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A short and sweet article on the future of subjunctives by Mary Morel. Check it out.
https://onlinewritingtraining.com.au/subjunctive-dying/

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The words 'If I were a rich man...' are from a song in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

Many people believe the subjunctive is dying. Somerset Maugham says in A Writer's Notebook (1949):

'The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is put it out of its misery as soon as possible.'

The subjunctive expresses wishes

One of the most common usages of the subjunctive is to express wishes or conditions contrary to fact. The only grammatical indication of this mood is that with singular subjects we use were instead of was.

Today, many people would use was instead.

My opinion: I still like the subjunctive in these types of sentences, but am not sure it matters.

The mandative subjunctive is used in requests

We use what is known as the mandative subjunctive to express requests, demands, suggestions and recommendations.

The mandative subjunctive is indicated by the use of the base form of the verb ( love, skip) with singular subjects.

Once again, many people would say:

My opinion: I think the mandative subjunctive is more common in formal than informal language. In informal language we often use an auxiliary verb rather than the subjunctive.

I insist that he should eat at the table.

I don't have strong feelings either way, but I read a lot of recommendations in board papers and wish they were consistently constructed. For example, either:

The formulaic subjunctive

We also use what is known as the formulaic subjunctive for idiomatic expressions with the meaning of 'let' or 'may'.

Long live the King!
Perish the thought!
Come what may...

My opinion: The formulaic subjunctive will live on in commonly used idiomatic expressions, but some old-fashioned expressions such as Perish the thought may die out.

I don't believe the subjunctive is dead

My research suggests that the subjunctive is more commonly used in the US than in Australia or Britain, so I think it is unlikely to die out altogether.

And sometimes the subjunctive just sounds better.

The following line by Shakespeare would not read as well without the subjunctive.

I like the subjunctive, but I value consistency more, and wish that writers understood it better and made informed decisions about whether to use it or ditch it.

Learn more

Learn more about grammar with my online course: Grammar, Punctuation and Usage

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Subjunctive: Is it dying? | Mary Morel | Online Writing Training

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The words 'If I were a rich man...' are from a song in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof. Many people believe the subjunctive is dying. Somerset Maugham says in A Writer's Notebook (1949): 'The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is put it out of its misery as soon as possible.'

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Warning: Prescriptivists stay away!
2013: National Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked

https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/national-grammar-day-2013-ten-more-grammar-myths-debunked/
2012: National Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked

https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/national-grammar-day-2012-ten-more-grammar-myths-debunked/
2011
https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/national-grammar-day-2011-ten-more-grammar-myths-debunked/
2010
https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/national-grammar-day-2010-ten-more-common-grammar-myths-debunked/
2009
https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/national-grammar-day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/

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Just when you think you know your way around modal verbs ;)
https://daily.jstor.org/the-hidden-life-of-modal-verbs/

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The Hidden Life of Modal Verbs - JSTOR Daily

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A linguist explains why we get so distracted by the fiery language of politics, while ignoring urgent information reported by scientists.

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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/

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Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions was a paradigm for many philosophers in the Twentieth Century. One reason is that it suggested a way to respond to longstanding philosophical problems by showing them to be specious. Russell argued that such sentences as 'The present King of Singapore is bald,' and, 'The round square is impossible,' possess superficial grammatical forms that are misleading as to their underlying logical structure. In so doing he showed how such sentences can be meaningful without this fact obliging us to posit current Singaporean monarchs or round squares. Many philosophers in what came to be known as the Ordinary Language movement were inspired by this achievement to argue that classic philosophical problems (e.g., of free will, the relation of mind to body, truth, the nature of knowledge, and of right and wrong) likewise rested on a misunderstanding of the language in which these problem are couched. In How to Do Things with Words, J.L. Austin for instance writes,

...in recent years, many things which would once have been accepted without question as 'statements' by both philosophers and grammarians have been scrutinized with new care... It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts...Along these lines it has by now been shown piecemeal, or at least made to look likely, that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake-the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions...it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy. (Austin 1962, pp. 1-2)

The Ordinary Language movement, with its broad claim that the meaning of an expression should be equated with its use, and its desire to transcend traditional philosophical perplexities, did not achieve the revolution of which Austin speaks. Nonetheless one of its enduring legacies is the notion of a speech act.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language and linguistics. Accordingly in this entry we will consider the relations among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

In the Introduction, we shuttered the expression 'speech act theory' with quotation marks. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Much of semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is less clear that "speech act theory" has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I briefly consider the possibility, envisioned by some, of an "illocutionary logic". For similar reasons I close with a discussion of the bearing of speech acts on current debates about freedom of speech.

Whereas an act of speech is any act of uttering meaningful words, 'speech act' is a term of art. As a first approximation, speech acts are those acts that can (though need not) be performed by saying that one is doing so. On this conception, resigning, promising, asserting and asking are all speech acts, while convincing, insulting and growing six inches are not. One can, for instance, resign by saying, "I resign...", although one can also resign from a position without describing oneself as doing so. However, this intuitive conception is too inclusive, since it also counts whispering as a speech act even though one can whisper a string of nonsense words without meaning anything. Instead a more accurate characterization of speech acts builds on Grice's notion of speaker meaning. This notion is discussed further in Section 6 below, but for now it is enough to note that in looking at my watch, I might be trying to tell the time; or I might be trying to indicate to you that it's time for us to leave. The latter (but not the former) is a case of speaker meaning.

Accordingly, we may now say that speech acts are cases of speaker meaning that can (but need not) be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so. This conception still counts resigning, promising, asserting and asking as speech acts, while ruling out convincing, insulting and growing six inches. It has the further virtue of ruling out the case of whispering, which one can do without speaker meaning anything and so is no speech act (although of course some speech acts may be performed at the level of a whisper). What is more, speech acts do not essentially involve language: bidding, promising, resigning and challenging are all acts that can be done without words. Our characterization of speech acts captures this fact in emphasizing speaker meaning rather than the uttering of any words.

Speech acts are thus also to be distinguished from performatives. 'Performative' is another technical term, and as used here it refers in the first instance to a kind of sentence. A performative sentence is in the first person, present tense, indicative mood, active voice, that describes its speaker as performing a speech act. 'I assert that George is the culprit,' is a performative sentence by this test. As we have seen, one can perform a speech act without uttering a performative. Further, since it is merely a type of sentence, one can utter a performative without performing a speech act. For instance, while talking in my sleep I might say, "I hereby promise to climb the Eiffel Tower," without thereby making any promise. We may also define a performative utterance as an utterance of a performative sentence that is also a speech act.

More nomenclature: 'Speech act' and 'illocution' will here be used synonymously. The latter term is due to Austin, who used 'illocutionary force' to refer to a dimension of communicative acts. (It is nowadays common also to use 'illocute' as a verb meaning 'to perform a speech act.') Austin's reason for using 'force' begins with the observation that, construed as a bit of observable behavior, the communicative significance of an act may be underdetermined by what has been said or observably done. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, an utterance of a meaningful sentence (which Austin calls a locutionary act) such as 'You'll be more punctual in the future,' may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, "What is the force of those words?" is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of those words' meaning but seek to know how that meaning is to be taken-as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command.

Or so it seems. In an early challenge to Austin, Cohen (1964) argues that the notion of illocutionary force is otiose provided we already have in place the notion of a sentence's meaning (Austin's locutionary meaning). Cohen contends that for a performative sentence, such as 'I promise to read that novel,' that sentence's meaning already guarantees that it is a promise. On the other hand, for a sentence that is not a performative, such as 'I will read that novel,' if it is understood to be being used to make a promise, the promise is still implicit in the sentence's meaning. In either case, Cohen concludes, meaning already guarantees force and so we do not require an extra-semantic notion to do so.

Cohen's reasoning assumes that any utterance of 'I promise to read that novel' is a promise. But as we have seen with the case of the somniloquist, neither a sentence, nor even the utterance of a sentence, is sufficient on its own for the performance of a speech act, be it a promise or some other. In a similar spirit to that of Cohen, Searle (1968, p. 407) observes that a serious and literal utterance of 'I promise to read that novel,' made under what he terms "conditions of successful utterance", also counts as a promise. Searle concludes from this that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, and infers from this in turn that for some sentences, their locutionary meaning determines their illocutionary force. This last inference is, however, a non sequitur. As we have seen, the aforementioned sentence's meaning does not determine the illocutionary force with which it is uttered. Rather, when that sentence is uttered in such a way as to constitute a promise, what determines that force is the meaning of the sentence together with such factors as the speaker's being serious and other contextual conditions being met.

We may thus agree with Searle that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, without losing sight of our earlier observation that locutionary meaning underdetermines illocutionary force. This fact about underdetermination is implied by Davidson's Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning, according to which once a bit of language has acquired a conventional meaning, it can be used for any of a variety of extra-linguistic purposes (Davidson, 1979). Green 1997 argues that Davidson's Autonomy Thesis is in need of qualification in such a way as to recognize sentences having the feature that if they are used in a speech act all, then there is at least one illocutionary force that their utterance must have. Even in light of this qualified version of the Autonomy Thesis, the most that can be said of, 'I promise to climb the Eiffel Tower,' is that it is designed to be used to make promises, just as common nouns are designed to be used to refer to things and predicates are designed to characterize things referred to. Below (Section 6.3) we shall consider the view that force is a component of meaning, albeit not of a sentence's meaning.

Let us return, then, to an elucidation of our distinction between what a speaker says and the force of her utterance. A grammatical sentence composed of meaningful words is commonly thought to express a "content," which is determined by what that sentence literally means together with features of the context of utterance. Suppose I say to someone in a crowded subway, "You're standing on my foot." I am most likely trying to convey the message that he should move. However, what I literally say is only that the addressee in question is standing on my foot. This is the content of my utterance. Many if not most utterances of grammatical sentences composed of meaningful words express more than those sentences' contents. Pragmaticians, however, commonly distinguish content from other aspects of meaning conveyed by an utterance. On this way of thinking, two intertranslatable sentences of different languages will express the same content, and certain transformations of a sentence within a language are commonly thought to express the same content. Thus, 'Mary saw John,' and 'John was seen by Mary,' will express the same content even if a speaker's use of one rather than another of these will carry a distinctive suggestion. For indicative sentences, such contents are typically called Propositions. (In what follows I will capitalize this term to signify that it is in part technical.) Propositions, then, are the contents of indicative sentences, are what such sentences express, and, further, are often thought to be the primary bearers of truth value. That is, the sentence, 'It's snowing,' is true only to the extent that the Proposition, that it is snowing, is true. In what follows we will remain neutral on the proper conceptualization of Propositions. Whether Propositions are sets of possible worlds, ordered n-tuples, or a third kind of entity, will make no difference for our considerations about speech acts.

Illocutionary force and semantic content are often taken to be distinct from one another, not just in the way that your left and right hand are distinct, but rather by virtue of falling into different categories. Stenius 1967 elucidates this distinction, noting that in chemical parlance a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of that compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a Proposition is itself communicatively inert. For instance, merely expressing the Proposition that it is snowing is not to make a move in a "language game". Rather, such a move is only made by putting forth a Proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further support from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among 'Is the door shut?', 'Shut the door!', and 'The door is shut'. This common element is the Proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : Propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a Proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of Propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That is why, from the fact that someone has said, "You'll be more punctual in the future," we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of communicative acts, pragmatics studies their force.

The force/content distinction also finds parallels in our understanding of mentality. Speech acts are not only moves in a "language game." They also often purport to express of states of mind with analogous structural properties. An assertion that it is snowing expresses, or purports to express, the speaker's belief that it is snowing. A promise to read Middlemarch expresses, or purports to express, the speaker's intention to read Middlemarch. We find evidence for these relationships in the fact that it is in some sense absurd to say, 'It's snowing, but I don't believe that it is,' and 'I promise to read Middlemarch, but I have no intention of doing so.' Further, just as we may distinguish between an assert ing and what is assert ed (the so-called "ing/ed ambiguity" for verbs such as 'assert'), and a promis ing from what is promis ed, we may also distinguish between a state of believing and what is believed, and a state or act of intending and what is intended. Searle 1983 delineates structural analogies between speech acts and the mental states they express. Pendlebury 1986 succinctly explains the merits of this approach.

In spite of these structural analogies, we may still wonder why an elucidation of the notion of force is important for a theory of communication. That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B, do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for pragmatics or the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning: Force is a feature not of what is said but of how what is said is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 5 below.

