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The phenomenon ofmisunderstandingis a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats tointersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of quantity (Grice, in: Cole, Morgan (eds) Syntax and semantics: speech acts, vol III, pp 41–58, Academic Press, New York, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over-specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is also unclear whether referential redundancy hinders or facilitates comprehension. We present an information-theoretic explanation for the use of over-specification in visually-situated communication, which quantifies the amount of uncertainty regarding the referent as entropy (Shannon in Bell Syst Tech J 5:10, 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x, 1948). Examining both the comprehension and production of over-specifications, we present evidence that (a) listeners’ processing is facilitated by the use of redundancy as well as by a greater reduction of uncertainty early on in the utterance, and (b) that at least for some speakers, listeners’ processing concerns influence their encoding of over-specifications: Speakers were more likely to use redundant adjectives when these adjectives reduced entropy to a higher degree than adjectives necessary for target identification.

We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

Speakers tend to lengthen the durations of words when a phonologically overlapping word has recently been produced. Although there are multiple accounts of why lengthening occurs, all of these accounts generally assume that competition at some point in the production-comprehension process leads to lengthening. We investigated the contexts that lead to competition and consequent lengthening of target word duration. In three experiments, we manipulated the contexts in which a target word was produced. Speakers produced simple descriptions of animations involving referents that shared initial phonology with another potential referent (e.g., hat and hand). In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated whether the related referent (i.e. hat) was named by the speaker themselves, by another person, or was unmentioned. Experiment 2 additionally made speakers aware of competitors in the environment. In both experiments, we found that lengthening does not occur whenever there are two referents in the display that could be confused, even when it is clear that they are confusable. Instead, speakers only lengthened target words when the speaker or another person had named the phonologically related word out loud. Experiment 3 tested whether the task relevance of a phonological competitor influenced naming and found that speakers lengthen words that overlap with previously produced words, even when they were no longer competitors in the display. We propose that an auditory memory account best explains these results and discuss the implications of these findings for other accounts of lengthening.

This paper explores the features and interactional functions of collaboratively constructed TCUs (CCTs) in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin daily conversations. Adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, the study explores the sequential features of the CCTs and bodily-visual resources co-occurring with the CCTs, such as gaze orientations and gestures. Two categories have been identified based on the participants’ roles in the question-answer sequences. First, the answerer initiates the response to the question, and the questioner collaboratively completes the response. The analysis shows that the questioners are not conveying the action of answering the question but assuming the answer to the question. Second, one answerer initiates the response to the question, and another one collaboratively completes the response. The data demonstrates that this type of CCTs usually involves the two question-recipients with more or less equal epistemic access to the referent.

In order to describe how humans represent meaning in the brain, one must be able to account for not just concrete words but, critically, also abstract words, which lack a physical referent. Hebbian formalism and optimization are basic principles of brain function, and they provide an appealing approach for modeling word meanings based on word co-occurrences. We provide proof of concept that a statistical model of the semantic space can account for neural representations of both concrete and abstract words, using MEG. Here, we built a statistical model using word embeddings extracted from a text corpus. This statistical model was used to train a machine learning algorithm to successfully decode the MEG signals evoked by written words. In the model, word abstractness emerged from the statistical regularities of the language environment. Representational similarity analysis further showed that this salient property of the model co-varies, at 280–420 ms after visual word presentation, with activity in regions that have been previously linked with processing of abstract words, namely the left-hemisphere frontal, anterior temporal and superior parietal cortex. In light of these results, we propose that the neural encoding of word meanings can arise through statistical regularities, that is, through grounding in language itself.

In all spoken languages, speakers use demonstratives - words like this and that e to refer to entities in their immediate environment. But which factors determine whether they use one demonstrative (this) or another (that)? Here we report the results of an experiment examining the effects of referent visibility, referent distance, and addressee location on the production of demonstratives by speakers of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), an Amazonian language with four demonstratives, and speakers of Dutch (Indo-European; Netherlands, Belgium), which has two demonstratives. We found that Ticuna speakers' use of demonstratives displayed effects of addressee location and referent distance, but not referent visibility. By contrast, under comparable conditions, Dutch speakers displayed sensitivity only to referent distance. Interestingly, we also observed that Ticuna speakers consistently used demonstratives in all referential utterances in our experimental paradigm, while Dutch speakers strongly preferred to use definite articles. Taken together, these findings shed light on the significant diversity found in demonstrative systems across languages. Additionally, they invite researchers studying exophoric demonstratives to broaden their horizons by cross-linguistically investigating the factors involved in speakers' choice of demonstratives over other types of referring expressions, especially articles. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This article, from a conversation analytic perspective, explores the functions of the Korean ‘subject’ particle ka, ‘topic’ particle nun, and zero particle, as used by children for formulating WH-questions (e.g., ‘What is this-ka/nun/o?’). Using video-recorded adult-child interactions, it describes how the three particles are deployed for organizing the information-seeking action as different types of stance-taking actions. The ka-marked WH-question is shown to be embedded in contexts where the target referent is oriented to as a ‘problem’, as revealed by the way a child speaker disjunctively solicits an adult recipient's assistance, often displaying a negatively valenced affective stance. Zero-marking, by contrast, embodies the child speaker's stance towards being congruent with the terms of the current activity, with the inquiry being made about the ‘situated relevance’ of the target referent therein. The use of the nun-marked WH-question is remedially motivated, with the child speaker's stance displayed towards enlivening/sustaining the sequence, and keeping an adult recipient involved as the interlocutor. The findings indicate that children's competence matches that of adults not only in implementing an information-seeking action, but also in organizing distinct types of stance and recipiency, through managing the three particles as interactional resources.

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers’ choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rati...

