Abstract
This paper focuses on the relation between certain linguistic elements (‘context triggers’) and the set of assumptions they provide access to, which is necessary to the interpretation of their host utterances. The question it seeks to address is how to go about investigating that relation, which it takes to be causal, but to involve elements pertaining to two levels of description that do not appear to interface, namely, the linguistic level and that of underlying processes and mental representations. Such question can be divided into two sub-questions: one about what might be a suitable approach, the other, about the type of trigger that provides an optimal point of departure. In terms of approach I favor an adaptive one, as it contains the rationale for linking those two levels, and provides the mediating structures and systems to implement that linkage. With regard to the optimal types of trigger, I argue that they are to be found at the discourse level. The ones I will be discussing have contents that bear a strong resemblance to presumed lower-level analogues.
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Notes
- 1.
The assumption is that within the same linguistic community, with access to the same networks, the connection between triggers and context can be expected to be stable.
- 2.
- 3.
This question is not about implementation. It takes for granted that there is a pathway between trigger and context, which the triggering process uses, and which becomes established over time [19].
- 4.
Arising from Ducrot [10] is the idea that the argumentative act and certain particles (e.g., ‘au moins’ (at least) are conjointly responsible for the same instance of context construction.
- 5.
Such cases involve linguistic, rather than non-linguistic, triggers, with those triggers contributing to the discourse (or text level).
- 6.
Also known as the ‘synthetic theory’. For further details on this perspective, see Nyan [22].
- 7.
This means they have to be linguistic, rather than non-linguistic.
- 8.
In virtue of the complexity argument [13].
- 9.
If it is the case that we are dealing with ‘assemblages’ of cues [20] working together, then more than one source of knowledge would have been drawn upon to construct a given context.
- 10.
- 11.
‘Contribute’ is to be preferred to ‘occur’ as a trigger that occurs at the utterance level and contributes to context construction at that level may also have an impact at the discourse level, in the sense of helping along with ‘discourse dynamism’ (of which, more below). An example would be an adjective such as ‘penniless’, which contributes a set of defining features at the utterance level, but gives rise to stances and actions associated with poverty, both on the part of the person thus described and those who respond to his situation.
- 12.
We are talking about utterance-type.
- 13.
- 14.
This example is based on Anscombre [2] well known ‘Pierre est riche: il peut s’offrir n’importe quoi’. The idea in selecting it is to provide a different take on how it might be analysed.
- 15.
The semantic mode, by contrast, would list features that need not be related to the object’s affordances.
- 16.
Jeannerod’s model for action production include a motor intention or representation which is prior to action execution. This motor representation contains, among other things, a pragmatic representation of objects, when they are goals for the action being considered.
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Nyan, T. (2017). Investigating the Causal Link Between Context Triggers and Context: An Adaptive Approach. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_49
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