We have spoken thus far as if the contents of speech acts must be Propositions, and indeed Searle routinely analyzes speech acts as having the form F( p) (e.g., 1975, p. 344), where ' F' is the force component and ' p' the Propositional content component. However, in the last two decades linguistic semantics has developed formal representations of contents for the two other major grammatical moods besides the indicative, namely the interrogative and the imperative. On the strength of the analyses of Hamblin (1958), Bell (1975), Pendlebury (1986) and others, one strategy for the semantics of interrogatives is to construe them as expressing sets of propositions rather than a single proposition, where each element of the putative set is a complete answer to the question at issue. Thus the content expressed by 'How many doors are shut?' will be {<No doors are shut>, <One door is shut>, ...} where the ellipsis will be filled by as many other Propositions as it is reasonable to interpret the questioner as asking after. Call such a set an Interrogative. A complete answer to an Interrogative is an element of the set by which it is defined; a partial answer is a subset of that set containing two or more members, as in 'Between two and four doors are shut.' On the present conceptualization, just as we may distinguish between expressing and asserting a Propositional content, we may also distinguish between expressing an Interrogative and asking a question. One merely expresses an Interrogative in such an utterance as, 'John wonders how many doors are shut.' In fact, a single utterance may express two Interrogatives while asking neither, as in 'How many doors are shut will depend on how many customers are trying on clothes.' Asking a question is no less substantial a conversational move than is making an assertion.

Similarly, work by Hamblin (1987), Belnap (1990), Portner (2004) and others suggests semantic analyses for sentences in the imperative mood: on one approach an imperative expresses a property, and when one speaker issues an imperative that her addressee accepts, that property is added to her "to do list", itself a parameter of what we will later describe as conversational score (Section 7).

In light of the above liberalization of the notion of sentential content to accommodate the contents of non-indicative sentences, we may rephrase Stenius's chemical analogy as follows:

Illocutionary force : sentential content :: functional group : radical

with the understanding that different types of sentential content will correspond to the different grammatical moods. This refined analogy would in turn require there to be different types of radical.

In some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, "I promise to meet you tomorrow," and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, "I hereby appoint you." (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, "You are now Treasurer of the Corporation." Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, details the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously.

Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses. The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, "I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky," I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake: I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you do not accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting. As we will see in Section 9, a systematic unwillingness on the part of a speaker's interlocutors to respond with the requisite uptake may compromise that speaker's freedom of speech.

Some speech acts can be performed-that is, not misfire-while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of making good. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for speech acts of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which thousands of types of speech act would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one.

As observed by Sbisà 2007, not only can I perform a speech act by speaker meaning that I am doing so, I can also subsequently rescind that act by speaker meaning that I take it back. I cannot, it would seem, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also withdraw it. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am now no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by speaker meaning that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Austin famously claimed that performatives are not statements (1962, p. 6). This may be taken either as the claim that performative sentences, even those in the indicative grammatical mood, lack truth value; or instead as the claim that utterances of performative sentences, even when such sentences have truth value, are not assertions. One can consistently hold that an indicative sentence has truth value, and even that it may be uttered in such a way as to say something true, while denying that its utterance is an assertion. (Testing a microphone in a windowless room, I utter, "It's raining," and it happens to be raining outside. Here I have said something true but have made no assertion.)

Lemmon 1962 argues that performative utterances are true on the ground that they are instances of a wider class of sentences whose utterance guarantees their truth. If sound, this argument would show that performatives have truth value, but not that they are assertions. It also leaves unanswered the question why some verb phrases such as 'I promise' may be used performatively while others cannot be so used. Sinnott-Armstrong 1994 also argues that performatives can have truth value without addressing the question whether they are also used to make assertions. Reimer 1995 argues that while performatives have truth values, they are not also assertions. Adopting a similar strategy, Jary 2007 aims to explain how utterances of such sentences as "I order you to clean the kitchen," can succeed in being orders. In so doing he draws on Green's 2007 analysis of showing to argue that such utterances show (rather than merely describe) the force of the speaker's utterance. Because 'show' is factive, if such an utterance shows its force, then it must have that force.

Most challenges to Austin, however, construe performatives as assertions and attempt to explain their properties in that light. Ginet 1979 argues that performative verbs ('promise,' 'appoint', etc.) name the kinds of acts that one can perform by asserting that one is doing so, and elaborates on why this is so. In this way he offers an account of how performatives work that depends on the assumption that performative utterances are assertions. Starting from that same assumption, Bach 1975 contends that 'I order you to clean the kitchen' is an assertion, and proceeds to explain on this basis how the speaker is indirectly also issuing an order. This explanation depends on the speaker's being able to count on the addressee's ability to discern the speaker's communicative intention. In later work, such as Bach and Harnish 1978, and 1992, this view is refined with a notion of standardization, so that a sufficiently common practice of issuing assertions with performative effect enables speakers and hearers to bypass complex inferential reasoning and jump by default to a conclusion about the illocution being performed. Reimer 1995 challenges Bach and Harnish on the ground that hearers do not seem to impute assertoric force to the indicative sentences speakers utter with performative effect; her criticism would evidently carry over to Ginet's proposal as well. Instead Reimer contends that performative utterances rest on systems of what she terms illocutionary conventions to achieve their performative effects.

Searle 1969 had argued that a performative formula such as "I promise to..." is an "illocutionary force indicator" in the sense that it is a device whose role is to make explicit the force of the speaker's utterance. Making something explicit, however, would seem to involve characterizing an independent event or state of affairs, and as a result Searle's account presupposes that speakers can imbue their utterances with the force of demotions and excommunications; yet this is what was to be explained. Realizing this, in later work Searle and Vanderveken (1985) characterize performatives as speech acts having the force of declarations. Uncontroversial examples of this speech act are declaring war or adjourning a meeting. In later work (1989), however, Searle acknowledged that this account pushes us back to the question how certain expressions come to have the power to make declarations. In that same work he offers an answer to this question that depends on the view that in uttering a sentence with a performative prefix, a speaker manifests an intention to perform an act of a certain kind: in uttering the words, 'I order you to close the door', I manifest an intention to order you to close the door, etc. Searle also takes it that manifesting an intention to perform a speech act is sufficient for the performance of that act. On this basis, Searle goes on to attempt to derive the assertoric nature of performatives, holding that when uttered in such a way as to say something true, they are also assertions.

Austin distinguishes illocutionary acts into five categories: verdictives (in which a speaker gives a verdict, e.g. acquitting and diagnosing), exercitives (in which speakers exercise powers, rights or influence, e.g. excommunicating and resigning), commissives (in which speakers commit themselves to causes or courses of action, e.g. promising and betting), behabitives (concerning attitudes and social behavior, e.g. apologizing and toasting), and expositives (in which speakers clarify how their utterances fit into lines of reasoning, e.g., postulating and defining).

Austin makes clear that he does not find his taxonomy satisfactory, and Searle criticizes Austin's taxonomy on two central grounds. First, Austin's methodology is unduly lexicographic, assuming that we can learn about the range and limits of illocutionary acts by studying illocutionary verbs in English or other languages. However, Searle observes, nothing rules out the possibility of there being illocutionary acts that are not named by a verb either in a particular language such as Swahili or Bengali, or indeed in any language at all; similarly, two non-synonymous illocutionary verbs may yet name one and the same illocutionary act.

Second, Searle argues that the principles of distinction among Austin's categories are unclear. For instance, behavitives seem to be a heterogeneous bunch with little unifying principle. Similarly, 'describe' appears both as a verdictive and as an expositive whereas one would expect taxonomic categories to be mutually exclusive. More generally, Austin's brief account of each category gives no direction as to why this way of delineating them does so along their most fundamental features. Searle offers a new categorization of speech acts based on relatively clear principles of distinction. To appreciate this it will help to explain some of the basic concepts he uses for this purpose.

Consider an example derived from Anscombe (1963): a woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to procure; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists are identical, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit: It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit: The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying "Thank you," and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., "Tell me who is at the door!"), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, "Hooray for Arsenal!" Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having "null" direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all.

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts are subject to different norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, "How do you know?" (Williamson 1996), while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture (Green 2009). Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit?

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction. This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction-truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, in a way enabling us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Sections 6-7.

In an attempt to systematize and deepen Austin's approach, Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of forces such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point: This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are, and perhaps also to bring about belief in an addressee; the characteristic aim of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement: This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assertin one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does soin her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

4. Content conditions: Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control; or, at least, I cannot promise to do anything that it is obvious to myself and my promissee that I cannot do. So too, I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law. (In light of our discussion above of semantics for non-indicative contents, this condition could be recast in terms of imperatival, interrogative, and propositional content conditions.)

5. Preparatory conditions: These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions: Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken (1985) suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a "setting" of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F ₁ and F ₂ are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot slow the expansion of the universe or convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the slowing of the universe's expansion. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight even though some flightless creatures are winged.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do so by noting that under the right conditions, one can urge just by saying, "I hereby urge you to shut the door," while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you just by saying, "I hereby persuade you to shut the door." A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act (1962, p. 107). Cohen (1973) develops the idea of perlocutions as characteristic aims of speech acts.

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, one speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1979). Phrases that are commonly used in service of indirect speech acts are, 'Would you mind terribly if I...,' 'Might I suggest...,' and 'It seems to me that...'

While indirect communication is ubiquitous, indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. Consider an example of a type often used to illustrate indirect speech acts. A asks B, 'Can you come to dinner with us tonight?', and B replies, 'I have to study.' B makes it clear that she is too busy to join A for dinner. However, must we conclude that she has done this by illocuting, for instance stating that she is too busy to join A for dinner? This seems unlikely. After all, if B did not think that her studying would prevent her from joining A for dinner, she would be misleading in saying what she does, but not a liar; yet if in answering as she has, she is asserting that she is unable to join A for dinner, she would be lying if she took her study plans not to interfere with dinner plans. Analogous arguments can be constructed for other illocutions that B might be thought to be performing. Similarly, in asking whether you intend to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without performing the speech act of suggesting. Saul (2012) provides an extensive study of lying and misleading in the context of implicature and speech act theory.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. Likewise for the dinner and smoking cases. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I will not have issued a request unless I have made that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by providing evidence justifying an inference to the best explanation. Perhaps the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so, and perhaps the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is that I intend to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope, or expression of hope, that you do so. Bertolet 1994 develops a more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state-hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is, he contends, explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur at all, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature-that process by which we mean more (and on some occasions less) than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979 influential account of indirect speech acts is couched in terms of conversational implicature (although he does not use this phrase). The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this theme in Section 6.

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. 'You'll be more punctual in the future' is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen, that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, 'shut the door', I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, "I intend to shut the door." If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, 'who is on the phone.' Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question, since you may have so spoken in the course of stating, "John wonders who is on the phone." Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles Meredith is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and the like to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism. According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of 'I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,' to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of "felicity conditions" for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances... (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

...utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

...the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and ...speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Millikan (1998) espouses a parsimonious conception of conventions that she terms 'natural conventions,' and on the assumption that natural conventions are a type of convention, one would expect this strategy to make it easier to defend the view that speech acts are inherently conventional. For Millikan, a natural convention is constituted by patterns that are reproduced by virtue of the weight of precedent. A pattern is reproduced just in case it has a form that derives from a previous entity having, in certain respects, the same form, and in such a way that had the previous form been different in those respects, the current form would be different in those respects as well (1998, p. 163). Photocopying is one form of reproduction meeting these criteria; the retinotopic mapping from patterns of stimulation on the retina to patterns of stimulation in the visual cortex is evidently another. Millikan would not treat retinotopic mapping as a type of convention, however, since it would not seem to be perpetuated by virtue of the weight of precedent. The point is difficult to discern, however, since in her discussion of the matter Millikan discusses the conditions under which a pattern is taken to be conventional, rather than for it to be conventional, writing

To be thought of as conventional, a reproduced pattern must be perceived as proliferated due, in important part, to weight of precedent, not to its intrinsically superior capacity to produce a desired result, or due, say, to ignorance of alternatives (ibid, p. 166).

Millikan thus seems to characterize what it is for a pattern to have weight of precedent in terms of that pattern's being perceived to have such weight. This notion is not itself elucidated, and as a result the notion of weight of precedent is left obscure in her account. Nonetheless, she tells us that just as the conventions of chess dictate that when one's king is in check, one does what one can to get him out of check; so too the conventions of language dictate that when A tells B that p, B responds by believing that p. Millikan describes the hearer's response as a hidden, inner act that is not under B's voluntary control. Millikan also describes this response as being learned in the way that we learn what she calls "natural sign patterns," such as our learning that the sound of crashing waves is an indication of a nearby coastline.

On Millikan's view, then, A's assertion of p being followed by B's belief that p is a process that is not intrinsically superior to others that might have been followed. This may be doubted, however. What, after, all would be viable alternative responses? Disbelieving p? Remaining neutral on the question of p? Scratching one's left earlobe? Any of these responses would tend to undermine using language as a means of transmission of information. What is more, if belief formation is not under the voluntary control of addressees, it is obscure how this aspect of communication could be conventional, any more than the pattern of stimulation of our visual cortex is conventional when that pattern results from an isomorphic pattern on the retina.