A range of studies investigating how overspecified referring expressions (e.g., the stripy cup to describe a single cup) affect referent identification have found it to slow identification, speed it up, or yield no effect on processing speed. To date, these studies have all used adjectives that are semantically arbitrary within the sentential context. In addition to the standard ‘informativeness’ design that manipulates the presence of contrast sets, we controlled the semantic relevance of adjectives in discourse to reveal whether overspecifying adjectives would affect processing when relevant to the context (fed the hungry rabbit) compared to when they are not (tickled the hungry rabbit). Using a self-paced reading paradigm with a sample of adult participants (N = 31), we found that overspecified noun phrases were read more slowly than those that distinguished a member of a contrast set. Importantly, this penalty was mitigated when adjectives were semantically relevant. Contrary to classical approaches, we show that modifiers do not necessarily presuppose a set, and that referential and semantic information is integrated rapidly in pragmatic processing. Our data support Fukumura and van Gompel's (2017) meaning-based redundancy hypothesis, which predicts that it is the specific semantic representation of the overspecifying adjective that determines whether a penalty is incurred, rather than generic Gricean expectations. We extend this account using a novel experimental design.

National Innovation Systems are found to be impacted by different cultural facets of the referent ecosystem; yet the findings are conflicting. This study undertakes a cross-country comparison to de...

The article analyses the loss of agreement between the dative clitic and its plural nominal referent in indirect object clitic-doubling in Spanish spoken in Galicia. On the basis of the previously defended hypothesis that number disagreement makes part of a grammaticalisation process whereby the clitic becomes a case affix, the paper examines some internal factors which lack consensus in previous studies, such as the relation between (in)transitivity and position of the clitic or animacity of nominal referents of the IO, and other external factors. Data analysis reveals that the percentage of disagreement in this area is much higher than in other Spanish speaking areas. This fact might be a consequence of language contact with Galician, a language where number inflection in the dative clitic is neutralised. To verify this hypothesis, the paper explores the relation between the number of occurrences of disagreement and the level of bilingualism of the speakers.

This study examines, from a conversation-analytic perspective, the use of [NP+wa?] format turns ([NP+wa?] turns) by young Japanese children aged 23–33 months, who have started using the so-called topic marker wa. Most of their [NP+wa?] turns are used in one of the following environments: 1) the NP in an [NP+wa?] turn refers to a person or object absent from the scene, 2) the NP refers to an object of noticing that is present at the scene, and 3) [NP+wa?] turns are used repeatedly. I will show that each of these situations provides co-participants with guidance to determine how the NP referent is relevant to the here-and-now and what kind of response is expected. I will then claim that [NP+wa?] turns provide these children with a convenient and powerful tool to engage with the everyday social world around them; that is, to explore how the life-world is organized and ordered. Furthermore, I will propose that wa can be seen as marking the speaker's claim that the recipient should be able to detect the preceding NP referent's relevance to the here-and-now. I claim that this is what is fundamentally involved in the “topic-marking” function that is conventionally associated with the particle wa.

Often, political theories of the subject detach the subject from nature or else reduce the subject to a mere aggregate of natural features. Consequently, many attempts to articulate theories of the subject purport to preserve political theoretical concepts such as freedom, normativity, or responsibility by means of disjoining the subject from its environment. This article proposes a new theory of the ecologically conditioned subject. Developing the concept of companion ecologies, the article employs three examples – architecture, the human microbiome, and indigenous Amazonian ontologies – to show how theorizing the subject at all necessitates theorizing her ecological conditions, as well. Companion ecologies do not refer merely to our environmental conditions, then. The term also functions as a referent. Ultimately, companion ecologies reveal that the individuation and formation of the subject is a process that takes place, paradoxically, only because of the ecological plurality underlying it. From this, I derive a minimalist theory of the subject for which subjects are materially and temporally extended and causally distributed morphogenetic sites, which emerge only in the context of interactive, multiscalar, and overlapping companion ecologies.

This paper analyzes pronominal competition and its pragmatic consequences in Scottish Gaelic (Celtic). In cases of competition cross-linguistically, use of a particular pronoun can trigger pragmatic effects like negative appraisal (N-effects). Although Scottish Gaelic exhibits a superficially similar pattern of competition and negative appraisal, I show that existing accounts based on referential potential (Sichel and Wiltschko 2020) and structure (Patel-Grosz and Grosz 2017) are unable to capture the Scottish Gaelic pattern. Instead, I argue that negative appraisal in Scottish Gaelic stems from the absence of positive appraisal, signaled via use of exempt anaphors. Following Charnavel (2020), I propose that exempt anaphors are anteceded by a null prolog introduced by a logophoric operator, which requires its complement to be evaluated from the perspective of prolog’s antecedent. By using an exempt anaphor, a speaker adopts the perspective of the pronoun’s referent, indicating positive appraisal since they are willing to take the referent’s point of view. Yet when a speaker chooses not to use an exempt anaphor, they refuse to make this perspective shift, which translates as negative appraisal. Apparent N-effects in Scottish Gaelic are, then, better characterized as not-P-effects.

This paper explores the extent to which L1-Korean L2-English speakers’ L1 influences the computation of conversational implicatures for the definite and demonstrative determiners the and that in English. Both the and that denote unique referents, but that carries implication of contrast (Roberts, 2002). Following Submaxim 2 of the Gricean Quantity Maxim, using that instead of unmarked the implicates that the referent is being implicitly contrasted with other members of the same noun. Korean has no equivalent for the and the demonstrative ku ‘that’ is situated on the semantic scale between the and that. This partial overlap could influence L1-Korean L2-English speakers’ implicature computation even though ku also carries implication of contrast. Acceptability judgment data indicate that unlike native speakers, L2 speakers did not show sensitivity to infelicitous use of that, indicating difficulty computing implicatures. Results are discussed in terms of crosslinguistic influence at the semantics-pragmatics interface in L2 acquisition.

