Philippe De Brabanter

Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.

Compliance with requests by children with autism: the impact of sentence type

This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the proportion of requests complied with significantly exceeded the proportion of requests not complied with, and no difference across categories was found. These results show that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic form to interpret an utterance as a request.

Uttering sentences made up of words and gestures

In several places, Robyn Carston warns the student of utterance interpretation against neglect of the ‘fact that most verbal utterances are a complex of linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and vocal gestures, which appear to function as a signal receiving a unified interpretation’, a fact which, she writes, remains ‘rather under-explored’ (2000: 824). Such neglect is unjustified because, she writes: the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive (=communicative) stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice, etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated. (2002: 129)

Quotations and the intrusion of non-linguistic communication into utterances

When linguists or philosophers of language study communication, they are naturally biased towards linguistic communication. This has resulted in a situation in which very little attention is being paid to the fact that many of our daily utterances are actually a mixture between linguistic and other expressive means, such as noises, gestures and facial expressions. It is precisely on this phenomenon that I wish to focus. I show how Clark & Gerrigs notion of demonstration can be usefully applied to intrusions of non-linguistic material into spoken or written utterances. Although I agree with relevance theorists that the linguistic bias should be abandoned, I am led to propose an account of non-linguistic demonstrations as linguistic constituents, at least in the particular category of data that I examine, namely utterances in which some gesturing appears to stand in for a missing linguistic constituent. In those cases, I contend, non-linguistic demonstrations are recruited to fulfil various syntactic functions. I justify this somewhat paradoxical stance by exploring the essential similarities between quotations and non-linguistic demonstrations.

Utterance interpretation and cognitive models

Reconciles armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. This book concerns with the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. It also explores the links between moods and forces. It looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.

Why Quotation Is Not a Semantic Phenomenon, and Why It Calls for a Pragmatic Theory

In this paper, I argue that quotation is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Linguistic productions are essentially symbolic, conventional, whereas quotations, in essence, are acts of iconic communication, i.e. ‘demonstrations’. As a consequence, any purely semantic account of the meaning of quotations—quotation are names, descriptions, demonstratives—is bound to be not only incomplete but flawed in key respects. Since most existing accounts of quotation are fundamentally semantic, they are also necessarily deficient, and therefore unsuitable as general, comprehensive theories of quotation. The ‘Depiction’ theory I defend is a pragmatic one at heart. That does not prevent it from also accounting for the truth-conditional effects of quotation pointed out in the literature (via such mechanisms as ‘syntactic recruitment’, ‘free pragmatic enrichment’, and ‘context-shifts’) and for certain morphosyntactic peculiarities of quoting expressions. The Depiction theory offers the best prospects for a theory that can (i) describe the empirical facts about quotation, (ii) help fix the boundaries of the phenomenon ‘quotation’, while (iii) doing justice to its iconic essence.

A Metalinguistic View of Rushdie’s ‘Stammering Puns’ in The Satanic Verses

This paper sets out: first to briefly examine why wordplay (and incidentally poetry) often poses apparently insurmountable difficulties in translation. To that end, I will successively consider the entanglement of form and content, the metalinguistic dimension of punning, reflected meaning (Leech, 1981), and metalinguistic connotation (Rey-Debove, 1997). Subsequently, in the light of these reflections, I will turn my attention to the way in which a special brand of wordplay was dealt with in the French translation of Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses. This unusual kind of pun might be labelled the ‘meaningful stammer’: Sisodia, an Indian film producer, has a bad stutter that ‘accidentally’ endows his utterances with an additional layer of meaning: (1) ‘For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ (519) Finally, drawing on this discussion, I will argue that a more acute awareness of the mechanisms that underlie puns — which mechanisms I suggest are metalinguistic — make better results possible in the translation of puns.