Force-conventionalism as espoused by Austin and later Searle has been challenged by Strawson, who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, "I entreat you." But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions....[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it manifests an intention to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as appointing and excommunicating. So too, as Skinner (1970) observes, understanding the utterances of an historical figure crucially depends on sensitivity to conventions of the society in which they are made.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

As Green 2013 observes, the point may be doubted. Suppose I am trying to work up the courage to ask Sidney's hand in marriage. Sidney recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my fumbling in my pocket for an engagement ring. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in asking Sidney anything. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. Closer to Searle's example, even if you were to find, on the basis of fMRI analysis of my neural activity, that I was trying to tell you that it's going to rain tomorrow, I still have not asserted anything about tomorrow's weather. (If I were completely paralyzed as a result of Locked-In Syndrome, then making such a neural effort might be the most I can hope to do; in that case, your fMRI information might be enough to justify you in holding me to have performed a speech act.)

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act-we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, their gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of a publicly accessible commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning-to which I now turn.

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B, do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems crucial to how I mean what I say. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of how I mean what I say that I happen to be speaking at that volume. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is an aspect of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, any aspect of what I say-that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be crucial to how I mean what I do.

In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of 'mean'. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as 'Those clouds mean rain,' and 'Those spots mean measles.' The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs 'natural meaning'. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of 'mean' from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying "You make a better door than a window", George meant that you should move,

and

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term 'non-natural meaning' for this sense of 'mean', and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term 'speaker meaning'. After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered communicators who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention.

It has, however, been argued that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience., Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of one's state of mind. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it is more plausible that I mean that it is raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this detour through speaker meaning help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P, it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P, and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, "How do you know that?" I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same "liability to error" way, but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content-where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move down the list we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, "How do you know that?", and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The "educated guess" is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, "You're tired," and my remark, "I'm tired," as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P, followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P, as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed further in Section 8 under the rubric of "mode" of illocutionary commitment.

Speaker meaning, then, encompasses not just content but also force, and we may elucidate this in light of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so-a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have sought to characterize speech acts in terms of their conversational roles. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that-not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, a speech act's "ecological niche" may nevertheless be the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove a speech act type from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may blind us to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic, suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers to those questions. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. Green 1999 rejoins that many conversations may indeed be construed in teleological terms. For instance, many conversations may be construed as aimed at answering a question, even when that question concerns something as banal as the afternoon's weather or the location of the nearest subway station. Asher and Lascardes (2003) develop a systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that also responds to Searle's challenge. Additionally, Roberts (2004, 2012) develops a model of conversational kinematics according to which conversations are invariably aimed at answering what she terms a question under discussion (QUD). This view is best appreciated within the framework of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, to which we now turn.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from research in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974), Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the kinematics of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of Propositions that can be presupposed by interlocutors. This set of Propositions is the conversational common ground, defined as that set of Propositions that all interlocutors take to be true, while also taking it that all other interlocutors take them to be true. If a Proposition p is in a conversation's common ground, then a speaker may felicitously presuppose p's truth. Suppose then that the Proposition that Singapore has a unique King is in a conversation's common ground at given point; then a speaker may felicitously utter a sentence such as 'The present King of Singapore is wise,' or 'Singapore's king is sleeping'. Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, and addressee. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as "conversational score".

"Scorekeeping" approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a Proposition: If that "assertion" is accepted, then the score is updated by having the Proposition entered into common ground. In this spirit, MacFarlane (2011) considers an account of the speech act of assertion in terms an utterance's capacity to update conversational score. Such an approach will, however, face a difficulty in explaining how two speech acts with the same content, such as an assertion that the Milky Way contains a black hole, and a conjecture that it does, will make different conversational contributions. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would include sensitivity to differences such as these.

Another development in the scorekeeping model refines the teleological picture adumbrated above to incorporate Questions, construed (along the lines of Section 2.1) as sets of Propositions. When an interlocutor proffers an assertion that is not met with objections by others in the conversation, the Propositional content of that illocution will enter into common ground. When an interlocutor poses a question that is accepted by others, we may represent the change as an addition to Common Ground of the set of propositions that is the Interrogative content of that illocution. The presence of that Interrogative obliges interlocutors to work to rule all but one Proposition that is a complete answer to the Interrogative. Because Interrogatives stand in inferential relations to one another (Q1 entails Q2 just in case any answer to Q1 is an answer to Q2), one strategy for answering a question is to divide it into tractable questions that it entails: 'How many covered bridges are there in Japan?' can be answered by answering that question for each of that country's 47 prefectures. Roberts (2004, 2012) develops the Question Under Discussion model of conversational dynamics according to which common ground contains a partially ordered set of Interrogatives in addition to a set of Propositions. This teleological approach to conversation bids fair to enrich our understanding of the relations of speech acts to other central topics within pragmatics such as presupposition and implicature.

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system in which to carry out deductive reasoning. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator: an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson (1979), however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise of introducing force-indicating devices into languages, formal or otherwise. Davidson's reason is that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest a force indicator could have would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could do this: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance. Referring to the putative force-indicating device as a 'strengthened mood,' he writes,

It is apparent that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion: every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act, even those utterances that occur on stage or as used by jokers or storytellers. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P, so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, it would show which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, 'as is the case' can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: 'If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.' Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is also committed to the content of the antecedent. If this claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Subsequent to Austin's introduction of the notion of a performative, it has also been suggested that what we might call performative sentential frames behave like force indicators: 'I claim that it is sunny,' seems to be a prolix way of saying that it is sunny, where the 'I claim' seems only to indicate how what follows is to be taken. On the approach of Urmson (1952), for instance, such a sentence should be understood on the model of 'It is sunny, I claim.' Support for such an analysis may be found in the fact that a potential reply to Marisa's utterance is 'No it isn't; it's pouring outside!', while 'No you don't' is not. Again, if Marisa does not believe that it is sunny outside, she cannot dodge the accusation of lying by remarking that what she had asserted was that she claimed that it is sunny, and not anything about the weather.

Nonetheless, drawing on Cohen 1964, Lycan 2008 objects to the view that such performative frames make no contribution to sentence or utterance meaning. If Marissa felicitously utters, 'I claim that it is sunny,' while Abdul felicitously utters, 'I conjecture that it is sunny,' the view implies that their utterances mean the same. The two speakers have clearly said different things, however. On the other hand, if we hold that the performative frame does contribute to the content of what Marissa and Abdul said, then, Lycan points out, it will be difficult to explain how their utterances commit either of them to any position about the weather. It certainly won't do to posit inference rules such as 'I state that p,' ergo, ' p '. We will consider a solution to what Lycan terms "Cohen's Problem" after developing a notion of illocutionary inference in the next section.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the Illocution rather than the Proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among Propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two event-types E1 and E2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S ₁ and S ₂ could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment. According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S ₁ commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S ₂ iff it is not possible to perform S ₁ without performing S ₂. Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S ₁ is identical with <IP ₁, Str ₁, Mode ₁, Cont ₁, Prep ₁, Sinc ₁, Stresinc ₁> (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S ₂ is identical with <IP ₁, Str ₂, Mode ₁, Cont ₁, Prep ₁, Sinc ₁, Stresinc ₁>. Suppose further that Str ₁ and Str ₂ differ only in that 1 is stronger than 2. Then it will not be possible to perform S ₁ without performing S ₂; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S ₁, ..., −1 implies a speech act .)

Searle and Vanderveken also define a notion of weak illocutionary commitment such that S ₁ weakly illocutionarily implies S ₂ iff every performance of S ₁ commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S ₂ (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q, and an agent asserts P, then she is committed to believing that Q. These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q. In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q.

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R, then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R. That is not to say that I have also asserted R: if assertion were closed under deductive consequence I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q, then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q. For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q. Developing this theme, let S be an arbitrary speaker, <Δ A, ..., Δ A, Δ B> a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S ₁, ..., −1, which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act . Even in such a case she performs only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S ₁, ..., −1; it is difficult to see how one can perform while having no intention of performing a speech act at all. Our finding thus provides little succor for Hare's reply to Davidson as discussed in Section 7 above.

We are also in a position to make headway on Cohen's Problem as formulated by Lycan. As argued in Green 2000, in an assertion of 'I (hereby) assert that p', a speaker commits herself to p even though her words do not logically entail that Proposition; nor do they presuppose, or either conversationally or conventionally imply it. They do, however, illocutionarily entail it: anyone committed to 'I assert that p' assertorically is thereby committed to p assertorically. By contrast, one committed to 'I assert that p' as a supposition for the sake of argument is not thereby committed to p. Accordingly, such a phrase as 'I assert that' is semantically opaque (making a non-trivial contribution to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it occurs) but pragmatically transparent in the sense that a speaker who undertakes assertoric commitment to a sentence in which it has widest scope is also assertorically committed to its complement. Analogous remarks apply to 'I conjecture that' and the like.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether "speech act theory" deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives-speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate reprimand accuse blame criticize assert suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively to answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover "illocutionary tautologies", "illocutionary absurdities" and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as "This very utterance is an assertion", "I doubt this very claim"? Affirmative answers to such questions will provide a welcome further justification of our use of "speech act theory".

In a paradigmatic illocutionary event, a speaker has a choice of which if any speech act to perform and her addressee will do her charitable best to discern that speaker's intentions and, where necessary, which conventions she may be invoking. Pratt (1986) observes that this paradigm is not true to the facts of very many areas of communicative life, writing

An account of linguistic interaction based on the idea of exchange glosses over the very basic facts that, to put it crudely, some people get to do more talking than others, some are supposed to do more listening, and not everybody's words are worth the same. (1986, p. 68)

Although Pratt intends this remark as a critique of speech act theory, it also suggests a way in which this theory might shed light on subtle forms of oppression. We saw in Section 2.2 that a putative bet can misfire if it is not accepted. In such a case the speaker attempts to bet but fails in that effort due to a lack of audience uptake. So too, a person may not be in the correct social position to, say, excommunicate or appoint. As a result, her attempts to perform such illocutions will misfire. More momentously, a pattern of abuses of speech act institutions might deprive a person of an ability to perform speech acts: the inveterate welsher will, in time, lead others in his community to be unwilling to accept any promises he tries to make. He can perform countless locutionary acts but will be unable to perform the illocutionary act of promising, at least in this community. His utterances may be locutionarily normal but will be illocutionarily inert.

A pattern of culpable behavior could make a speaker inert with respect to one speech act type. Could a pattern of culpable behavior-intentional or inadvertent-on the part of others in a speaker's community also maker her inert with respect to a type of speech act? This could happen if enough such speakers decide never to accept one person's bets, or her warnings or promises. Beyond such hypothetical cases, it has been argued that patterns of social inequality can manifest themselves as disabling certain groups from the ability to perform speech acts. Building on and refining McKinnon's (1993) claim that pornography silences women, Langton (1993), and Hornsby and Langton (1998) argue that the industry and consumption of pornography deprive women of the ability to perform the speech act of refusing sexual advances. Refusing is a speech act, but if large enough numbers of men deny uptake (with such thoughts as, "By 'no' she really means 'yes'," etc.) then, these authors argue, women's attempts to refuse sexual advances will be characteristically inert with respect to the speech act of refusal. Women will still be able to attempt to refuse sexual advances, and can still try to prevent them by physical means, but a crucial illocutionary form of protection will be closed to them. So too, apartheid, Jim Crow, and even patterns of discrimination of which the perpetrators are not consciously aware, can deprive racial, religious, and ethnic minority groups of the ability to perform speech-act types requiring uptake. These phenomena are generally referred to as illocutionary silencing.

Bird (2002), however, denies that the speech act of refusal requires uptake. Such an illocution is, he contends, like inviting and surrendering, which can occur whether or not their intended audiences grasp or accept the proffered illocutions. Similarly denying that the "silencing" argument should be cast in terms of speech acts, Maitra 2009 argues that the institution of pornography prevents speaker-meant instances of refusal from being understood. One can speaker-mean that she refuses, for instance, but patterns of cognitive and affective response will systematically prevent that refusal from being grasped. Broadening the scope of investigations of the interaction of injustice and illocutionary phenomena, McGowan 2009 argues that some speech acts can not only cause but also constitute instances of oppression. Anderson, Haslanger and Langton (2012) and McConnell-Ginet (2012) provide overviews of research on racial, gender and related forms of oppression as they relate to speech acts. Recent scholarship offers hope that speech act theory will illuminate power structures indiscernible through the lenses of syntax and semantics alone.

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---, 1986b. 'Notes on conversation,' in D.G. Ellis and W. A. Donohue (eds.), Contemporary Issues in Language and Discourse Processes, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 7-19.

---, 1989. 'How performatives work,' Linguistics and Philosophy, 12: 535-558.

---, 1992. 'Conversation,' in H. Parrett and J. Verschueren (eds.), (On) Searle on Conversation, New York: Benjamins, 7-30.

---, 1999. Mind, Language, and Society: Doing Philosophy in the Real World, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

---, and D. Vanderveken, 1985. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shoham, Y., 1993. 'Agent-Oriented Programming,' Artificial Intelligence, 60: 51-92.