This study intended to identify which referent features are more frequently selected in the naming of the concept class of places and, in turn, determine which are the preferred conceptualizations in Mapudungun. This language is mainly spoken by Mapuche people in central and southern areas of Chile and in the Central-West area of Argentina. To identify the features of this conceptualization, a cognitive-semantic analysis of the conceptual patterns of 112 nominal compounds pertaining to the concept subclasses of natural places (intervened and non-intervened) and non-natural places (installations and territorial divisions) was conducted. Results show that, for non-intervened natural places, an entity present in the natural place is preferably selected in the name, whereas for intervened places, an agricultural activity or an animal associated to the place is preferably chosen. Concerning installations, the preferred conceptual pattern specifies, by means of the constituent ruka ‘house’, the man-made nature of the place. Regarding territorial divisions, the preferred naming pattern combines two place concepts. This information is crucial for the creation of neologisms in Mapudungun because it guarantees that newly formed lexical units are coherent with the Mapuche worldview and do not import foreign models. Resumen El presente estudio se propuso identificar qué aspectos del referente son seleccionados con mayor frecuencia en la denominación de los conceptos de lugar y, a su vez, determinar cuáles son las conceptualizaciones preferidas en mapudungún, lengua del pueblo mapuche, hablada principalmente en el centro y sur de Chile y en el centro-oeste de Argentina. Para lograr esto, se realizó un análisis cognitivo-semántico de los patrones conceptuales de 112 compuestos nominales relativos a las subclases conceptuales de lugares naturales (no intervenidos e intervenidos) y no naturales (instalaciones y divisiones territoriales). Los resultados muestran que en la denominación de los lugares naturales no intervenidos se selecciona preferentemente una entidad presente en el lugar natural; mientras que, en los intervenidos, lo es una actividad agrícola o un animal asociado al lugar. En las instalaciones, el patrón conceptual preferente especifica, mediante el constituyente ruka 'casa', la naturaleza artificial del lugar; mientras que en las divisiones territoriales, el patrón conceptual preferente combina dos conceptos de lugar. Esta información es crucial para la creación de neologismos en mapudungún, pues garantiza que las unidades léxicas recién formadas sean coherentes con la visión del mundo de los mapuches y no importen modelos ajenos. Résumé Cette étude vise à identifier quels aspects du référent sont choisis plus fréquemment pour nommer des concepts de lieu et, au même temps, à décrire les conceptualisations préférées en langue Mapudungun, langue du peuple Mapuche qui est parlée surtout dans le centre et sud du Chili et dans le centre-ouest de l’Argentine. Dans ce but, nous avons mené une analyse sémantique-cognitive des patrons conceptuels reflétés dans les dénominations de 112 noms composés appartenant aux classes conceptuelles de lieux naturels (exploités et non exploités) et lieux non naturels (installations et répartitions territoriales). Les résultats montrent que pour les lieux naturels non exploités, une entité présente dans le lieu est choisie de préférence ; tandis que pour les lieux exploités, c’est une activité agricole ou un animal associé au lieu qui est choisi le plus souvent. Pour les installations, le patron conceptuel préferentiel souligne le caractère artificiel du lieu au moyen du formant ruka ‘maison’ ; alors que les répartitions territoriales combinent deux concepts de lieu. Cettes données sont très utiles pour informer la création de néologismes en mapudungun, car elles permettent d’assurer que les nouvelles unités sont formées de façon cohérente avec la vision du monde du peuple mapuche et on n’importe pas de modèles étrangers.

This study illustrates Korean speakers' routine practice of deploying the so-called subject particle ka in negatively valenced questions that display incipient disagreement, express disbelief, or make a challenge or complaint. An examination of 18 naturally occurring face-to-face conversations shows that a speaker's selection of the particle in such questions is contingent on neither the grammatical role of the referent (subject) nor the referent's information state (new vs. old). It is instead consistently contingent on the interactional job being done by the question (action formation) and the question's position in the sequential and interactional environment: the speaker questions how a referent is represented or understood in a prior turn, or notes a problem with the current state of the referent, as departing from the speaker's knowledge, understanding, or expectations. The particle serves to bring the target referent to the fore as the object of trouble at that moment of the interaction while leaving other possible candidates behind. This study illuminates the interactional import of the particle ka by demonstrating how it contributes to speakers' practices for managing discrepancies in their knowledge, understanding, or expectations regarding objects or matters in the material and social world with other participants of the talk-in-interaction.

The results of a comprehensive study of color names derived from the names of colored stones in the system of color names of the modern Russian language are presented in the article. The research was conducted in 2018-2020 in two stages using the methods of content analysis and an online psycholinguistic experiment. At the first stage, the state of the semantic group of names of colored stones, potential objects-referents of color names, was assessed by analyzing four different groups of sources: specialized dictionaries of colored stones, dictionaries of color, individual author's dictionaries of color names and explanatory dictionaries of the modern Russian language. At the second stage, the state of the color terms formed from the names of colored stones in the active vocabulary of modern Russian speakers was investigated on the basis of data from an online psycholinguistic experiment, in which 2,457 people aged 16 to 95 took part. The results of a comparative analysis of the lists of colored stones-prototypes of color names in the passive and active dictionaries of the speakers of the modern Russian language are presented. The scope of denotation and the function of color names derived from the names of colored stones are considered. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the derivative productivity of the names of referent objects of the studied class and the frequency of use of individual color names in the responses of Russian speakers with different socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, professional experience).

