Daniel Dor

On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers

This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines. Couched within Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual effect and processing effort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for specific stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading the stories. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

From Englishization to Imposed Multilingualism: Globalization, the Internet, and the Political Economy of the Linguistic Code

C urrent debates on the possible linguistic consequences of the process of globalization concentrate on the complementary issues of Englishization and language loss. Most writers view today’s linguistic world as a site of contestation between the global and the local: the spread of English as the lingua franca of the information age is viewed as the linguistic counterpart to the process of economic globalization; the causal factors working against the process of Englishization are thought of as locally bound and are equated with patterns of local resistance to economic (and cultural) globalization. This conception also determines the structure of the discourse on linguistic human rights: the need for negotiated multilingualism and the rights of speakers to resist global pressures and to use, maintain, and develop their local languages. In this essay, I suggest that this conceptual framework misses out on a critical aspect of the linguistic dynamics of our time. The process of globalization undoubtedly has far-reaching linguistic consequences, but these, I claim, have less to do with the spread of

The co-evolution of language and emotions

We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory processes that individuals could learn because of their brain plasticity. Those cultural–linguistic innovative practices that were consistently socially and culturally selected drove a process of genetic accommodation of both general and language-specific aspects of cognition. We focus on the affective facet of this culture-driven cognitive evolution, and argue that the evolution of human emotions co-evolved with that of language. We suggest that complex tool manufacture and alloparenting played an important role in the evolution of emotions, by leading to increased executive control and inter-subjective sensitivity. This process, which can be interpreted as a special case of self-domestication, culminated in the construction of human-specific social emotions, which facilitated information-sharing. Once in place, language enhanced the inhibitory control of emotions, enabled the development of novel emotions and emotional capacities, and led to a human mentality that departs in fundamental ways from that of other apes. We end by suggesting experimental approaches that can help in evaluating some of these proposals and hence lead to better understanding of the evolutionary biology of language and emotions.

From Symbolic Forms to Lexical Semantics: Where Modern Linguistics and Cassirer's Philosophy Start to Converge

Ernst Cassirers theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and promising linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirers theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirers most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirers philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirers philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: (i) natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; (ii) the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises & partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; (iii) this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and (iv) linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits.