Lingua Inglese

Confusing discourse language

Language is the basis of all human activities; it is used to transmit information, emotions, and feelings. It is made by a symbolic system with several functions like inform, express, order, ask, etc. This symbolic system is made of signs that are arbitrary ways to describe something because there is no necessary relation between a word and its meaning. These signs are words. Meanings are divided in:

• Physical objects namely something concrete
• Inner feelings namely something abstract
• Abstract relations namely something like comparison, deduction, etc. (e.g. "Love is stronger than pride", no objective fact)

The process of verbal reference

The process of verbal reference is made by three things: symbol, concept, and referent. The symbol or word activates a concept, namely what is understood; this concept refers to a referent that is part of the non-verbal world. We can also say the symbol stands for a referent. The concept may be different between two or more people because we can have a different perception of something like "the beautiful".

When we talk about language, we have to talk about an abstraction because we communicate through mental abstraction socially agreed upon, tacitly accepted, and recognizable. These mental abstractions are made by:

• Selection: Namely words that can fit better into a sentence rather than in another one
• Definition: Namely when we choose a word because it refers to a particular meaning
• Simplification: Namely when we choose words that simplify what we want to express (not specific)

Understanding context

Every sentence has a context that permits understanding the meaning. The types of context are:

• Situational context: Something perceived in that moment.
• Background knowledge: Something known by a group of people with the same culture.
• Background knowledge: Something known thanks to previous times (interpersonal knowledge).
• Co-text: Something just said.

Types of references

The types of reference are:

• Exophoric references means something that is external to the text with no previous mention. They are also called deixis and can refer to a person, a place, a time, a tense, and an aspect. The intertextuality is a type of background knowledge because we refer to another text. The co-text means that exists the text of the text itself.
• Endophoric references means something already mentioned in the text. Anaphora refers to something mentioned in the preceding text. Cataphora refers to something mentioned in the following text. Associative endophora is when the noun phrases aren't linked explicitly to each other. It is halfway between endophora and exophora because there is a knowledge within the text and a background knowledge.

The perception of the non-verbal world

The perception of the non-verbal world develops onto 5 levels:

1. Pre-verbal abstraction: Event/process level is the perception of reality
2. Object level is the direct experience
3. Verbal abstraction: Descriptive level is the act of naming something
4. Inference level is when we refer to something possible
5. Generalization level is when we refer to logical models

We communicate thanks to social agreement because we learn the label that are ways of calling something in a particular way. The recognizability is divided into word-internal factors and word-external factors. The word-internal factors have linguistic references, regularity, and consistency; the form is very important like also the logical order (SVO). The word-external factors refer to experience, to a common ground, and to a context.

Cohesion in texts

In texts, cohesion is very important and it refers to grammatical and lexical. The first one talks about reference, substitutions, and ellipsis; the second one refers to repetitions, synonymous, superordinate (we use "flower" instead of "rose") and general words ("thing", "stuff", "person").

Analytical philosophy

Speech acts theory talks about traditional semantics can evaluate language in truth-conditional terms. It doesn't consider ambiguous sentences with different meanings because all sentences are speech acts that want to produce an effect. Analytical philosophy is the necessity of a context to verify if a sentence is true or false. The utterances are measured in terms of felicity namely about its effectiveness. The 3 different levels of language are:

• Locutionary level is what is said and it refers to the literal meaning.
• Illocutionary level/force is what is meant and it refers to the communicative intention. This level is the middle stage between locution and perlocution; if the illocution corresponds to the locution, the speech act will be direct [intention = form] and if the illocution corresponds to the perlocution, the speech act will be indirect [intention = effect]. Searle recognize 2 aspects of the illocution namely the illocutionary point that is the proposition of content and the illocutionary force that is the strength of commitment.
• Perlocutionary level/effect is what is expected the other to do and it refers to the intended effect. This level doesn't imply the fact that our listener has to do something; there are 2 different effects, one is physical and it is the action, the other is psychological and it is the state of mind, the attitude, and the mood. The use of irony is relevant in the perlocutionary level.

Speech acts types

The speech acts types are:

• Directive acts is when you want to make the hearer do something [order, request, command]
• Representative acts meant to express our interpretation of the world [think, believe, describe]
• Commissive acts meant to manifest the intention of performing something in the future [promise, offer, refuse]
• Expressive acts meant to manifest a psychological condition in relation to social circumstances
• Declarative acts meant to change the state of things [declare, resign, pronounce]

The speech acts can be divided into direct speech acts when the locutionary level corresponds to the illocutionary/perlocutionary level and in indirect speech acts the locutionary level doesn't correspond with the other functions. The felicity conditions are very important for the speech acts; for Austin the context and roles of participants must be recognized by all parties, the action must be carried out completely, and the persons must have the right intentions. For Searle the general condition is the participants have to hear and understand the language, the preparatory condition is the participants have to know the context, the propositional condition is the content implied must be possible, the sincerity condition is the participants must neither lie nor play, and the essential condition the participants must be committed to what they say and in a position to say what they say.

Limitations of speech act theory are the overlap, namely when utterances fall into more than one macro-class, the messiness of everyday spoken language, some fillers, backchannels, and incomplete sentences are very difficult to classify. The macro-functions were described as the transactional and interactional functions by Yule and Brown in 1983. The transactional is the function which language serves in the expression of content and the transmission of factual information. The interactional is that function involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes, showing solidarity, and maintaining social cohesion [establish common ground and sharing a common point of view].

Conversation

Conversation is a no practical case in which a speech act is not part of a larger exchange. Utterances are linked in cohesive and coherent texts. Each speech act is influenced by the previous speaker's sentence and affects the following one. No consideration of fillers because of lack of semantic content (backchannels feedback + incomplete sentences). Two theories exist to account for this interaction:

1. Exchange structure (quantitative based)
2. Conversation analysis (qualitative based) (Sinclair and Coulthard)

Each conversation develops on five levels from low to high. The first level is an act or speech act and it is divided into initiation act that is used to start an exchange, response act that is the answer to initiation acts, and fillers that meant to fill the gaps of a conversation. These fillers can have an acknowledge function (backchannels) namely to signal you are following, an evaluative function meant to evaluate what was said, and discourse makers are boundary. The second level is the IRF moves in which speech acts become relevant only if combined; IRF moves are initiation (inform, elicit, nominate, check), response (react, reply), and follow-up namely the comment on the response (accept, evaluate). The third level is the exchange namely a series of moves thematically or semantically related. The fourth level is the transaction namely a series of exchanges that have the same situational and pragmatical context. The fifth level is the speech event namely the combination of all transactions.

Limitations of exchange structure theory are the asymmetrical power relation because the roles are predetermined and the possibility of analyzing only task- or goal-oriented conversation means not occasional or everyday.

Conversation analysis permits analyzing a conversation without a question-answer feedback and it allows approaching conversation as a free form process. Analytical tools are attitudes and instruments that we use to make a conversation.

Turn-taking and adjacency pairs

Turn-taking is the cooperation of all participants namely the interaction during the conversation. A basic requirement is not interrupting the others during a conversation, in fact, you can understand when is your time at the transition relevance point (TRP). During the turn-taking there can be two problematic cases like an interruption before the TRP or an overlap. The attributable silence is relevant because it is a reflective pause. Adjacency pairs are bits of conversation that are always interconnected. The preferred responses are the expected ones and sometimes it can correspond to different categories. In most cases, dispreferred responses are given and they are more complex.