In this study, stress diacritics were used to investigate the processing of stress information in lexical decision. We ran two experiments in Italian, a language in which stress position is not predictable by rule and only final stress—that is, the less common pattern—is orthographically marked with a diacritic. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task, two factors were manipulated: the stress pattern of words—antepenultimate (nondominant) and penultimate (dominant)—and the presence/absence of the diacritics, signalling the stress position. Participants were faster to categorise stimuli as words when they bear dominant than nondominant stress. However, the advantage disappeared when the diacritic was used. In Experiment 2, a same-different verification task was used in which participants had to decide if a referent word and a target were same (carota-CAROTA, /ka’rɔta/; tavolo-TAVOLO, /’tavolo/) or different. We compared two conditions requiring a “different” response, in which referent and target with dominant and nondominant stress were congruent (caròta-CAROTA; tàvolo-TAVOLO) or incongruent (càrota-CAROTA; tavòlo-TAVOLO) with the word’s stress. For words with dominant stress, “different” responses were faster in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. This congruency effect was not observed for words with nondominant stress pattern. Overall, the data suggest that stress information is based on lexical phonology, and the stress dominance effect has a lexical base in word recognition.

International audience; Our interest is in the development of modeling activities that link knowledge in various mathematical fields and other scientific disciplines. Looking at mathematics education research we highlight the benefits and limitations of "problem-solving" and of approaches that involve translation between the real world and mathematics. Science education seldom takes mathematics into account. Its contribution is the conception of an "empirical referent". Using epistemological studies, we highlight examples of modeling situations supported by a plurality of models and an organization of work that allows students to engage with them. To do this we adopt the theoretical framework of connected workingspaces. A case study shows how students create linkages between the workspaces and the benefits of the connections on their understanding of concepts at stake.; Nous nous intéressons à la conception d’activités de modélisation pour la mise en relation de connaissances dans divers champs des mathématiques et d’autres disciplines scientifiques. En didactique des mathématiques, nous soulignons les apports, mais aussi les limites des approches "problem solving" et "translation entre réalité et mathématiques". La didactique des sciences prend quant à elle peu en compte les mathématiques. Son apport est dans la conception d’un "référent empirique". A partir d’études épistémologiques, nous privilégions des situations de modélisation s’appuyant sur une pluralité de modèles et une organisation du travail des élèves qui leur permette de confronter ces modèles. Nous adoptons pour cela le cadre théorique des espaces de travail connectés. Un exemple de situation montre comment les élèves créent des connexions entre espaces de travail et les apports de ces connexions à leur compréhension des concepts en jeu.

This paper presents an original semantic theory of proper names that aims to cover both non-empty and empty proper names. According to the theory, proper names have simple assignable hyperintensions as their content. This content provides the referent (if there is one) for which the proper name stands. The paper further describes the role of the proposed content of (empty) proper names within the compositional semantics of problematic sentences. I stress the difference between the content of a sentence (i.e. its hyperintension) and the proposition (i.e. a mapping from possible worlds to truth values) denoted by that sentence.

The aim of this study is to describe the use of the pronouns le and les in the Spanish spoken in the province of Barcelona. We analyzed a sample of 12 reading tasks and 22 oral interviews taken from two corpora: the FEC (Fonología del Español Contemporáneo, Pustka et alii 2018) corpus (with mainly Catalan-dominant bilingual speakers) and the Corpus oral de profesionales de la lengua castellana en Barcelona (Sinner 2001, with mainly Spanish-dominant bilinguals). In doing so, we took into account several linguistic variables as well as language dominance of the speakers in order to find out 1) if there is leísmo in Catalan Contact Spanish (although there is no equivalent of leísmo in Catalan) and if so, 2) which features of the referent and of the verb trigger leísmo in this variety, and 3) if Catalan-dominant bilinguals produce leísmo to a lesser extent. While the results of the reading task suggest that leísmo is not absent in the Spanish of Barcelona, there are only a few cases of leísmo in spontaneous speech in both corpora. Regarding the linguistic variables, we see that on the one hand, leísmo is not restricted to leísmo correcto in our corpora; on the other hand, the majority are fake-leismo cases. Thus, our data seem to suggest that the Spanish of Barcelona is only a fake-leísmo variety. Regarding the language dominance, however, we find that Catalan-dominant bilinguals do not produce fewer cases of leísmo, since the leísmo rate is higher in the FEC corpus.

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a characteristic hallmark of cognition and therefore not surprisingly a central topic in cognitive science. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour commonly observed in strictly controlled lab environments generalizes to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (i.e. anticipatory eye movements as observed in the visual world paradigm) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of i) immersing participants in naturalistic everyday scenes, ii) increasing the number of distractor objects present, iii) manipulating the location of referents in central versus peripheral vision, and iv) modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents in the experiment. Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed, even in the presence of 10 objects (hereby testing working memory) and when only 25% of all sentences contained a visually present referent (hereby testing error-based learning). The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, when referents were placed in peripheral vision. Together, our findings suggest that working memory may play an important role in predictive processing in everyday communication, but only in contexts where upcoming referents have been explicitly attended to prior to encountering the spoken referential act. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand in hand in future studies of human predictive behaviour.

On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent....

Previous studies have shown that visual information is a crucial input in early language learning. In the present study we examine what type of visual input helps preschoolers in acquiring nonnative phonological contrasts. Catalan/Spanish-speaking children (4–5 years, N = 47) participated in a task to assess their phonological discrimination abilities before and after a training. Three training conditions were presented: one with clear oral/visual speech information, one with an ostensive object-sound mapping, and one with a rich social interaction. Children’s looking patterns were tracked to examine their focus of interest while being trained. Results revealed that preschoolers’ discrimination abilities increase in all trained conditions, but the condition where the speaker created an ostensive object–sound mapping led to higher long-term gains (especially for younger children). Eye-tracking results further showed that children looked to the object of reference while being exposed to the novel phonological input, which may explain the higher learning gains in this condition. Our results indicate that preschoolers’ learning of nonnative phonological contrasts is particularly boosted when the speech input is accompanied by an object of reference that is signaled ostensively and contingently in the visual space, compared to when the visual space only contains clear oral/visual speech information or social interactivity cues.