Skinner, Q., 1970. 'Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,' The Philosophical Quarterly, 20: 118-38.

Smith, B., 1990. 'Toward a history of speech act theory,' in A. Burkhardt (ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions: Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John Searle, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 29-61.

--- (ed.), 2003. John Searle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stalnaker, R., 1972. 'Pragmatics,' in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 380-397.

---, 1973. 'Presuppositions,' Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2: 447-457.

---, 1974. 'Pragmatic Presuppositions,' in M. Munitz and P. Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy, New York: NYU Press, 197-213.

---, 1984. Inquiry, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stenius, E., 1967. 'Mood and language-game,' Synthese, 17: 254-274.

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---, 1964. 'Intention and convention in speech acts,' The Philosophical Review, 73: 439-60, reprinted in Strawson,Logico-Linguistic Papers, London: Methuen, 1971.

---, 1970. 'Meaning and truth,' reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers, London: Methuen.

---, 1973. 'Austin and "locutionary meaning",' in G. Warnock (ed.), Essays on J. L. Austin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 46-68.

Thomason, R., 1990. 'Accommodation, meaning and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics,' in Cohen, Morgan and Pollock (eds.), Intentions in Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 325-364.

Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.), 1994. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, London: Routledge.

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Vanderveken, D., 1990. Meaning and Speech Acts, Vols I and II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Watson, G., 2004. 'Asserting and Promising,' Philosophical Studies, 117: 57-77.

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Furberg, M., 1971. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin's Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell.

Grewendorf, G. and G. Meggle (eds.), 2002. Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Holdcroft, D., 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the Theory of Speech Acts, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lepore, E. and van Gulick, R. (eds.), 1991. John Searle and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell.

Tsohatzidis, S. (ed.), 2007. John Searle's Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Warnock, G. (ed.), 1973. Essays on J. L. Austin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

---, 1989. J. L. Austin, New York: Routledge.

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Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions was a paradigm for many philosophers in the Twentieth Century. One reason is that it suggested a way to respond to longstanding philosophical problems by showing them to be specious.

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Many accents from different parts of the English-speaking world actually have a ton of similarities. Dialect coach Erik Singer talks about how this happens, and breaks down which mouth and tongue shapes correlate to the sounds we hear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=uuFCoDqLmY0&feature=emb_logo

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Accent Expert Explains Why Different Accents Can Sound the Same | WIRED

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Generative Grammar: Lecture notes on Transformations

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Generative Grammar: Lecture notes on Transformations

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http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ctjhuang/lecture_notes/lecch6.html

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6.1. The English Auxiliary System Revisited
In Chapter 4, we took a look at the English auxiliary system and saw that the auxiliary is an optional element of a sentence which, if it occurs, may select one or more of the options included in the following rule, PSR9:

(1) PSR-9: The Auxiliary Rule

According to this rule, the infinitival auxiliary, to, and the modal auxiliaries (will, could, must, etc.) are in complementary distribution. They cannot co-occur (*for John to will go, *for John will to go). The infinitival auxiliary and modal auxiliary, however, may each co-occur with a perfective or a progressive aspect, or with both, in the order given.

We also observed that the Infinitival auxiliary differs from the other auxiliary elements in two important ways. First, the auxiliary to can only be used in a subordinate clause whereas a sentence without to may occur as a main clause or a subordinate clause. Secondly, a clause with to does not contain any marking for Tense, whereas one without to must. That is, a clause is tenseless if infinitival:

(2) a. For John to sing . . . .
b. For John to have sung . . . .
c. For John to be singing . . . .
d. For John to have been singing . . . .

But if not infinitival, a clause or sentence is necessarily marked for either Present or Past Tense:

(3) a. John sings/sang.
b. John will/would sing.
c. John has/had sung.
d. John is/was singing.
e. John will/would have sung.
f. John will/would be singing.
g. John has/had been singing.
h. John will/would have been singing.

Note that Tense, when it shows up on a sentence or clause, may show up in different positions depending on what other elements a given sentence has. Thus, if a sentence contains no auxiliary at all, Tense shows up on the verb (as in (3a)). If it contains one auxiliary (a modal, have, or be), then the Tense shows up on this auxiliary (as in (3b, c, d), respectively). If it contains two or more auxiliaries, Tense always shows up on the leftmost auxiliary (as in (3e, f, g, and h)). The following sentences are ungrammatical:

Furthermore, note that each sentence can contain at most one marking for Tense:

(5) a. *John would sang.
b. *John is sings.
c. *John has is singing.
d. *John would had was sang.

How can we incorporate this piece of our knowledge--which is clearly systematic and therefore rule-governed--into our Grammar? Let us just concentrate on the part of PSR9 that deals with tensed S's. A tensed S contains a sub-string of the following form:

(6) (Modal) (Perf) (Prog) V . . . .

The descriptive generalization appears to be that Tense must appear on the leftmost element chosen from (6). The problem we are facing is how we can express this generalization by a rule of some sort, thus capturing the generalization that the distribution of Tense is systematically rule-governed. Our Grammar contains two components: a PSG and a Lexicon. Since all verbs and auxiliaries (save to) are capable of bearing Tense, the question of which of them should bear Tense in a given sentence cannot be answered by a lexical marking on any of these elements. We must then look to the PSG component for an answer. For example, consider only the tensed part of PSR9, as in (7):

(7) Aux ----> (Modal) (Perf) (Prog)

Recall that a PSR is a general statement of constituency for phrases or sentences in a given language. The rule (7) says what kind of things an English auxiliary may consist of and in what order. Suppose we use the notation [+Tns] to indicate that a given element bears Tense, the tensed Aux in English may take any of the following forms:

(8) a. Aux ----> Prog
[+Tns]

b Aux ----> Perf (Prog)

[+Tns]

c. Aux ----> Modal (Perf) (Prog)

[+Tns]

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Note that while each of these rules is an adequate description of a given grammatical realization of (7), we cannot combine these sub-rules into one like (7) itself. For example, we cannot abbreviate all of (8) with the rule (9):

(9) Aux ----> (Modal) (Perf) (Prog)
[+Tns} [+Tns] [+Tns]

Because this rule incorrectly allows cases where more than one element shows up with Tense, and where Tense shows up on the non-leftmost element in Aux. Since we cannot collapse the cases in (8) into one general rule like (7), we miss an important generalization about the structure of Aux, that it contains three optional constituents in the order given in (7).

The problem is in fact more serious when we consider sentences containing no Aux, in which case the main verb must bear Tense. We could modify the VP rule PSR3 in such a way as to allow for verbs to bear Tense, but it's not going to do the work we need done:

(10) VP ----> V . . . .
[+Tns]

This rule fails to capture the fact that the V bears Tense just in case the VP is not preceded by any Auxiliary element.

We might continue to pursue the strategy represented by (8) and (10), but it is clear at least that, whatever result we come up with, it will necessarily cost our Grammar much of the simplicity and generality it has otherwise displayed.

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6.2. Affix Hopping
The important generalization that has presented a problem for us is that the Tense morpheme in English seems to " migrate" depending on the kind of elements available in the Aux+VP complex of a sentence. There is a very simple way to capture the descriptive generalization, first suggested by Chomsky in his little 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures. Chomsky argues that natural language grammar contains two types of rules: Phrase Structure Rules (PSRs) of the type we have been assuming, and Transformational Rules (or Transformations). First, he proposes that Tense, an element of inflectional morphology, should be recognized as a separate lexical category (a "word") and be admitted as a leftmost daughter of the category Aux for a tensed sentence:1

(11) Aux ----> Tns (Modal) (Perf) (Prog)

The constituent Tns in turn may consist of the Past or the Non-Past (Present) Tense morpheme, which we shall represent with the suffixes {-es} and {-ed}, respectively. The minor PSR we need is (12), and our Lexicon needs to contain the two entries in (13):

(12)
(13) a. Present ----> {-es}
b. Past ----> {-ed}

Note that by positing Tense morphemes as constituents of the Aux, we are analyzing an inflected verb, like finishes and finished, as two separate items: the uninflected stem of the verb (i.e., finish), and the Tense suffix. By listing these morphemes as independent units in the Lexicon, we now only need to list the root (uninflected) form of each verb. (As for how each root form combined with a suffix is to be pronounced, we assume that this will be taken care of by principles of English morphology, which lies outside the scope of this course.2).

With this proposal, a sentence like John would be singing will be generated in the form of the following P-marker (assuming that the root form of would is will):

(14)

And he arrived suddenly yesterday has the P-marker (15) (irrelevant details omitted):

(15)

Other P-markers can be generated, giving terminal strings like:

(16) a. John -es have sung three times.
b. They -es be playing in the bathroom.
c. Mary -es will have been singing.
d. Bill -ed believe that I -ed shall try the dish.

Note that none of the P-markers and terminal strings in (14)-(16) correspond directly to the form the sentences are actually pronounced or heard. Chomsky proposed that the actual forms are obtained by a rule of transformation, called Affix Hopping, which attaches an affix (a bound form) to the very first element that follows it within the Aux+VP complex. The rule of Affix Hopping is a set of instructions which says that if you scan a P-marker or terminal string and encounter an affix immediately followed by an auxiliary or verbal element, attach the affix to the immediately following element. as a suffix of the latter. If we now apply this transformation to (14)-(16), we obtain the following:

(17) a. John will+ed be singing.
b. He arrive+ed suddenly yesterday.
c. John have+es sung three times.
d. They be+es playing in the bathroom.
e. Mary will+es have been singing.
f. Bill belive+ed that I shall+ed try the dish.

(Note that Affix Hopping applied two times to yield (17f). Once the Tense morpheme is placed in its proper location, appropriate morpho-phonemic rules will turn these sentences into their surface form:

(18) a. John would be singing.
b. He arrived suddenly yesterday.
c. John has sung three times.
d. They are playing in the bathroom.
e. Mary will have been singing.
f. Bill believed that I should try the dish.

Summarizing, what Chomsky proposed is, first, to look under the surface of English syntax, by detaching Tense affixes from their hosts, and place them in the beginning of the Aux+VP complex, and then invoke a transformational rule to place the affix onto whichever auxiliary or verbal element follows it. This provides a very simple and straightforward way to guarantee that the Tense morpheme for each sentence is realized on the correct element within the sentence. Notice how all possibilities illustrated in (3), and only these possibilities, are generated by exactly this single rule of Affix Hopping, and there is no need to complicate our PSRs as in (8)-(10) and to run into the problem of not being able to collapse the sub-rules of the PSG. Most importantly, the proposal to look below the surface and the postulation of Affix Hopping enable us to capture the linguistically significant generalization that in English, Tense morphology seems to migrate, settling on whichever element follows it in a P-marker generated by the PSRs including the new Aux rule (11).

The idea that Tense belongs to the Aux constituent also captures the fact that Tense is not an inherent part of a verb (unlike derivational affixes, e.g., -ize), but an element that modifies the sentence as a whole. This is because Tense is not generated as part of a verb in the grammar, but as a constituent of Aux outside the whole VP. Since it is a bound morpheme, it cannot surface as an independent word. Therefore it must, with the help of Affix Hopping, cling to an appropriate host and be supported by it.

It should be noted that Affix Hopping is not an ad hoc rule proposed for the sole purpose of accounting for the distribution of Tense morphology in English. For example, recall that the Perfective Aspect in English involves the auxiliary have and a requirement that the verbal element following it must take the form of a past participle (symbolized by {-en}, and the Progressive Aspect requires the following verb to appear in the form of a present participle (symbolized by {-ing}). Furthermore, if both the Perfective and the Progressive Aspects appear, then the past participle morpheme {-en} must be realized on the auxiliary be, but not on the verb. In other words, the {-en}, {-ing} morphemes must also be realized on the first auxiliary or verb immediately following it. We can capture these requirements straightforwardly by assuming that the Perfective Aspect consists of the free word have and an affix {-en} that will be subject to Affix Hopping. And the Progressive consists of the free word be plus an affix that will undergo Affix Hopping.

(19) a. Perf ----> have -en
b. Prog ----> be -ing

Under these assumptions, the appropriate P-marker for John would be singing is (20), prior to the application of Affix Hopping:

(20)

And Mary will have been singing has the P-marker:

(21)

The result of applying Affix Hopping to these structures will yield:

(22) a. John will+ed be sing+ing.
b. Mary will+es have be+en sing+ing.

And the appropriate morphophonemic rules of English will turn these into their surface forms.

