Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically, syntactically, or both.
Universal pragmatics (UP), more recently placed under the heading of formal pragmatics, is the philosophical study of the necessary conditions for reaching an understanding through communication. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term in his essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?" where he suggests that human competition, conflict, and strategic action are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of modal confusions. The implication is that coming to terms with how people understand or misunderstand one another could lead to a reduction of social conflict.
Intercultural communication is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within an organization or social context made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. In this sense it seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate and perceive the world around them.
Incivility is a general term for social behaviour lacking in civility or good manners, on a scale from rudeness or lack of respect for elders, to vandalism and hooliganism, through public drunkenness and threatening behaviour. The word "incivility" is derived from the Latin incivilis, meaning "not of a citizen".
The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts.
Pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience and elicits feelings that already reside in them. Pathos is a communication technique used most often in rhetoric, as well as in literature, film and other narrative art.
Mudstone, a type of mudrock, is a fine-grained sedimentary rock whose original constituents were clays or muds. Grain size is up to 0.063 millimetres (0.0025 in) with individual grains too small to be distinguished without a microscope. With increased pressure over time, the platy clay minerals may become aligned, with the appearance of fissility or parallel layering. This finely bedded material that splits readily into thin layers is called shale, as distinct from mudstone. The lack of fissility or layering in mudstone may be due to either original texture or the disruption of layering by burrowing organisms in the sediment prior to lithification. Mud rocks such as mudstone and shale account for some 65% of all sedimentary rocks. Mudstone looks like hardened clay and, depending upon the circumstances under which it was formed, it may show cracks or fissures, like a sun-baked clay deposit.
Relevance theory is a framework for understanding utterance interpretation first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. It was originally inspired by the work of H. Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995. The impact of their work is seen by the fact that Google Scholar lists over 21,000 citations of this book.
Politeness theory, of which proposers are Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, accounts for politeness which centers redressing the affronts to people's self-esteems of effectively claiming positive social values in social interactions. Such self-esteem is referred as the sociological concept of face to discuss politeness as a response to mitigate or avoid face-threatening acts such as requests or insults. Notable components in the framework of the theory include positive and negative faces, face threatening act (FTA), strategies for doing FTAs and factors influencing the choices of strategies; each described below.
Word error rate (WER) is a common metric of the performance of a speech recognition or machine translation system.
Tandem language learning is a method of language learning based on mutual language exchange between tandem partners, where ideally each learner is a native speaker in the language the other person wants to learn. Many language schools in the world, organised as TANDEM International, as well as many universities, implement this approach.
In linguistics, a referring expression (RE) is any noun phrase, or surrogate for a noun phrase, whose function in discourse is to identify some individual object. The technical terminology for identify differs a great deal from one school of linguistics to another. The most widespread term is probably refer, and a thing identified is a referent, as for example in the work of John Lyons. In linguistics, the study of reference relations belongs to pragmatics, the study of language use, though it is also a matter of great interest to philosophers, especially those wishing to understand the nature of knowledge, perception and cognition more generally.
Aviation communication refers to the conversing of two or more aircraft. Aircraft are constructed in such a way that make it very difficult to see beyond what is directly in front of them. As safety is a primary focus in aviation, communication methods such as wireless radio are an effective way for aircraft to communicate with the necessary personnel. Aviation is an international industry and as a result involves multiple languages. However, as deemed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), English is the official language of aviation. The industry considers that some pilots may not be fluent English speakers and as a result pilots are obligated to participate in an English proficiency test.
Time-domain harmonic scaling (TDHS) is a method for time-scale modification of speech, allowing the apparent rate of speech articulation to be changed without affecting the pitch-contour and the time-evolution of the formant structure. TDHS differs from other time-scale modification algorithms in that time-scaling operations are performed in the time domain.
Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning to a different speaker, using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic cues.
Laura L. Koenig is an American linguist and speech scientist.
Larry Paul Heck is the CEO of Viv Labs and Senior Vice President and Head of Bixby North America at Samsung. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of Artificial Intelligence including speech and speaker recognition, natural language processing, dialogue systems, web search, online advertising and acoustics. He is probably best known for his role as the founder of the Microsoft Cortana Personal Assistant and his early work in deep learning for speech processing.
Ludmilla A. Chistovich was a pioneering linguist and speech scientist who co-founded the Leningrad School of Phonology, together with her husband Valery A. Kozhevnikov.
Clement Howell High School is a senior high school in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos. Named after Clement Howell, it serves forms three through five and is operated by the Ministry of Education.