Mill argued that names denote but do not connote. He also claimed that names can be used attributively, like ‘York’ in “This is York”. There seems to be, thus, a tension. For, in such a construal we attribute to the referent picked out by the demonstrative ‘this’ the property of carrying the name ‘York’ and, therefore, that the name connotes the referent as the bearer of the name. I will show how Perry's critical referentialism, in distinguishing between the reflexive content and the official or referential content of an utterance, helps us to dissolve this alleged tension without having to dismiss Mill's claims.

This paper analyses how different definitions of happiness affect the individual assessment of subjective wellbeing. Bearing in mind the production theory, we study the impact of definitions of happiness on how efficiently a set of determinants are used and converted into happiness. From a theoretical point of view, we discuss the role of the Conceptual Referent Theory within the affective-cognitive process of personal evaluation of happiness. We use data from the Understanding High Happiness in Latin America survey (2018), which includes a sample of people from Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and the USA, to investigate how happiness conceptual referents influence personal assessment using Stochastic Frontier Analysis. This method permits to assess the impact of different definitions of happiness on how a set of standard drivers like income and social relations are used and converted into perceived happiness. To this end, conceptual referents for happiness are treated as (in)efficiency factors. This study shows that the concept of happiness shapes how individuals value the same inputs. “Stoicism”, “virtue” and “enjoyment” emerge as the most efficient referents. Also, we observe that cross-country differences in the level of perceived happiness are associated with differences in the prevalence of conceptual referents. In the USA, where less efficient definitions prevail, people report lower levels of happiness.

When speakers mention referents for the first time in discourse, they can also accompany them with gestures. This study explores whether the semantic content expressed by such gestures – whether gestures focus on the entity itself or on an action that the referent is involved in – is related to discourse properties. We consider the potential effects of a referent's information status (brand-new/inferable), definiteness of the referring expression (indefinite/definite), and the clause structure in which it occurs (more/less specialized for referent introduction). Results suggest that ‘entity’ gestures specifically accompany brand-new referents expressed by indefinite nominals (e.g., indicating the shape of ‘a broom’), and in clause structures specialized for the introduction of referents (e.g., ‘there was a broom’). In contrast, ‘action’ gestures are more likely to occur with inferable referents expressed by definite nominals (e.g., pretending to hold the broomstick), and in less specialized clause structures focusing on events (e.g., ‘a spoon came flying in). The study highlights the importance of considering variations on the word, clause and discourse levels for understanding the semantic content of gestures.

This paper details different elicitation tasks that have been conducted with speakers of Kogi, an indigenous language of Northern Colombia, and discusses them with regard to their suitability for investigating epistemic marking. The expression of epistemicity, more precisely the recently proposed category of ‘engagement’, can be considered a distinctive characteristic of Kogi grammar. ‘Engagement’ refers to the encoding of shared/non-shared access in terms of knowledge, expectation (i.e. epistemic access) or attention (i.e. perceptual access) to a discourse object on part of the speech act participants (Evans et al. 2018). In Kogi, engagement is manifested in a set of (ad)nominal demonstratives in the use of which shared attention of speaker and addressee towards a referent plays a crucial role (Knuchel, forthcoming). Moreover, engagement is encoded in the verbal domain in four auxiliary prefixes which express (a)symmetries between speech act participants in epistemic access to a state of affairs, and reflect two different parameters: epistemic authority (i.e. whose knowledge is targeted) and (non)- shared access (i.e. whether it is exclusive to one of the speech act participants, or shared by both) (Bergqvist 2016). In order to study the use of these forms, a number of interactional stimuli-based tasks were carried out in which epistemic/perceptual access to a referent or state of affairs can, to a certain degree, be determined by the task design, and which allow for the observation of the participants' attentional states. A matching game based on the ‘Shape Classifier Task’ (Seifart 2003) provided particularly revealing data about the use of a demonstrative associated with joint attention. Epistemic prefixes were observed in the Family Problems Picture Task, an interactional story-telling task (FPPT, San Roque et al. 2012), where the markers are frequently used in the enactment of conversations between characters. The talk discusses the employed methods and obtained data, and furthermore introduces a set of picture stimuli currently under development. These stimuli are inspired by parts of the FPPT and are designed to elicit enacted conversations between characters that are involved in situations with assumed shared or non-shared access to knowledge.

Countless experiments have been devoted to understanding techniques through which memory might be improved. Many strategies uncovered in the literature are thought to act via the integration of contextual information from multiple distinct codes. However, the mnemonic benefits of these strategies often do not remain when there is no clear link between a word and its multisensory referent (e.g., in abstract words). To test the importance of this link, we asked participants to encode target words (ranging from concrete to abstract) either by drawing them, an encoding strategy recently proven to be reliable in improving memory, or writing them. Drawing provides a compelling test case because while other strategies (e.g., production, generation) shift focus to existing aspects of to-be-remembered information, drawing may forge a link with novel multisensory information, circumventing shortcomings of other memory techniques. Results indicated that while drawing’s benefit was slightly larger for concrete stimuli, the effect was present across the spectrum from abstract to concrete. These findings demonstrate that even for highly abstract concepts without a clear link to a visual referent, memory is reliably improved through drawing. An exploratory analysis using a deep convolutional neural network also provided preliminary evidence that in abstract words, drawings that were most distinctive were more likely to be remembered, whereas concrete items benefited from prototypicality. Together, these results indicate that while the advantageous effects of drawing exist across all levels of concreteness, the memory benefit is larger when words are concrete, suggesting a tight coupling between the drawing benefit and visual code.