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6.3. Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Transformations
According to Chomsky's proposal, then, a grammar consists of a Lexicon and two types of rules: PSRs and Transformations. PSRs generate P-markers by successively expanding phrasal categories into sequences of their constituents until every node is specified in terms of lexical (word) categories (until we have reached the "terminal nodes"). Then appropriate lexical items are inserted into a given P-marker, giving substance to the P-marker as a representation of a sentence. The results of applying the PSRs and Lexical Insertion do not necessarily correspond to what is directly observed on the surface, however. They may still be somewhat abstract. Such abstract structures may be subject to alteration by Transformations, such as the Affix Hopping rule, which map them into P-markers that are closer to their observed surface forms. The (abstract) P-markers generated by the PSRs and Lexical Insertion are called the Deep Structures of sentences. Transformations operate on P-markers and map them to (relatively more concrete) P-markers, called their Surface Structures. The organization of a Transformational-Generative Grammar is as follows:

(23)

Note that a transformational rule differs from a PSR in fundamental ways. A PSR always takes the form of specifying what any given phrasal constituent consists of:

(24) X ----> Y Z W

The rule is "context-free": it says that any constituent of category X may consist of the daughters Y, Z, W in that order. By applying various PSRs, we generate P-markers. In deciding whether a given constituent should be further expanded, we simply examine whether that constituent appears on the left-hand side of any PSR. Any category appearing on the left-hand side of the arrow of a PSR must be rewritten as a sequence of its daughter(s). It does not matter where that category occurs in a sentence. (For example, the rule NP ---> (Det) N .... applies to rewrite NP as N, Det-N, etc., regardless where NP occurs (as subject of S, object, or object of a preposition, etc.).

A transformation, on the other hand, is "context-sensitive". It does not generate P-markers by successively expanding given phrasal categories. Rather it operates on P-markers generated by the Base Component and modifies them. The rule Affix Hopping, for example, might be formulated as follows (with the arrow "==>" indicating a change effected by a transformation):

(25) Aff X ==> X+Aff
[+V]

Let's use the feature [+V] as a cover term to refer to verbs and auxiliaries (both of which are "verbal" elements--auxiliaries are traditionally auxiliary verbs, while verbs are main verbs). The rule (25) says that if you scan a given P-marker and encounter a string of an Affix immediately followed by a verbal (verb or auxiliary) element, then attach the affix to the verbal element as its suffix. (The "+" indicates a "morpheme" boundary, not a word boundary. Thus X+Affix is one single word.) We can also formulate a transformation in the following manner, in terms of a Structural Description (SD), a Structural Change (SC), and optionally one or more conditions:

(26) Affix Hopping
SD: Aff X
1 2
SC: ¯ 2+1
Condition: 2 = [+V]

This rule says that any string (within a given P-marker) that satisfies the SD will undergo the change described by the SC (become a string or P-marker that satisfies the SC). The Condition gives more information about the SD that triggers the application of the rule.

Clearly, according to either formulation (25) or (26), the Affix Hopping transformation is a context-sensitive rule. It cannot apply, for example, if the affix is not

immediately followed by a [+V] element.

Thus, according to the organization indicated in (23), the derivation of a sentence proceeds as follows. First, PSRs apply to generate abstract P-markers to which Lexical Insertion occurs, resulting in d-structures, or deep P-markers. Transformations operate on the d-structures and map them to more concrete structures. When all the transformations have applied, the result is an s-structure, or surface P-marker. Since a d-structure may be modified by more than one transformation, the result of applying a given transformation is an intermediate structure, unless the transformation is the last apply, in which case the result is an s-structure. (We shall use the capitalized terms D-Structure and S-Structure to refer to the levels of syntactic representation in our grammar, and occasionally use the lower-case "d-structure" or "s-structure" to refer to an actual P-marker at the D-Structure or S-Structure levels, respectively.

We have seen an example of the Transformational Component. In the rest of this Chapter we shall introduce a few other transformations and show why it is desirable for our Grammar to incorporate these transformations.

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6.4. Auxiliary Inversion
Consider the following sentences:

These sentences are questions, more specifically "yes/no questions", differing from the ordinary declarative sentences that have been the subject of our study so far. Each of these sentences starts with an element of the Auxiliary system, followed by a subject, other auxiliary elements, and the VP, in that order.

None of these sentences are directly generatable by our Grammar as it has been formulated. There is only one rule in our PSG that allows us to generate a sentence that begins with something other than the subject, i.e., the rule S' ----> Comp S, but these sentences each start with an auxiliary element, not with a Complementizer. What can we do about our Grammar to allow it to account for these sentences?

One possibility is to increase the inventory of the Complementizer, and say that auxiliaries like any modal, have and be may be used as a Complementizer and be inserted under Comp in a P-marker generated by our PSG. A slightly different possibility is to revise our S' rule as:

(28)

However, neither of these possibilities is satisfactory. For one thing, listing auxiliaries both as members of Modal, Perf, or Prog, and as members of Comp in the Lexicon is undesirable because we are duplicating the lexical listing for what are clearly the same items, for no other reason than to accommodate the sentences in (27). In other words, such a move would be ad hoc and not independently motivated. Even if we take the strategy of revising the S' rule as (28), a problem arises as to how we can ensure that only one Aux element can appear before S--recall that our Aux rule says that an Aux may contain several elements (Modal, Perf, and Prog). We would have to further complicate the rule (28) by listing all the three possibilities together with Comp in (28), again in an ad hoc way. But most importantly, whether we pursue the first or the second possibility, we miss an important generalization about the sentences under consideration. Note that in each of these sentences, if an auxiliary, say a Modal, appears before S, then that element must be missing from S. Similarly, a sentence that starts with the auxiliary have or be cannot also contain have or be between the verb and the subject. The following sentences are ungrammatical:

If the sentences do not start with an auxiliary, as in the following examples, they are of course grammatical:

That is, a given auxiliary can occur before the subject just in case it is missing from the position after the subject, and an auxiliary must be missing from the internal position just in case it is found in sentence-initial position. The obvious generalization is that in each of (27) an auxiliary element has been "moved" to the sentence-initial position to form a yes/no question; that is, the sentences in (27) are somehow derived from those in (30), respectively, by moving an auxiliary element to the sentence-initial position. We cannot express this generalization by base-generating each of (30) with one set of rules, and each of (27) with another. (That would treat the two sets of sentences as if they were not related to each other whatsoever.) However, the generalization can be expressed quite straightforwardly if we invoke a transformation, call it Subject Auxiliary Inversion (SAI), which operates on the P-markers of (30a-f) and map them to P-markers representing (27) by moving the first auxiliary element in each of (30) to the sentence-initial position. You can see that this is exactly what happens in these sentences. The sentences in (30) may each contain one or more auxiliary element, and if you move the first auxiliary element in each case leftward across the subject, you get the desired result indicated in (27). The effect on (30a-b) is shown in (31):

(31)

Note incidentally that in each of the yes/no questions, the inverted auxiliary is inflected with Tense already. Since we have assumed, with Chomsky, that Tense is base-generated by our PSG as a daughter of Aux, dissociated initially from the other Aux elements, the d-structures underlying the sentences in (27) are, strictly speaking, not the ones in (30), but rather more abstract P-markers (having the form before Affix Hopping takes place). Thus the d-structure of (27b), for example, is actually (32):

(32)

This structure is subject to both Affix Hopping, which needs to apply twice to this structure, and SAI, which moves the inflected auxiliary to the left of the subject NP. For present purposes, we can assume that these two rules may be ordered in either way. Suppose Affix Hopping applies before SAI, then from (32) we first get (33) as the result of applying Affix Hopping.

(33)

To this intermediate structure, the SAI rule applies, moving the inflected modal (will+ed) across the subject, resulting in the s-structure (27b). (We shall assume without justification that the moved category is attached to the S node as its daughter.) Similar sentences may be derived in the same way.

On the other hand, we might assume that SAI applies before Affix Hopping. Since the inverted auxiliary has Tense with it, we must make sure that SAI moves both the Tns constituent and the first Aux immediately following it to the front of the sentence. In other words, SAI applies to (32) and preposes the substring Tns+Modal, resulting in the intermediate structure (34). (We again assume that the inverted auxiliary elements are immediately dominated by S after they are fronted.)

(34)

After Affix Hopping applies to this structure, the s-structure (27b) is obtained.

For the moment, it seems that either the order "Affix Hopping > SAI" or the order "SAI > Affix Hopping" will do. As we shall see below, however, in other cases the order is not free.

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6.5. Do Support
Such questions are illustrated by the examples in (35):

(35) a. Ý Do you know that Bill married his ex-wife again?
b. Does she love him still?
c. Did he propose to her this time?

These sentences differ from the other yes/no questions we have seen in that each question starts with an inflected form of the element do, instead of an auxiliary element like a modal, the perfective have, or the progressive be. In fact, none of these sentences contain any Auxiliary element after the subject either. If we consider the following declarative sentences, from which we assume they are derived ("transformed"), we see that these are cases where the Tense affix has hopped onto the main verb, there being no other auxiliary element for it to hop to.

(36) a. You know that Bill married his ex-wife again.
b. She loves him still.
c. He proposed to her this time.

Note that the occurrence of do, does, did in (35) is entirely triggered by the process of yes/no question formation. Furthermore, the Tense affix that occurs with the main verbs in (36) now shows up on the do, does, did in (35), in sentence initial position. The D-Structure representations of these declarative sentences are as in (37), considering only the terminal strings:

(37) a. You -es know that Bill marry+ed his ex-wife again.
b. She -es love him still.
c. He -ed propose to her this time.

Let us see how we can derive the yes/no questions in (35) from the affirmatives in (37). First, SAI must apply to move certain auxiliary elements to the left of the subject. Since the only Auxiliary element in each case is a Tns affix, SAI moves that affix to sentence-initial position, resulting in the following intermediate structures:

(38) a. -es you know that Bill -ed marry his ex-wife again?
b. -es she love him still?
c. -ed he propose to her this time?

Now, each of these sentences has (at least) one Tns affix, which must undergo Affix Hopping, so that the affix will have a host to cling to. Applying Affix Hopping to the sequence -ed marry in (38a) is no problem, and the correct result marry+ed will be obtained. However, we cannot apply Affix Hopping to the sentence-initial Tns affixes. In fact, we must prevent Affix Hopping from applying to these affixes, because if the affixes were to hop to the first following verbal elements, that would simply undo the effect of SAI, and we are back to the same old declarative sentences! We must somehow constrain Affix Hopping so that it will not move an affix across a following subject NP. We cannot, however, simply require Affix Hopping not to apply in these cases and leave the sentences as they are in (38), with the affixes "stranded", because by definition affixes are bound forms; they must cling to some lexical element (an auxiliary verb or a main verb). How can we rescue these affixes from being stranded? The answer is that a transformational rule, called Do Support, inserts the dummy verb, do, immediately after the Tns affix to "support" the affix in each case, to act as a host for the affix to hop to, and to prevent it from being stranded:3

(39) a. -es do you know that Bill -ed marry his ex-wife again?
b. -es do she love him still?
c. -ed do he propose to her this time?

Note that Do Support must be constrained in such a way as to apply only as a Last Resort, to rescue a sentence with an otherwise stranded affix. For example, if the Tns affix is already followed by an auxiliary or verbal element so that Affix Hopping can apply, an unmotivated application of Do Support would result in ungrammaticality. The following sentences do not allow a dummy (auxiliary) do:

(40) a. John would talk to her in the morning.
b. *John did will talk to her in the morning.
(41) a. They are all streaking in the rain.
b. *They do be streaking in the rain.

(42) a. Bill has broken many promises.
b. *Bill does have broken many promises.

The ungrammaticality of the (b) sentences can be explained if we assume that Do Support is a "last resort" rule. Since it is not called for to prevent affix-stranding, it cannot apply. Similarly, the following sentences are grammatical, in which a dummy do has been inserted between Tns and the main verb:4

(43) a. *You do know that Bill married his ex-wife again.
b. *She does love him still.
c. *He did propose to her this time.

Returning to (39), we see that, with do inserted into these sentences, Affix Hopping can now apply, yielding the following:

(44) a. do+es you know that Bill -ed marry his ex-wife again?
b. do+es she love him still?
c. do+ed he propose to her this time?

which, of course, will be morphophonemically realized as the surface structures in (35).

Ý
6.6. Summary
Ý

We have seen that our description of English syntax can be much simplified if our Grammar contains a Transformational Component in addition to the Base Component with a PSG and a Lexicon, as depicted in (23), and if we look at sentences at two different levels of representation: an abstract level called Deep Structure, and a more concrete level called Surface Structure. These two levels are related by transformations, such as Affix Hopping, Subject Auxiliary Inversion, and Do Support. We have also seen that the transformational rules apply sequentially, one after another, each mapping a P-marker into another and that, in order to obtain the correct results, the rules must apply in a correct order. Thus, a question like did you see John? is derived by first applying SAI, Do Support, and Affix Hopping in that order. First, the Base Component (with the PSG and the Lexicon) generates the d-structure (45):

(45)

SAI applies, mapping it to the following intermediate structure:

(46)

To this Do Support must apply, yielding (47):

(47)

After Affix Hopping applies, the surface structure (48) is obtained:

(48)

Therefore, in order to obtain the correct results, we must apply the transformations in the following order: SAI > Do Support > Affix Hopping. Recall that, while discussing yes/no questions that do not involve Do Support in Section 6.4, we noted that either the order Affix Hopping > SAI or the order SAI > Affix Hopping would give us the desired results . However, in order to derive the sentences involving Do Support, we must apply SAI before Do Support, and Affix Hopping after it. This means that we must not apply Affix Hopping before letting SAI have a chance to apply. If Affix Hopping were to apply to (45) before SAI, the string You see+ed Bill would result. If SAI were to apply to this output, we would get *Saw you Bill?, which is of course ungrammatical in English.

