Discourse, Misc

This paper presents a study into the Hindi-Urdu 'na' as a sentence-final particle. Although also used as a topic marker and negation, 'na' occurs sentence-finally across clause-types. In light of the data, we think the following hypothesis offers the best fit: 'na' signals the speaker’s belief that the content of na’s containing clause is a reasonable inference, given what’s common ground. Notably, in addition to other clause-types, we explore na's distribution in exclamations and exclamatives. We link our work to recent (...) research on the polar question particle 'kya' in Hindi-Urdu. (shrink)

We focus on a sui generis grounding move in Hindi-Urdu dialogue, namely 'voh hi na'. 'Voh' is third person pronoun and can function as a propositional anaphor in dialogue. 'Hi' and 'na' are two discourse particles in Hindi-Urdu. A dataset consisting of minimal pairs of dialogues is presented to get a better sense of the move. Using dynamic models of discourse structure, we propose a semantics for 'voh hi na' in terms of its update effects.

Presuppositions are at the same time a crucial and almost neglected dimension of arguments and fallacies. Arguments involve different types of presuppositions, which can be used for manipulative purposes in distinct ways. However, what are presuppositions? What is their dialectical function? Why and how can they be dangerous? This paper intends to address these questions by developing the pragmatic approaches to presupposition from a dialectical perspective. The use of presuppositions will be analyzed in terms of presumptive conclusions concerning the interlocutor’s (...) acceptance of a proposition, which can be assessed as reasonable or unacceptable. Their dialectical function is described in terms of dark side commitments attributed to a collective "voice" representing what is commonly shared. For this reason, they count as attempts to include the presupposed contents into the hearer’s commitment store, which in some circumstances can reverse the burden of proof. The different manipulative strategies grounded on controversial presuppositions will be examined by showing the distinct roles that the latter play and the relationship between the degrees of presuppositional implicitness and the speaker’s burden of retraction. (shrink)

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. (...) Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers. (shrink)

This article addresses the question as to whether it is logically possible to fashion a discourse exclusively for the natural environment. Could such a discourse emerge without colonization by other social spheres acting as proxy? The prospects appear to be rather bleak, for even in the case of two apparently non-human-directed or non-committal discourses, that of extensionist ethics and new sophisticated management (of environmental crises), the latent social-constructionism built into both renders them monistic discourses hegemonically mapping the territories of what (...) they refer to. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the human epistemic locatedness anti-anthropocentric critics demand. Despite this, such an exercise offers us the benefit of being mindful of what the crisis of social-scientific discourses amounts to as well as what to expect of discourse analysis as such. Furthermore, the prospects of the two discourses examined are being mapped onto two modified models drawing on Foucault and Deleuze thus helping us understand the pattern of our diverse environmental responses. Ecological thinking is perhaps the first subject-matter that transcends or shatters discourse boundaries and strains both imagination and human powers when selecting between conceptual frameworks, making us aware of the ineluctable feature of social-constructionism present in our social thought. (shrink)

An archive is a repository - that is, a place or space in which materials of historic interest or social significance are stored and ordered. A national archive is the storing and ordering place of the collective memory of that nation or people(s). This article provides a brief his torical/theoretical introduction to the politics of the archive in late capi talist societies and discusses this politics of memory via the performance of ordinary daily activities of librarians and archivists. Some relevant (...) political/discursive questions include: who controls, establishes and maintains the archive, and how do they do so? Which materials are preserved in the archive and which are excluded? As the documents and artifacts selected for the archive are ordered and classi fied, how do the schemas and structures applied include, exclude, fore ground or marginalize those materials? Finally, to what extent do the logical hierarchies for classification and arrangement reflect social or political hierarchies? Librarians and archivists face these concerns in HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 4 © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199811)11:4;17-32; 006604]their professional practice as they make decisions influenced by budgets, finite amounts of both physical and computer storage space and limited staff resources. The authors give real-life examples of choices made as archivists struggle to balance ideological goals made contradictory by practical constraints. For example, is it more appro priate to acquire as many materials as possible but be unable to describe, preserve and present them adequately, or is it preferable to describe, preserve and make fully available a more limited range of records and documents? Because of such practical concerns in modern technicist cultures, the explicitly political who often is reduced to the technically instrumental how - that is, political-moral questions are displaced to nonmoral and nonpolitical technical discourse, thereby establishing a 'meta-politics' that is understood only by the initiated. Conversely, archival activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are 'technical' activi ties that may become explicitly 'political'. The article concludes that technical activities always are political, at least latently or potentially, even when they are not contested and made explicitly political. (shrink)

Is writing a human science? Certainly it is not science as such, despite much specialist knowledge about its strategies, developed by scholarly research going back many years. But what are called the human sciences are not ’sciences’ either; they have simply followed in the wake of the natural sciences and used the same word. And yet it is precisely here, in the equivocal area opened up by the statement ’writing as a human science’, that one of the fundamental questions concerning (...) the relationship of these ’sciences’ to writing is revealed. (shrink)