This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and perform practices, including why they sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. The final section considers why an analytical focus on place is valuable, noting that place-based experiences and place-identities are formative of ontological security. It argues that treating interveners as a referent object provides opportunities to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement in the ontological security literature. Building on this, it argues that examining the emplaced security of interveners invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places.

The paper focuses on a specific type of referring legal provisions, in which the referring phrase contains a component that indicates the position of a certain fragment of the same text of a normative act by determining the position of that fragment in relation to the fragment in which the given referring phrase is located. Despite the fact that these referrals, called deictic, may be perceived as uncomplicated in structure and as functioning correctly in legal texts, many theoretical as well as practical problems arise during their drafting and legal interpretation. The article attempts to reveal, organize and name these problems basing on the conceptual grid formulated by Studnicki, Łachwa, Fall and Stabrawa as a universal, although not widely known outside Polish jurisprudence, tool for analysing and solving referring provisions as elements of various legal systems, especially continental ones. Texts of selected Polish Codes have been chosen as an illustrative material of deictic referrals which have been incorrectly formulated as leaving space for interpretative doubts in terms of place of indication (demonstratum) and place of reference (referent), which also causes a potential problem of the deferred ostension phenomenon noticed by Quine. The author argues that proper drafting of referring legal provisions with deictic indication requires that the legislator should have extensive pragmalinguistic knowledge and is an essential part of law-making oriented towards achieving comprehensibility of texts of normative acts, especially as important as Codes.

An important research objective in modelling instruction is defining what students should learn about the model-referent relationship, as when unguided, they tend to errantly think of models as literal interpretations of their referents. Restating this problem we say students should learn about structure-preserving transformations between models and referents; including: what gets transformed, how it is transformed, and directions of information flow in transformation. To define what students should learn of this triumvirate, we introduce two explanatory statements: models are abstractions and models have transferability. We then investigated how readily students could learn about abstraction and transferability, and how this learning related to literal interpretation, by comparing pre- and posttest scores of modelling knowledge for students (n = 175) who participated in a modelling activity that provided experiences with abstraction and transferability. A control group (n=49) took identical tests but received no relevant instruction. Results showed that modelling students: (1) improved their capability to generate abstract models; (2) gained in their understanding that models represented their referents under transformation; and (3) consequently, did not think of models as literal interpretations. Lack of gains in the control ruled out a testing effect. We concluded that knowledge of structure-preserving transformations is a viable and valuable object of instruction.

Purpose Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have difficulty with word learning. Recent studies have shown that incorporating retrieval practice provides a significant benefit to this learning. However, we have not yet discovered the best balance between the amount of retrieval and the amount of study (hearing the word in the presence of the referent) that is provided. In this investigation, we compared a word learning procedure using more retrieval and less study with a procedure that used more study and less retrieval. Method Participants were 13 children with DLD and 13 same-age peers with typical language development (TD). Both groups ranged in age from 4 to 6 years. The children learned two sets of novel words, with each set taught in two sessions. During an initial criterion period, the children had the opportunity to retrieve all of the words. Following this period, the words were either retrieved without further study or studied without additional retrieval. Recall and recognition testing immediately followed the second learning session and was repeated 1 week later. Testing assessed the children's retention of both the word forms and their meanings. Results Better recall both immediately after learning and after 1 week was seen for the more retrieval/less study condition. This was seen for both groups of children for word form recall and for children with DLD for meaning. Group differences were not found. Conclusion This study served as a stringent test of the benefits of retrieval to children's word learning. Continued retrieval after initial retrieval practice appeared to be helpful even when further study was discontinued and when the comparison study condition had also provided retrieval practice in the initial stages. Further refinement of retrieval procedures might lead to the development of useful clinical tools to promote word learning.

Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) tend to use more pronouns than healthy aged adults when referring to entities during discourse. This referential behavior has been associated with the decrease of cognitive abilities, such as lexical retrieval difficulties or reduced abilities in working memory. However, the influence of certain important discourse factors on the referential choices made by people with AD has yet to be established. This study examines referential choices made at three discourse stages during narrative discourse (the introduction of a referent, the maintaining of the referent in focus, and the shift from one referent in focus to another). These referential choices are examined in increasingly complex referential contexts. In addition, this study investigates the relationships between referential choices and various cognitive abilities. To do so, the narrative discourses of 21 people with AD and 21 healthy adults were elicited using a newly developed storytelling in sequence task. The analyses focused on the production of three major referential expressions (indefinite expressions, definite expressions and pronouns) which are expected to vary according to discourse stage and the referential complexity of the stories. The results show that AD participants produce significantly fewer of the referential expressions expected at the introduction and shift stages than healthy aged adults produce. Nevertheless, the variation in the categories of referential expressions produced by the AD participants between the discourse stages is similar to that produced by the healthy aged adults, suggesting a preserved sensitivity to the factors manipulated in the task (i.e., discourse stages and referential complexity). This study also highlights the fact that different cognitive competences, especially executive abilities, are greatly involved in referential choices. The results add further evidence that referential choices rely on a variety of cognitive skills, depending on the discourse context in which they are made.