Note that while some Transformations are obligatory, others are optional. Do Support is obligatory (when its application is motivated), and so is Affix Hopping; otherwise an affix would be stranded. On the other hand, SAI is optional, so it need not apply to a d-structure like (45). If one chooses not to apply SAI, Do Support would have no occasion to apply. And (45) will directly undergo Affix Hopping, yielding the surface sentence You saw Bill.

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Homework 6
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(1) Examine the following sentences:

a. Mary will not talk to Bill.
b. Mary must not be talking to Bill.
c. Mary has not been talking to Bill.
d. Mary is not talking to Bill.
e. *Mary will have not talked to Bill.
f. *Mary not will talk to Bill.
g. *Mary has been not talking to Bill.
h. *Mary must be not talking to Bill.
i. *Mary must be talking not to Bill.
j. *Mary must be talking to Bill not.
k. *Mary not talked to Bill.
l. Mary did not talk to Bill.
m. *Mary did talk not to Bill.
n. *John talked not to Bill.

Assume that these negative sentences are derived from their affirmative counterparts by a transformation called Negative Placement, which places the morpheme not into an appropriate position.

(i) Describe the Negative Placement rule, indicating how it can correctly obtain the correct negative sentences (in conjunction with the other Transformations we have posited in this chapter).
(ii) Give the D-Structure P-marker of the sentence Mary did not talk to Bill, and indicate how the s-structure is obtained (name the transformations that apply to them in succession and describe what happens when each given transformation applies).

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(2) For each of the following sentences:

(a) Could the little boy have been crying?
(b) Did you explain the problem to him?

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(i) provide an appropriate d-structure (with a tree diagram) and
(ii) indicate what transformations are involved in deriving their surface forms. Name the transformations in the order they apply, and for each transformation, indicate what it does, by showing the intermediate structure or surface structure ( with a terminal string--not a tree) that it yields.

Ý

(3)

(i) Explain the following contrasts:
a. Do you have any wool?
b. *Have you any wool? (*in American English)
c. Have you brought any wool?
d. *Do you have brought any wool?

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(ii) Explain the following contrasts:

a. John did a good job.
b. *John did not a good job.
c. John did not do a good job.
d. John has done a good job.
e. *John does not have done a good job.

Ý

Ý

1 A tenseless Aux would have the form defined by Aux ----> Inf. (Perf) (Prog). This case and the case represented by (11) can be collapsed into the following rule:

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Note that every S must contain either Inf or Tns as its Aux, because an S is necessarily either tensed or tenseless. This formulation, which takes Tns as a constituent of Aux, means that every S contains an Aux, which is necessarily either tenseless or tensed, containing Inf or Tns. Hence we need to revise our PSR1 so that the Aux constituent is obligatorily chosen: S ----> NP Aux VP, not S ---> NP (Aux) VP. Note also that Modal as an option is available only when Tns is chosen instead of Inf.

Ý

2 For example, English morpho-phonemic rules provide that the Past Tense morpheme takes the phonemic form of /Id/ if the stem ends with /t/ or /d/; otherwise it takes the form of /t/ if the stem ends with a voiceless consonant; otherwise it takes the form of /d/. The morpho-phonemics of irregular verbs like had, has, was, went, etc. would be directly specified in the Lexicon. But at the syntactic level we still can consider them as consisting of a root form plus a suffix, e.g., have + {-ed}, go + {-ed}, etc. The fact that go + {-ed} is pronounced as went is provided by the morphological-lexical component of the Grammar.

3 The dummy, or auxiliary, use of do should be distinguished from the main verb do. The main verb do means "to perform, act, execute, or carry out", etc., but the dummy verb is devoid of semantic content. Its sole existence is to serve the grammatical function of a place holder to which a Tns affix can be attached. In the sentence Did he do the job? the sentence-initial did is used as an auxiliary (dummy), and the sentence-internal do is the main verb.

4 These sentences are ungrammatical with the dummy do, did, does each pronounced with normal (reduced) stress. They are grammatical only if they are emphatically stressed. We exclude emphatic sentences from consideration.

Ý

Ý

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HUANG Intro Syntax Lecture Notes - Chapter 6 -

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6.1. The English Auxiliary System Revisited In Chapter 4, we took a look at the English auxiliary system and saw that the auxiliary is an optional element of a sentence which, if it occurs, may select one or more of the options included in the following rule, PSR9: (1) PSR-9: The Auxiliary Rule According to this rule, the infinitival auxiliary, to, and the modal auxiliaries (will, could, must, etc.)

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Writing Good Multiple Choice Test Questions

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Writing Good Multiple Choice Test Questions

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https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/writing-good-multiple-choice-test-questions/

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Writing Good Multiple Choice Test Questions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
by Cynthia J. Brame Print Version Cite this guide: Brame, C. (2013) Writing good multiple choice test questions. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/writing-good-multiple-choice-test-questions/. Constructing an Effective Stem Constructing Effective Alternatives Additional Guidelines for Multiple Choice Questions Considerations for Writing Multiple Choice Items that Test Higher-order Thinking Additional Resources Multiple choice test questions, also known as items,...

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phrasalverbdemon.com is a long-term project aimed at providing free materials on phrasal verbs.
https://www.phrasalverbdemon.com/prepoff.htm
About the author: https://www.phrasalverbdemon.com/about.htm
(Buy him a coffee if you like his work.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
break off

I was shocked when they broke off their engagement.

call off

The meeting was called off at the last minute due to mist and heavy drizzle.

clock off

All employees had to clock off at the end of the day.

come off

The team came off second best.

cry off

He cried off at the last moment.

cut off

We were cut off in the middle of our phone conversation.

dash off

Feel free to dash off an email to us at any time.

finish off

The invasion of the Spaniards finished off the Aztec languages of Mexico.

get off

Can you get off the phone, please?

go off

The party went off without a hitch.

hoot off

He was hooted off the stage after only 15 minutes.

knock off

We knocked off early and went to the pub.

lay off

It's safer to lay off the drink completely if you do have to drive.

leave off

We need to continue where we left off.

log off

I logged off and decided to drive home.

pass off

Voting passed off peacefully in most parts of the country.

pay off

I've paid off all my debts.

pension off

I was employed until injury had me pensioned off.

play off

The losers of the semifinal matches will play off for the bronze medal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
phrasal verbs english prepositions particles adverbs dictionary two-part verbs esl multi-word verbs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phrasal Verb Demon. Making sense of phrasal verbs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
break off I was shocked when they broke off their engagement. call off The meeting was called off at the last minute due to mist and heavy drizzle. clock off All employees had to clock off at the end of the day. come off The team came off second best.

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LINGUISTICS: FREE ACCESS TO SELECTED JOURNALS

# data[].attributes.subject
LINGUISTICS: FREE ACCESS TO SELECTED JOURNALS

# data[].attributes.body
http://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/linguistics?fbclid=IwAR102PkI9xyx8TfFToIeYdlNQYq_2yHPox2Hc5Oioq02IHWVXYaRClsghbs#editorschoice

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With the end of the year approaching, De Gruyter Mouton would like to say thank you to all scholars, researchers and authors from our community by providing free access to selected issues of the Mouton journals below.

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COMMENT- Predatory journals: no definition, no defence

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COMMENT- Predatory journals: no definition, no defence

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PDF version: https://www.nature.com/magazine-assets/d41586-019-03759-y/d41586-019-03759-y.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03759-y?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=17f895c8d1-briefing-dy-20191211&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-17f895c8d1-44268273&fbclid=IwAR0pa4cN4s1veTUBP4qUup7tcwNtAO7pOsCB5voznset9M8yNnEUbVVVIAk

# data[].attributes.headline
Online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription

# data[].attributes.subject
Online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription

# data[].attributes.body
Online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription
https://tophonetics.com/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hi! Got an English text and want to see how to pronounce it? This online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription will translate your English text into its phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Paste or type your English text in the text field above and click "Show transcription" button (or use [Ctrl+Enter] shortcut from the text input area).

Features:

Choose between British and American* pronunciation. When British option is selected the [r] sound at the end of the word is only voiced if followed by a vowel, which follows British phonetic convention.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols used.

The structure of the text and sentences in it (line breaks, punctuation marks, etc.) is preserved in phonetic transcription output making it easier to read.

An option to vary pronunciation depending on whether words are in stressed or weak position in the sentence, as in connected speech (checkbox "Show weak forms"). Weak forms are italicized in the output.

Words in CAPS are interpreted as acronyms if the word is not found in the database. Acronym transcriptions will be shown with hyphens between letters.

In addition to commonly used vocabulary the database contains a very substantial amount of place names (including names of countries, their capitals, US states, UK counties), nationalities and popular names.

You can output the text and its phonetic transcription along each other side-by-side or line-by-line to make back-reference to the original text easier. Just tick the appropriate checkbox in the input form.

Where a word has a number of different pronunciations (highlighted in blue in the output) you can select the one that agrees with the context by clicking on it. To see a popup with a list of possible pronunciations move your mouse cursor over the word.
Note that different pronunciations of one word may have different meanings or may represent variations in pronunciation with the same meaning. If unsure which pronunciation is relevant in your particular case, consult a dictionary.

The dictionary database is regularly amended with most popular missing words (shown in red in the output).

The text can be read out loud in browsers with speech synthesis support (Safari, Chrome).

*) American transcriptions are based on the open Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary.

We encourage students of linguistics/phonetics to do their own work during their assignments and remind them that submitting transcriptions produced by this website for academic credit is a breach of academic integrity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hi! Got an English text and want to see how to pronounce it? This online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription will translate your English text into its phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Paste or type your English text in the text field above and click "Show transcription" button (or use [Ctrl+Enter] shortcut from the text input area).

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Collocation Teaching Effect on Reading Comprehension in Advanced EFL Setting

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813001626

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Abstract

The current study tried to address whether explicit collocation teaching has a positive effect on reading comprehension compared to explicit single-item vocabulary instruction. Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKL) and vocabulary pretest were used to determine prior knowledge of 3 rd year ELT department students in Pamukkale University. Of the two treatment groups one received explicit collocation teaching and the other received single -item vocabulary instruction followed by a reading passage (Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score: 28). Five of the six reading comprehension questions aimed to elicit the target collocations in the answers. The two-tailed t-test significance values were higher than 0.05 for all the questions (q1: 1,000; q2: 0,64; q3: 0,39; q4: 0,106; q5: 0,768), and yet indicated differences between participant means were likely due to chance and not likely due to the difference in treatment types (single-item vocabulary instruction and collocation instruction). The inconclusive findings could be due to only one treatment session.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Collocation Teaching Effect on Reading Comprehension in Advanced EFL Setting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The current study tried to address whether explicit collocation teaching has a positive effect on reading comprehension compared to explicit single-item vocabulary instruction. Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKL) and vocabulary pretest were used to determine prior knowledge of 3 rd year ELT department students in Pamukkale University.

# data[].attributes.body
Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology is an e-journal with an international scientific committee; it publishes articles on the English lexicon (thematic issues, “book review” section, special issues, etc.), from a synchronic as well as from a diachronic perspective. Lexisaccepts articles in English and in French.
https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/

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Critical Discourse Analysis: How language affects politics 

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Critical Discourse Analysis: How language affects politics 

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October 9, 2012 - Faculty from Stanford and UC Berkeley examine how language affects politics with an audience at Litquake, San Francisco's largest literary festival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImM0ENioZkU

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Language and Politics: This Discourse of Power

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Behavior Research Methods volume 50, pages1166–1186(2018)

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Behavior Research Methods volume 50, pages1166–1186(2018)

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The reliability paradox: Why robust cognitive tasks do not produce reliable individual differences

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-017-0935-1?fbclid=IwAR2L07bGNJPv6masVdMGQx3bLjXJcvojM_kLTyiw8Xo3x_NozQ5LRzUnP9Q

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Craig Hedge

Georgina Powell

Petroc Sumner

Article

Individual differences have been an annoyance rather than a challenge to the experimenter. His goal is to control behavior, and variation within treatments is proof that he has not succeeded... For reasons both statistical and philosophical, error variance is to be reduced by any possible device. (Cronbach, 1957, p. 674)

The reliability of experimental effects

Different meanings of reliability

For experiments, a "reliable" effect is one that nearly always replicates, one that is shown by most participants in any study and produces consistent effect sizes. For example, in the recent "Many labs 3" project (Ebersole et al., 2016), which examined whether effects could be reproduced when the same procedure was run in multiple labs, the Stroop effect was replicated in 100% of attempts, compared to much lower rates for most effects tested.

In the context of correlational research, reliability refers to the extent to which a measure consistently ranks individuals. This meaning of reliability is a fundamental consideration for individual differences research because the reliability of two measures limits the correlation that can be observed between them (Nunnally, 1970; Spearman, 1904). Classical test theory assumes that individuals have some "true" value on the dimension of interest, and the measurements we observe reflect their true score plus measurement error (Novick, 1966). In practice, we do not know an individual's true score, thus, reliability depends on the ability to consistently rank individuals at two or more time points. Reliability is typically assessed with statistics like the IntraClass Correlation (ICC), which takes the form:

1Here, variance between sessions corresponds to systematic changes between sessions across the sample. Error variance corresponds to non-systematic changes between individuals' scores between sessions, i.e. the score for some individuals increases, while it decreases for others. Clearly, reliability decreases with higher measurement error, whilst holding variance between participants constant. Critically, reliability also decreases for smaller between- participant variance, whilst holding error variance constant. In other words, for two measures with identical "measurement error," there will be lower reliability for the measure with more homogeneity. Measures with poor reliability are ill-suited to correlational research, as the ability to detect relationships with other constructs will be compromised by the inability to effectively distinguish between individuals on that dimension (Spearman, 1910).

In contrast to the requirements for individual differences, homogeneity is the ideal for experimental research. Whereas variance between individuals is the numerator in the ICC formula above, it appears as the denominator in the t-test (i.e., the standard error of the mean). For an experimental task to produce robust and replicable results, it is disadvantageous for there to be large variation in the within-subject effect. Interestingly, it is possible for us to be perfectly aware of this for statistical calculations, without realising (as we previously didn't) that the meanings of a "reliable" task for experimental and correlational research are not only different, but can be opposite in this critical sense.

Present study

The issues we discuss have broad implications for cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Recent reviews have highlighted the potential for individual differences approaches to advance our understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function (Kanai & Rees, 2011). The way in which we measure and conceptualize cognitive processes has largely been built on within-subject paradigms, though their strengths in experimental contexts may make these paradigms sub-optimal for individual differences. Here, in three studies, we evaluate the re-test reliability of seven commonly used and robust tasks, spanning the domains of cognitive control, attention, processing style, and numerical-spatial associations. In doing so, we not only provide sorely needed information on these measures, but also evaluate the relationship between robust experimental paradigms and reliable individual differences in real data using cohort sizes and trial numbers similar to, or greater than, most imaging studies. In addition, we illustrate how taking the reliability of these measures into account has the power to change the conclusions we draw from statistical tests.

First, we examined the reliability of the Eriksen flanker task, Stroop task, go/no-go task, and the stop-signal task, which we then replicated in Study 2. These tasks are all considered to be measures of impulsivity, response inhibition or executive functioning (Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Stahl et al., 2014). In Study 3, we examined the Posner cueing task (Posner, 1980), the Navon task (Navon, 1977), and a spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect paradigm (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). These tasks are used to measure the constructs of attentional orienting, perceptual processing style, and the automatic association between magnitude and space (i.e., the "mental number line"), respectively. These tasks were selected because they were all originally developed in experimental contexts, and we believed they would be familiar to most readers. Further, all these tasks have since been used in the context of individual differences, and their underlying neural correlates. A Google Scholar search for the term "individual differences" within articles citing the original papers for each task produces at least 400 citations for each. For conciseness, we combine the reporting of our methods and results across all studies.

Method

Participants

Participants in Study 1 were 50 (three male) undergraduate students aged 18-21 years (M = 19.5 years, SD=0.9). Participants in Study 2 were 62 (12 male) undergraduate students aged 18-47 years (M = 20.5 years, SD=4.98). Participants in Study 3 were 42 (five male) undergraduate students aged 18-40 years (M = 20.4 years, SD=3.5). All participants gave informed written consent prior to participation in accordance with the revized Declaration of Helsinki (2013), and the experiments were approved by the local Ethics Committee.

Design and procedure

Participants completed the tasks (four in Studies 1 and 2, three in Study 3) in each of two 90-min sessions taking place 3 weeks apart, at the same time of day. Seven participants in Study 1 and five participants in Study 2 were unable to attend their second session exactly 3 weeks later, and were rescheduled to between 20 and 28 days following their first session. Each participant completed the tasks in the same order in both of their sessions (in order not to introduce between-session variance associated with order), and the order of tasks was counterbalanced across participants using a Latin square. Though counterbalancing is common practice in experimental studies, it is often preferable to administer tasks in a fixed order when correlating variables (though not all do, see e.g., Aichert et al., 2012; Wöstmann et al., 2013). However, our primary focus here was the re-test reliability of the tasks, and a fixed order could cause one task to appear more reliable than another due to presentation order rather than the task itself.

Following completion of the tasks, participants completed the UPPS-P impulsive behavior scale (Lynam, Smith, Whiteside, & Cyders, 2006; Whiteside & Lynam, 2001), which we commonly administer in our lab. We include reliability information for the UPPS-P components as a reference for the levels of reliability attainable in our sample with a measure constructed for the purpose of measuring individual differences.

Data analysis

Data were not included if participants did not return for the follow-up session (3,2,2 for the three studies respectively). Participants' data were not analysed for a given task if they show very low compliance, defined as: accuracy below 60% in either session for overall performance in the flanker, Stroop, Navon, and SNARC tasks, responses to go stimuli in the go/no-go task, discrimination performance on go trials in the stop-signal task. For the Posner task, participants were also required to have anticipatory response rates (i.e., responding before the stimulus appears) of less than 10%. For the stop signal task, participants' data were not included if their data produced a negative SSRT, or if they responded on more than 90% of stop-signal trials in either session, as an SSRT could not be meaningfully calculated. A participant's data was removed entirely if they fell below these criteria for two or more tasks within a single session, otherwise data were only excluded for the individual task. After these exclusions, 47 and 57 participants remained for the flanker and go/no-go tasks in Study 1 and 2, respectively, 47 and 56 in the Stroop task, and 45 and 54 in the stop-signal task. All participants met the inclusion criteria in Study 3. The calculation of mean RTs excluded RTs below 100 ms and greater than three times the each individual's median absolute deviation (Hampel, 1974; Leys, Ley, Klein, Bernard, & Licata, 2013).

Reliabilities were calculated using Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICC) using a two-way random effects model for absolute agreement. In the commonly cited Shrout and Fleiss ( 1979; see also McGraw & Wong, 1996) nomenclature, this corresponds to ICC (2,1). This form of the ICC is sensitive to differences between session means. In Supplementary Material A, we perform further analyses to account for potential outliers and distributional assumptions. The choice of statistic does not affect our conclusions. We report reliabilities separately for Studies 1 and 2 in the main text so that consistency across samples can be observed. We combine the studies in supplementary analyses.

As both measurement error and between-participant variability are important for the interpretation of reliability, we also report the standard error of measurement (SEM) for each variable. The SEM is the square root of the error variance term in the ICC calculation and reflects the 68% confidence interval around an individual's observed score.

Summary level data, as well as the raw data for our behavioral tasks, are available on the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/cwzds/ )

Results

Task performance

Task reliabilities

Studies 1 and 2

None of the behavioral measures in Studies 1 and 2 (see Table 1) exceeded reliabilities of .8, typically considered excellent or of a clinically required standard (Cicchetti & Sparrow, 1981; Fleiss, 1981; Landis & Koch, 1977). Two indices of response control exceeded a standard of good/substantial reliability (.6) in both sessions: the Stroop RT cost (ICCs of .6 and .66 in Studies 1 and 2 respectively) and commission errors on the go/no-go task (ICC = .76 in both studies). The reliability of the RT cost scores, calculated by taking the difference between congruent and incongruent conditions for example, are generally lower than their components, and we examine reasons for this below. For example, the flanker RT cost in Study 1 has a reliably of .4, whereas the RTs for congruent and incongruent trials have reliabilities of .74 and .66 respectively. This is despite the flanker RT cost having a relatively low SEM of 15 ms. Thus, measurement error alone does not predict reliability. The scatter plots in Fig. 2 show the SEMs for the critical measures to show the size of the error relative to the variance in the data.

The results for the stop signal task warrant expansion. Large SEMs were observed for Go RT and mean SSD in Study 1. We suspect that this is due to proactive slowing in a subset of participants in one session, who did not strategically adjust their responses in the same way in the other session. However, despite a reduced SEM and higher reliability for go RTs in Study 2, the reliability of SSRT did not increase. Though the integration method of calculating SSRT was shown by Verbruggen et al. ( 2013) to be robust against gradual slowing within a session, it will remain sensitive to more substantial strategic changes between sessions (c.f., Leotti & Wager, 2010). Adopting a more conservative exclusion criterion did not improve upon the reliability estimates for SSRTs (see Supplementary Material A).

Study 3 (see Table 2)

Only one behavioral measure had a reliability in the nominally excellent range (.82): the conflict effect when responding to local characters in the Navon task. An influential data point (an error cost of 43% in both sessions) contributed to this, though the measure still shows good reliability (.74) if this individual is excluded.

The reliability of the Posner cueing effect was good (.7), though also influenced by an outlying data point (ICC = .56 if excluded). The reliabilities for all other behavioral effects of interest were poor (ICCs <.25).

How many trials should be administered?

We found that the literature on these seven tasks also lacks information to guide researchers on how many trials to run, and different studies can choose very different numbers without any explicit discussion or justification. For those interested in the use of these tasks for individual differences, we provide information on the relationship between reliability and trial numbers in Supplementary Material D.

What happens to variance in within-subject effects?

The relationship between reliability and the sources of variance in the RT measures is shown in Fig. 4, which plots the three components of variance from which the ICC is calculated. Each bar decomposes the relative variance accounted for by differences between participants (white), differences between sessions (e.g., practice effects, gray), and error variance (black). Correlational research (and the ICC) relies on the proportion of variance accounted for by individual differences, and the standard subtractions (e.g., to calculate the Stroop RT cost) do not improve this signal-to-noise ratio - if anything, it is reduced, explaining why difference scores are generally lower in reliability than their components. The equivalent plot for errors can be seen in Supplementary Material E. We also plot the absolute variance components in Supplementary Material E. In absolute terms, the total amount of variance is reduced in the difference scores often by a factor of 3 or 4 relative to their components. This is desirable in an experimental task, in which any variation in the effect of interest is detrimental.

How does accounting for reliability affect between-task correlations?

Spearman's Rho correlations can be seen in Table 3. We combined the data from Studies 1 and 2 to maximize statistical power. In order to examine the impact of reliability, in Table 4, we also estimated the dissatenuated correlation coefficients using Spearman's ( 1904) formula:

Spearman noted that the correlation that is observed between two measures will be attenuated (weakened) by measurement error. Assuming that the reliability coefficient reflects the noise in each measure individually, he proposed the disattenuation formula as a means to "correct" the correlation obtained from a sample. As the formula depends on sample estimates of the correlation and reliabilities, it is itself an estimate, and not intended here for inference (for discussions of interpretative issues, see Muchinsky, 1996; Winne & Belfry, 1982). We present them to illustrate the impact of reliability on theoretical conclusions, especially when using the traditional approach of statistical thresholds, though the attenuation of effect sizes is not unique to the null hypothesis significance testing framework. For ease of comparison, correlations significant at p<.05 are highlighted.

Focusing first on the observed correlations in Table 3 there is little support for a relationship between these measures. Consistent with some observations (Reynolds, Ortengren, Richards, & de Wit, 2006), though inconsistent with others (Aichert et al., 2012), we observed a strong correlation between SSRT and commission errors on the go/no-go task. Otherwise, if we were making a dichotomous decision as to whether different response control tasks were related, we would fail to reject the null hypothesis by traditional standards.

The disattenuated correlations in Table 4 paint a somewhat different picture. Note that the dissatenuated correlation will always be higher than the observed correlations when the reliabilities are less than one. The increase in the correlations in Table 4 is therefore unsurprising. If we apply the same statistical thresholds however, the dissatenuated correlations lead us to different qualitative conclusions about the relationships between measures. Note that not all of these relationships are consistent with a single underlying response control construct. For example, whereas SSRT shows a positive correlation with flanker error costs, it shows a negative correlation with flanker RT costs. These may suggest other factors moderating the relationships between these measures, such as speed-accuracy trade-offs that carry some consistency across tasks.

For reference, we include the raw and disattenuated correlations for the measures used in Study 3 in the Supplementary Material F.

