Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
It is used interpretively if it represents some other utterance or thought, irrespective of the truth or state of affairs, as is the case with direct or indirect quotations, summaries, quoting folk wisdom, linguistic example sentences, tentative scientific hypotheses, et cetera. On a deeper level, every utterance is interpretive of a thought of ...
Relevance is the connection between topics that makes one useful for dealing with the other. Relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive science, logic, and library and information science. Epistemology studies it in general, and different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant.
Relevance theory originally described loose talk, hyperbole, metaphor, and other figures of speech as conveying information solely via implicatures. The argument goes that a metaphorical utterance such as "Your room is a pigsty" would have the basic explicature "Your room is an enclosure where pigs are kept", but that cannot be an explicature ...
Carston generally agrees with the relevance theoretic concept of implicature, but argues that Sperber and Wilson let implicatures do too much work. The mentioned embedding tests not only categorize utterances on the likes of the vodka bottle example as explicatures, but also loose use and metaphors: [62] If your steak is raw, you can send it back.
Another example of an ambiguous sentence is, "I went to the bank." This is an example of lexical ambiguity, as the word bank can either be in reference to a place where money is kept, or the edge of a river. To understand what the speaker is truly saying, it is a matter of context, which is why it is pragmatically ambiguous as well. [15]
In linguistics, Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) is a syntactic theory which focuses on the hierarchical structure of sentences by isolating and identifying the constituents. While the idea of breaking down sentences into smaller components can be traced back to early psychological and linguistic theories, ICA as a formal method was ...
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
In linguistics (particularly sub-fields like applied linguistics and pragmatics), a hedge is a word or phrase used in a sentence to express ambiguity, probability, caution, or indecisiveness about the remainder of the sentence, rather than full accuracy, certainty, confidence, or decisiveness. [1]