Achievement goal theory includes both personal motivational features (achievement goals) and contextual features (goal structures). The theory holds that the prevailing goal structures in learning environments (such as the classroom) influence the achievement goals students adopt. This meta-analysis (k = 68, N = 47,975) examined the strength of the relationships between student ratings of goal structures (mastery-approach goal structures, mastery-avoidance goal structures, performance-approach goal structures, and performance-avoidance goal structures) and achievement goals (mastery-approach goals, mastery-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals) as well as moderating variables. Results indicated that each achievement goal was most strongly related to its contextual counterpart. Educational level and world region moderated some of the relations, and for most combinations of goal structures and achievement goals, measures framing goal structures as a climate produced higher correlations than measures using the teacher as referent. Challenges and promising routes for future research and theory building are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Although marketing researchers agree that brand authenticity has various meanings, little consensus exists concerning the number of meanings and what those meanings entail. This paper addresses this lack of clarity in the literature by introducing the Entity-Referent Correspondence (ERC) Framework of Authenticity. The ERC Framework provides an overarching definition of authenticity—a consumer’s perception of the degree to which a supposed authentic entity corresponds with or is “true to” something else, which we label a referent. The ERC Framework also suggests three types of authenticity—true-to-ideal, true-to-fact, and true-to-self—that are consistent with the general definition yet are distinct. Each type may manifest in a variety of ways in a brand context, suggesting that brand authenticity is not a singular concept. The framework also proposes nomological nets that explain how consumers form perceptions of each type, how the types lead to managerially relevant outcomes (e.g., expected quality, trust), and how the types affect each other. This research advances the literature on brand authenticity by offering three types of conceptual contributions as identified by MacInnis (2011): integrating, differentiating, and delineating.

The angel investing space has transformed as investors have moved from individual deal seeking to more collaborative models of investing. Angel networks are formal investor organizations that pursue investment deals with entrepreneurs, assist with deal screening, and coordinate due diligence. These coordination activities have clear benefits for angel network members, but they also give rise to a dynamic of reliant judgment in which the espoused opinions of network peers are taken as evidence that weighs heavily on the investment decision. In this article, we provide evidence from an experiment set in an angel investment pitch meeting that reveals the positive bias an angel investor shows toward peer opinions. By revealing these potentially hidden forces in angel network deliberations, we raise awareness and, by extension, offer response strategies for angels and angel network directors to properly manage the influence of peer opinion in angel network discussions.

The aim of this article is to investigate gender categorisation in sequences that introduce referents by their occupational titles. The study addresses the following three questions: (1) What can the systematic patterns in authentic conversation tell us about the use of gender in Icelandic? (2) What is the distribution of labour between grammatical and referential gender? (3) Does the mismatch between grammatical and referential gender cause any problems in the conversation? The data used come from 10 hours and 22 minutes of conversation recorded between 1996 and 2018 comprising everyday conversations, phone calls, radio interviews about current affairs, moderated political debates and spontaneous speeches in the parliament. In total, 55 sequences of occupational titles were identified in the data. The analysis shows that when the gender of the referent is known to the speaker, the choice of pronoun is based on the referential gender, but when the gender is unknown or the main referent is hypothetical, the speaker uses a pronoun that matches the grammatical gender of the noun. Finally, the data show that the choice of pronoun rarely triggers repairs.

The article aims to reconstruct the concept of the Lithuanian political elite from the citizens’ perspective, focusing on how the concept is perceived, how the political elite is recognized in social life, and what attributes are associated with this particular concept. Applied qualitative in-depth interview data gathering and inductive data analysis approaches demonstrate that the Lithuanian political elite concept consists of two images: legalistic and charismatic. Although these two images are completely divergent, they are intertwined and successfully coexistent in the minds of citizens. The citizens are tending to apply either a legalistic or charismatic image depending on the circumstances: the legalistic image is applied in recognizing and describing the political elite as an externally existing referent; meanwhile, the charismatic image is applied in building up the normative political elite portrait.

There has been debate between those who maintain that indexical expressions are not essential and those who maintain that such indexicals cannot be dispensed with without an important loss of content. This version of the essentialist view holds that thoughts must also have indexical elements. Indexical thoughts appear to be in tension with the computational theory of mind (CTM). In this case we have the following inconsistent triad:\ud \ud (i) De se thoughts are essential.\ud (ii) De se thoughts are indexical, they have a (Kaplanian) character.\ud (iii) Computations can only take the syntactic type into account, they cannot take tokens into account.\ud If (iii) is correct, then it seems we cannot make sense of a thought which uses a character such that its referent could vary from tokening to tokening. I argue that (iii) need not cause a problem, while maintaining the CTM. I claim that computations need not be sensitive to the features of a tokened symbol in the way that character demands. This job may be performed by a non‐modular part of the mind. Resolving the triad in this way provides a reason to accept that indexicals in thought are possible.

A growing body of research, examining a wide spectrum of reference forms across diverse languages, cultures, and identities, has shown how references to persons can be selected for context-specific interactional outcomes. This report describes how even such simple forms of person reference as somebody (along with someone and a/the person) can be selected on the basis of their relevance for the specific interactional context in which they are employed. We consider how the particular circumstances of some person reference occasions can make these generic person reference forms specially relevant (even when other, more elaborated forms of reference, either recognitional or non-recognitional, were evidently available to the speaker), and we demonstrate how even these barest forms of person reference can be called on to perform delicate, context-sensitive interactional work. Specifically, we show that speakers can select these generic reference forms for non-recognitional references that a) contribute to the formation of the action of a turn, and, when used in a story, b) contribute to the story's telling. Finally, we show how a generic person reference can be selected in place of a recognitional reference, thereby openly concealing a referent's identity.

