Keith Allan

Nouns and Countability

The customary disjunctive marking of lexical entries for English nouns as [+ countable] does not match the fact that the majority can be used both countably and uncountably in different NP environments: this binary opposition is characteristic not of the nouns, but of the NPs which they head. Nevertheless, nouns do have countability preferences; some enter countable environments more readily than others. And not all nouns occur in all kinds of countability environments. A nouns countability preference can be computed by checking its potential for occurrence in a definitive set of countability environments. In the dialect examined here, wellformedness conditions on NP must consider eight levels of countability among English nouns-not, as custom has it, only two.*

Hierarchies and the Choice of Left Conjuncts (With Particular Attention to English).

Over the last decade or so, hierarchies such as the animacy hierarchy, the personal hierarchy, the case hierarchy, the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies and so forth have been identified as determinants of constituent order. It is my intention in this paper to review the set of hierarchies and rank them as determinants of NP sequencing in English. I shall from time to time compare and contrast the effect of a hierarchy in other languages with what we find in English; but it remains to be seen whether the ranking which obtains for English has a wider application: I make no a priori claim that it does. The hierarchies and families of hierarchies are ranked as follows, from the most powerful determinant to the least: (1) the familiarity hierarchy; (2) the topic (3) the universal sequencing conventions; (4) the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies; (5) the personal, social status, and role hierarchies; (6) the dominant descriptor hierarchies; (7) the formal hierarchies.

What is Common Ground

Language is primarily a form of social interactive behaviour in which a speaker, writer or signer (henceforth S) addresses utterances (U) to an audience (H). It requires S to make certain assumptions about H’s ability to understand U. This includes choice of topic, language, language variety, style of presentation, and level of presentation (because, for instance, addressing a neophyte or a child must be differently handled from addressing a group of experts). These assumptions constitute what can conveniently be called “common ground”. They have been subsumed to context (e.g. Allan 1986; Duranti 1997); and at least a part of the common ground constitutes what Lewis (1969) referred to as “common knowledge”, a term adopted by Stalnaker (1973). Schiffer (1972) called it “mutual knowledge*”. Prince (1981) rejected “shared knowledge”, preferring “assumed familiarity”. Following Grice (1981, 1989), Stalnaker (2002) named it “common ground”, which he described as “presumed background information shared by participants in a conversation” [...] “what speakers [take] for granted—what they [presuppose] when they [use] certain sentences”. A fatal flaw was carried over from Schiffer’s definition of mutual knowledge* into Stalnaker’s definition of common ground: “It is common ground that φ in a group if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that φ, and all believe that all accept that φ, and all believe that all believe that all accept that φ, etc.” (Stalnaker 2002: 716). The recursion within this definition would necessitate infinite processing on the part of each of S and H. This flaw has been accepted and repeated by many since (e.g. Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 2014)). Clark (1996) attempted to circumvent it but his definition includes a clause that calls itself, thus creating an endless loop. In this essay I suggest a way, inspired by Lee (2001), to characterize common ground from the points of view of both S and H and which does not admit runaway recursion. In line with Stalnaker’s mingling of presupposition and common ground, it refers to the preconditions on illocutions.

The component functions of the high Rise terminal contour in Australian declarative sentences

There is a peculiar sentence intonation pattern, found in English so far as I know only among women, which has the form of a declarative answer to a question, and is used as such, but has the rising inflection typical of a yesno question, as well as being especially hesitant. The effect is as though one were seeking confirmation, though at the same time the speaker may be the only one who has the requisite information. [Lakoff 1975:17.]

The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics adopts a broad definition of pragmatics, presenting the main orientations in pragmatic research worldwide, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge state-of-the-art solutions. In addition to the well-established post-Gricean philosophical accounts of intention and inference in communication, it includes lexical pragmatics, historical pragmatics, sociopragmatics, the pragmatics of utterance processing, and empirical approaches in pragmatic research. Against these perspectives, there is a section on applications of pragmatics to various types of expressions and phenomena which are of particular importance. The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics aims to offer unbiased and accessible introductions that present the many different points of view to be found in the current literature.

Reports, Indirect Reports, and Illocutionary Point

This essay examines the properties of reports and the diagnostic value of illocutions in reports.

The Reporting of Slurs

This essay examines the semantics and pragmatics of a handful of potential slurring terms identifying many of their uses in extant texts in order to assess slurring and non-slurring instances. Also examined are benchmarks for politeness that feed into so-called ‘political correctness’ and attitudes to what language expressions and behaviour are socially acceptable. People who find completely unacceptable those language expressions which are often employed as slurs or insults will regard reports of slurs as themselves slurring. The evidence, however, shows that, divorced from context, language expressions themselves do not slur, though they may be used in order to disparage, besmirch, insult, etc. – i.e., slur. It is a speaker/writer’s perlocutionary intention to slur which is truly reprehensible. Reports of slurs in themselves therefore do not slur unless the reporter subscribes to the intention to slur; a reporter who does not subscribe to the slur needs to somehow make clear their attitude.

Salience and defaults in utterance processing

The book addresses controversies around the conscious vs automatic processing of contextual information and the distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning. It sheds new light on the relation of the literal/nonliteral distinction to the distinction between the automatic and conscious retrieval of information. The question of literal meaning is inherently interwoven with the question of salience and defaults. This volume addresses these interconnected issues, stressing their mutual interdependence.

A Benchmark for politeness

(Im)politeness is never a depersonalized, decontextualized absolute but always a perception or judgement of appropriate behaviour on a given occasion—what one expects oneself and others to do in a particular social interaction. Nevertheless, it is normal for most tabooed words and phrases to be castigated in dictionaries as dysphemistic (having connotations that are offensive either about the denotatum and/or to people addressed or overhearing the utterance). For example, in a range of dictionaries, shit is judged ‘coarse’, ‘obscene’, ‘insulting’, ‘vulgar’, ‘profane’, ‘taboo’, ‘impolite’, and ‘offensive’. No rationale is given for any of these ex cathedra value judgements in the dictionaries, nor in media outlets, but a middle-class politeness criterion (MCPC) was proposed in Allan and Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon. (New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 21, 31, 1991):

Interpreting from context

My interest in this topic stems from the attempt to define the proper charact:rization of a theory of linguistic meaning. One problem I have been conslJering is the relationship between the lexical item and its semantic description. In modern linguistics it has been fashionable to decompose lexical items into semantic components (also called semantic features, semantic markers, and semantic atoms). This is a practice that goes back perhaps as far as Plato’s Cratylus of the fifth century B.C., where Socrates analyzes on or their relation to words and other expressions in cvc’r_ lay language with which they often share a formal identity in fact, if nc’t m theory. Katz has suggested that semantic components exist in the mind, cf: