frequently defined as sermo by the sources) were an everyday event in politics. Informal exchanges framed the way in which political deals were made, opinions were tentatively questioned, news circulated, and Roman senators looked for information. They constituted part of public speech and of political communication, although just at their limits and in a grey zone. There were no parties in Rome, and no stable political agreements either, but short-term alliances. Therefore, senators had to be constantly looking for new allies. In this context, informal conversations were crucial. This necessity of contacts was based on socialization, which provided the opportunity for meetings that allowed time to discuss politics. Therefore, the analysis of fragments of informal conversations illuminates the use of rhetoric in unofficial settings and moments, but also exposes how such informal meetings defined late Republican politics.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Miranda warning, pointing out the opportunities it provides for creating ambiguity. Following this, the chapter points out the ways police interviewers used ambiguity with juvenile murder suspect Kevin Rogers in Houston, Texas, and juvenile suspect Michael Carter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The third case describes the law enforcement interviews with Major Dragan Jokic of the Serbian army during the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia at The Hague. Major Jokic was accused of abetting genocide during the Srebrenica massacre. In all three cases, analysis demonstrates the ways that these government officials used ambiguity deceptively during their interviews with their suspects. This analysis includes the way the interviewers’ used deceptive ambiguity while presenting the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and lexicon and grammar.

The present research constitutes as a research-intervention carried out with Control Agents of Zoonoses (CCZ) - Dengue Control Program. The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention of the Dialogical Conversation Wheels for refinement of the perception of Quality of Life of these workers. In the midst of this, the variations of the perception of the Quality of Life by the participants when inserted in the Wheels are identified. For that, the WHOQOL-bref instrument is used to collect quantitative data related to the Quality of Life of the research subjects, and the Dialogical Conversation Wheels as a tool for collecting qualitative data and also as a mediating space between the questionnaire and the workers. The methodology used thus involves both the quantitative and content analysis of these data, as well as an analysis of the workers' discourse from their speeches in the Dialogical Conversation Wheels, in which the researcher appropriates a Freirean look to carry out the discussion, which presents the speech of the participants of the Wheels itself in an elucidatory and explanatory way. . From the analysis of the four domains evaluated by the WHOQOL-breaf: Physical, Psychological, Social and Environmental, what can be perceived about the differences of scores (percentage) between the moments of the research, is, firstly, that there is a significant change in the perception of QV between at least two of the moments, which is expressed between moments 0 and 1, with the realization of five wheels between them.The main result that can be perceived concerns the fact that the Dialogical Conversation Wheel fulfills its objective, as the aspects related to quality of life are discussed, the return to the questionnaire is carried out in a more reflective way, in which the instrument itself can approach the reality of these people. It is also explicit that it is not any group that allows us to refine the perception about quality of life, since the Wheel of Dialogic Conversation is organized in such a way as to provide reception, encounters / confrontations of the subjects with the other, in a singular way, with himself, facing the stagnation and the massification of his daily life to denaturalize what is constructed as his life.

Colonial Phantoms argues that Dominican cultural expression from the late nineteenth century to the present day reveals the ghosted singularities of Dominican history and demographic composition. For centuries, the territory hosted a majority mixed-race free population whose negotiations with colonial power were deeply ambivalent. Disquieted by the predominating black freedom, Western discourses ghosted—mis-categorized or erased—the Dominican Republic from the most important global conversations and decisions of the 19th century. What kind of national culture do you create when leaders of the world powers, on whose recognition you depend, rarely remember your nation’s name? Dominicans, both island and diasporic, have expressed their dissatisfaction with dominant descriptors and interpellations through literature, music, and speech acts. These expressions run the gamut from ultra-conservative, anti-Haitian nationalist literature to present-day Afro-Latinx activism. Dominant fields of knowledge constructed to account for various modes of being in the Americas have not been able to discern, and, in some cases, have helped to obscure, the kinds of free black subjectivity that emerged in the Dominican Republic. Analyzing literature, government documents, music, the visual arts, public monuments, film, and ephemeral and stage performance, this book intervenes at the level of knowledge production and analysis by disrupting some of the fields. In so doing, it establishes a framework for placing Dominican expressive culture and historical formations at the forefront of a number of scholarly investigations of colonial modernity in the Americas, the African diaspora, geographic displacement (e.g., migration and exile), and international divisions of labor.

It is familiar from speech act theory how saying so can make it so. When the C.E.O. declares that no more overtime will be approved, for example, the C.E.O. thereby enacts a new company policy; her words effect an immediate change to the norms and policies operative in that company. Clearly, speech can enact facts about what is permissible and the familiar way for speech to do this is via an exercise of speaker authority. In this essay, though, I argue for a different way that speech enacts permissibility facts. Starting in the kinematics (i.e. the mechanics) of conversation, I first argue that conversational contributions routinely enact norms for the very conversation to which they contribute. I then argue that this phenomenon generalizes in a way that illuminates the crucial role of speech in enacting and perpetuating social hierarchy.

The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but is the socially recognized capacity to make one’s words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another person something and expect to be believed, and what we learn from others in this way is the basis for most of what we take ourselves to know about the world. The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this fundamental human phenomenon. The account concentrates on the difference between what may be revealed in one’s speech (like a regional accent) and what we explicitly claim and make ourselves answerable for. Some prominent themes include the meaning of sincerity in speech, the nature of mutuality and how it differs from “mind reading,” the interplay between the first-person and the second-person perspectives in conversation, and the nature of the speech act of illocution as developed by philosophers such as J. L. Austin and Paul Grice. Ordinary dialogue is the locus of a kind of intersubjective understanding that is distinctive to the transmission of reasons in human testimony, and The Exchange of Words is an original and integrated account of this basic way of being informative and in touch with one another.

This article introduces the linguistic subdiscipline of pragmatics and shows how this is being applied to the development of spoken dialogue systems — currently perhaps the most important applications area for computational pragmatics. It traces the history of pragmatics from its philosophical roots, and outlines some key notions of theoretical pragmatics — speech acts, illocutionary force, the cooperative principle and relevance. It then discusses the application of pragmatics to dialogue modelling, especially the development of spoken dialogue systems intended to interact with human beings in task-oriented scenarios such as providing travel information and shows how and why computational pragmatics differs from ‘linguistic’ pragmatics, and how pragmatics contributes to the computational analysis of dialogues. One major illustration of this is the application of speech act theory in the analysis and synthesis of service interactions in terms of dialogue acts.