PurposeThis study aims to elaborate the picture of the relationships between information and power by examining how expert power appears in the characterizations of gatekeeping presented in the research literature.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses conceptual analysis for examining how expert power is constitutive of the construct of gatekeeper and how people subject to the influence of gatekeeping trust or challenge the expert power attributed to gatekeepers. The study draws on the analysis of 40 key studies on the above issues.FindingsResearchers have mainly constructed the gatekeepers' expert power in terms of superior knowledge and skills applicable to a specific domain, coupled with an ability to control or facilitate access to information. The gatekeeper's expert power has been approached as a contextual factor that facilitates rather than controls access to information. The power relationships between the gatekeepers and those subject to gatekeeping vary contextually, depending on the extent to which the latter have access to alternative sources of information. The findings highlight the need to elaborate the construct of gatekeeping by rethinking its relevance in the networked information environments where the traditional picture of gatekeepers controlling access to information sources is eroding.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study focuses on how expert power figures in gatekeeping, no attention is devoted to the role of social power of other types, for example, reward power and referent power.Originality/valueThe study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the nature of expert power as a constituent of gatekeeping.

This paper investigates the extended uses of a Wugang Xiang classifier di45 beyond the referential domain, specifically its attitudinal uses. Using conversational data from Wugang Xiang, a Sinitic variety spoken in south-eastern Hunan province in China, we first examine the uses of di45 within the referential domain, namely, expressing a quantity of small amount and instantiating a noun. We then focus on the attitudinal uses of three types of di45 constructions, namely, relational [N+di45+N], [di45+N], and [di45+DEM+CL+N] constructions. Our analysis indicates that di45 in Wugang Xiang has fully pragmatized into an attitudinal marker in [di45+DEM+CL+N] constructions. We show that the attitudinal function of di45 is induced by one or more of the following factors: (i) the ‘trivialness’ reading inherent in the original use of di45 as a quantifying classifier, (ii) the ‘vagueness’ reading that emerges when di45 is associated with indefinite referents, and (iii) the ‘detachment’ effect which surfaces when di45 is associated with a referent that is obviously definite but with the demonstrative deliberately elided to downgrade potential face-threats to both speaker and others. The findings of this study shed light on how versatile classifiers often extend beyond the referential domain to serve discourse-pragmatic functions.

This article focuses on a common rhetorical referent in Egyptian public imagery and parlance–that of wasat (center) and its derivatives wasati/wasatiyya (centrist/centrism)–and discusses how it has been appropriated and molded in the sphere of party politics. Inductive in approach, it examines the rhetorical appropriations of the center ground by party officials, revealing not only its popularity as a marker of (ideological) self-positioning but its malleability and contextuality. The article concludes that in Egyptian party politics the center positioning of parties cannot be gauged exclusively from the study of party manifestos and/or expert surveys, but ought to include contextual analysis of how this and other ideological markers are appropriated and given meaning in elite rhetoric.

We investigated symbolic understanding, word–picture–referent mapping, and engagement in children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) and ability-matched typically developing children. Participants viewed coloured pictorial symbols of a novel object (given a novel name) on an iPad in one of three conditions: static 2D images and either automatically or manually rotating images (providing a three-dimensional context). We found no significant difference in word–picture–referent mapping between groups and conditions, however, children who manually rotated the picture had greater on-screen looking time compared to other conditions. Greater visual attention related to more successful word–picture–referent mapping only for the children with ASC. Interactive iPad tasks may increase visual attention in both typical and atypical populations and greater visual attention may benefit word–picture–referent mapping in ASC.

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.

Metaphor understanding is traditionally thought to emerge late in childhood. Although recent findings suggest that even pre-schoolers can understand metaphor in more age appropriate paradigms, it is still unclear which skills scaffold the development of metaphorical abilities. Metaphor comprehension is a complex process relying on multiple cognitive abilities with different developmental paths, such as Alternative Naming (i.e., accepting two labels for the same referent) and Analogy Perception (i.e., detecting similarities across objects). These two abilities may prove crucial to explain the development of metaphoric competence because difficulties in one or both of them may impose additional demands linked to children’s general cognitive development. This might contribute to slow down the development of metaphor understanding. This study aims at teasing apart the contribution of Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception in the development of metaphor understanding. Using a unified picture-matching paradigm, we tested 3- and 4-year-olds in three tasks: Metaphor Comprehension, Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception. Results reveal that children with better alternative naming and analogical abilities show a better performance in the metaphor task, suggesting that both Alternative Naming and Analogy Perception play a role in the development of metaphoric competence.

Hasta finales del siglo XVIII los espartanos fueron el principal modelo y referente de la Antigüedad griega en la tradición y el pensamiento occidental, encarnando los valores de coraje, patriotismo, servicio a la comunidad, estabilidad constitucional y austeridad frente a una Atenas cuya democracia era percibida como oclocracia y su riqueza como corrupción. En el presente artículo mostraremos cómo la incipiente historiografía científica de la primera mitad del siglo XIX, particularmente en Gran Bretaña, desmontó el paradigma espartano al poner el foco sobre su excluyente régimen oligárquico, su militarismo y su esterilidad cultural y económica, al tiempo que lo reemplazaba por el paradigma ateniense, basado en su régimen democrático, su imponente legado cultural y el benéfico liderazgo de un imperio naval, una imagen que guarda un sospechoso parecido con el liberal e industrioso imperio británico contemporáneo. Until the end of the 18th century the Spartans were the main model and referent of Greek Antiquity in western tradition and thought, embodying the values of courage, patriotism, community service, constitutional stability and austerity against an Athens whose democracy was perceived as ochlocracy and its wealth like corruption. In this paper we will show how the incipient scientific historiography of the first half of the 19th century, notably in Great Britain, dismantled the Spartan paradigm by focusing on its exclusive oligarchic regime, its militarism and its cultural and economic sterility, while replaced by the Athenian paradigm, based on its democratic regime, its imposing cultural legacy and the beneficial leadership of a naval empire, an image that holds a suspicious resemblance to the liberal and industrious contemporary British empire.