Discussion

Across many research, educational, or clinical contexts, when finding a group level effect, it is often theoretically meaningful to ask what factors of the individual predict effectiveness. It is not intuitive, and rarely discussed, that such questions may be at odds with each other because one requires low and one requires high variability between individuals (Rogosa, 1988), even though the statistical issues have been long known. The challenges highlighted by our data are also cause to reflect upon the way in which researchers evaluate paradigms for this purpose; it should not be assumed that robust experimental paradigms will translate well to correlational studies. In fact, they are likely to be sub-optimal for correlational studies for the same reasons that they produce robust experimental effects. Our findings, as well as observations from elsewhere in the literature, indicate that this challenge currently exists across most domains of cognitive neuroscience and psychology (De Schryver, Hughes, Rosseel, & De Houwer, 2016; Hahn et al., 2011; Lebel & Paunonen, 2011; Ross et al., 2015). We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of this below, including the way in which sub-optimal reliabilities should be interpreted; the extent to which these problems generalize to other populations; and the challenge this poses to resource intensive research such as neuroimaging, where it is not easy just to increase participant numbers.

Translating experimental effects to correlational studies

The reliability of a measure is an empirical question and a prerequisite for effective correlational research. Clearly reliability cannot be assumed on the basis of robustness in within-subject contexts. Success in within-subject contexts does not necessarily exclude a task from consideration in individual differences contexts, or vice versa. Hypothetically, an effect could produce reliable between-subject variation, but also a mean difference large enough so that it can be consistently reproduced across different samples. However, the reliabilities of many the measures reported here, spanning the domains of attention, cognitive control, and processing style, are much lower than most researchers would expect, and fall short of outlined standards (Barch et al., 2008; Cicchetti & Sparrow, 1981; Fleiss, 1981; Landis & Koch, 1977). There are direct implications of this for initiatives recommending and employing some of the measures we evaluated (e.g., the Stroop and stop-signal tasks; Barch, Braver, Carter, Poldrack, & Robbins, 2009; Hamilton et al., 2015), and for the way in which experimental tasks are evaluated for this purpose in the future.

It is important to emphasize that these results do not indicate that these paradigms are not replicable, valid, or robust measures of their respective constructs. For example, the global precedence effect from the Navon task was highly robust, and generally of a similar magnitude in each session of each study. It also does not preclude the use of these tasks for examining between-group differences in experimental designs. The difference between group means may be sufficiently large so as to be detectable, for example, if one or both groups are located at extreme points on the continuum. Rather, our results suggest that these measures do not consistently distinguish between individuals within a population. Such difficulties with inter-task correlations and reliability have been discussed previously in studies of executive functioning, in the context of the "task impurity" problem (Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Miyake et al., 2000). Individual differences in a given task will likely capture only a subset of "executive functions," in addition to domain specific mechanisms. Moreover, as Cronbach ( 1957) highlighted, the goal of the experimentalist is to minimize individual differences, and many of the tasks we examine come originally from this tradition. As a result, these tasks may tap in to aspects of executive functioning that are relatively consistent across individuals compared to those that differentiate between them.

In noting that measures are constructed to achieve different aims in experimental and correlational research, we can also consider whether it is problematic to attempt to experimentally manipulate behavior on measures constructed to reliably measure individual differences. For example, self-report measures such as the UPPS-P are developed with the explicit purpose of assessing stable traits (Whiteside & Lynam, 2001), such that they should be purposefully robust to natural or induced situational variation. Nevertheless, some studies have looked at the UPPS-P dimensions as outcome variables, for example, in a longitudinal study on alcohol use (Kaizer, Bonsu, Charnigo, Milich, & Lynam, 2016). As noted previously, whether a measure is effective for a given aim is an empirical question, though we believe these broader considerations can provide useful guidance.

Difficulties with difference scores

However, it does not follow that tasks without difference scores are preferable. In principle, subtracting a baseline measure in order to control for unwanted between-participant variance is not at odds with the goal of examining individual differences in performance on that task. After all, one wants to measure individual differences in a specific factor, not just obtain any between-participant variance. For example, simple and choice RTs correlate with measures of general intelligence (Deary, Der, & Ford, 2001; Jensen, 1998). Omitting the baseline subtraction from a task could produce between-task correlations for this reason, but would not aid our understanding of the specific underlying mechanism(s).

The impact of reliability on statistical power - is "good" good enough?

An immediate consequence of a failure to consider reliability in correlational studies is that effect sizes will generally be underestimated. If a researcher conducts an a priori power analysis without factoring in reliability, they bias themselves towards finding a null effect. A less intuitive consequence is that the published literature can overestimate effects (Loken & Gelman, 2017). Though on average correlation estimates are attenuated by measurement error, noise can also produce spuriously high correlations on occasion. When spuriously high estimates are selected for by a bias to publish significant findings the average published correlation becomes an overestimate. In combination, these factors are challenges to both reproducibility and theoretical advancement.

Consideration of reliability is not completely absent from the cognitive and imaging literature (e.g., Salthouse, McGuthry, & Hambrick, 1999; Shah, Cramer, Ferguson, Birn, & Anderson, 2016; Yarkoni & Braver, 2010). However, our informal discussions with colleagues and peers suggest that it is not routine to factor reliability estimates into power analyses, and it is exceedingly rare to see this reported explicitly in published power calculations. It is also potentially problematic that researchers tend to underestimate the sample sizes necessary to detect small effects (Bakker, Hartgerink, Wicherts, & van der Maas, 2016). To illustrate these issues concretely, Table 5 shows some numerical examples of the impact of different reliabilities on sample size calculations. This compares the sample size required for the assumed underlying correlation with that required for the attenuated correlation. This calculation, sometimes attributed to Nunnally ( 1970), rearranges Spearman's ( 1904) correction for attenuation formula that we applied earlier:

Two things are apparent from Table 5. First, the magnitude of reliability for a measure has a substantial impact on required sample sizes. Even for reliability nominally considered to be "good" (>.6) by commonly cited criteria (Cicchetti & Sparrow, 1981; Fleiss, 1981; Landis & Koch, 1977), the required sample sizes are about three times higher than what would be specified if reliability had not been taken in to account. Second, even with moderate ( r = .3) true effect sizes assumed, the sample sizes required greatly exceed those typically used in most cognitive and neurophysiological research.

Challenges for cognitive neuroscience and clinical research

Measurement error or state-dependence

We have largely discussed issues of task construction and measurement. An alternative possibility is that participants simply fluctuate in their ability to perform these tasks over time and contexts. There is evidence, for example, that SSRTs are sensitive to strategic changes (Leotti & Wager, 2010), and that SSRTs and go/no-go performance are disrupted by alcohol (e.g., Caswell, Morgan, & Duka, 2013; de Wit, Crean, & Richards, 2000; Dougherty, Marsh-Richard, Hatzis, Nouvion, & Mathias, 2008; Mulvihill, Skilling, & VogelSprott, 1997; Weafer & Fillmore, 2008), indicating that performance on these tasks is not impermeable.

Nevertheless, there is evidence for stability for some tasks in our data. Low ICCs in a homogenous sample are not necessarily indicative of substantial changes in performance. The low SEMs in the flanker RT cost indicate that participants generally perform the task similarly in both sessions, even though the relative ranking between individuals is not consistent. Further, if the low ICCs we observe were primarily due to variation in psychological or physiological factors over the course of 3 weeks, we might expect high reliabilities when comparing performance in the first half of each session to the second half, or comparing odd and even numbered trials. However, these within-session reliabilities ( Supplementary Material G) show similarly sub-optimal reliability for the key measures (see also Khng & Lee, 2014). An exception to this is the stop-signal reaction time, where the odd vs. even trial comparison produces estimates between .82 and .89 for the integration method. This is likely in part because the tracking procedure used will produce a high reliability for the SSD when taking alternating trials.

We would generally expect measurements taken closely together in time to yield higher estimates of reliability than those taken at more distant points, even within a single testing session. However, there are sources of variance outside the construct of interest that could increase or decrease reliability estimates. Time-series analysis of RTs suggests that there is a correlation between the speeds of consecutive responses given by an individual, which decreases as the number of intervening trials increases (Gilden, Thornton, & Mallon, 1995; Wagenmakers, Farrell, & Ratcliff, 2004). Estimates comparing odd to even numbered trials may appear to be more reliable because they encompass such short-scale fluctuations. Alternatively, factors such as practice effects or fatigue may decrease reliability by increasing measurement error, or by producing systematic shifts in performance between measurement points (e.g., individuals being slower in the second half of trials compared to the first). The analyses we conduct in Supplementary Materials D and G explore these as possible reasons for the sub-optimal reliabilities that we observed. Taken together, these suggest that the key issue is simply that individuals do not differ enough from one another to reliably overcome measurement fluctuations.

Generalizability of findings to other populations.

If between-participant variance differs markedly between populations, the population with higher variance will show higher reliability, unless measurement noise increases proportionally. We used a (predominantly female) student sample, who might show restricted variance compared to a general population. However, our comparisons indicate that they have similar levels of variability to samples taken from a general population, which also did not show consistently higher reliability estimates (see Supplementary Material C1 and C2). Further, the components of UPPS-P, a self-report measure of impulsivity, showed reliabilities between .7-.9, indicating that reliable measurement is attainable in a student sample on measures designed to differentiate between individuals. Finally, examples of sub-optimal reliability for robust within-subject effects are not limited to student samples (e.g., attention networks in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls; Hahn et al., 2011). Therefore, the issues we discuss are likely to generalize to other samples.

Though our sample sizes are larger than many previous retest reliability studies of these tasks, it has been argued that samples approaching 250 are necessary for a stable estimate of the (Pearson's) correlation effect size (Schonbrodt & Perugini, 2013). Using simulations, they defined stability as the point at which the "observed" correlation did not deviate from a specified window (±.1) around the "true" effect with the addition of more data points. However, the point of stability is dependent on the size of the underlying correlation, and the degree of uncertainty one is willing to accept. For example, assuming a confidence (power) level of 80% and a population correlation of R = .7, the point of stability for a window of ±.15 was N=28. Therefore, ICCs as low as the ones we observe are unlikely if the population ICC is excellent.

The student population we used is typical of most cognitive and imaging studies, but regardless of population, the main points of this paper will remain true: experimental designs aim to minimize between-subject variance, and thus successful tasks in that context should be expected to have low reliability; taking reliability into account could entirely change theoretical inferences from correlational structure.

Future directions and recommendations

Our consideration of reliability issues form part of a broader concern that studying individual differences is challenging for laboratory-based research, particularly in resource-intensive contexts such as neuroimaging. With these global issues in mind, we discuss approaches that could help to optimize research designs using cognitive tasks. Note that although the majority of discussion focuses on analysis methods, one should not expect to create inter-subject variability from a task that is designed to produce homogenous performance. Researchers should be mindful of these properties at the stages of task design/selection and power analysis. For several of these approaches, it is undetermined or untested whether they improve reliability estimates for the contexts we focus on here, though some have shown promise in other areas.

Alternative measurement approaches

The independent examination of mean RTs or mean error rates belies the richness of the data provided by many behavioral tasks. The practice of considering RT and errors costs as independent and interchangeable measures of performance has been questioned in several areas (e.g., Draheim, Hicks, & Engle, 2016; Ratcliff & Rouder, 1998; Wickelgren, 1977). In the domain of task switching, it has been suggested that composite scores of RT costs and error rates are better able to predict performance in a working memory task than RT costs alone (Draheim et al., 2016; Hughes, Linck, Bowles, Koeth, & Bunting, 2014). Further, Hughes et al. observed higher within-session reliabilities for composite RT-accuracy scores, relative to RT costs or accuracy costs in isolation, but only when using a response deadline procedure.

Alternatively, mathematical models of decision making such as the drift-diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978; Ratcliff & Rouder, 1998; Ratcliff, Smith, Brown, & McKoon, 2016) decompose RT and accuracy into parameters thought to reflect decision processes. The combination of modelling techniques with imaging methods has also been discussed (Forstmann, Ratcliff, & Wagenmakers, 2016; Forstmann & Wagenmakers, 2015). Recently, Lerche and Voss ( 2017) observed that the retest reliability of key diffusion model parameters was similar to that of overall accuracy and mean RT in lexical decision, recognition memory, and an associative priming task. However, the parameters they extracted reflect processes (e.g., information processing speed) in individual conditions or across conditions, rather than a within-subject effect analogous to an RT cost. It is possible to create difference scores from model parameters, though these may be subject to the same statistical issues noted previously. Thus, while there may be theoretical value in such modelling approaches, whether they improve reliability estimates for experimental effects is an open question.

Another suggested alternative to difference scores is to use residualized differences (Cronbach & Furby, 1970; DuBois, 1957; Friedman & Miyake, 2004). This entails a regression approach in which scores in the baseline condition (e.g., congruent RT) are used to predict incongruent RTs, and an individual's residual from their predicted value is taken as the index of performance. Residualized scores show improved reliability over standard difference scores in some situations, though their interpretation is not straightforward (for a review, see Willet, 1988). Evaluating the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of all these approaches is beyond the scope of the current paper. From a methodological perspective, the reliability of any composite measure or modelled parameter will not be perfect, and thus needs to be empirically measured and accounted for.

Alternative statistical approaches

In our reliability analyses, we adopted the ANOVA-based approach to estimating components of variance (McGraw & Wong, 1996; Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). This is perhaps the most commonly used method in psychology, produced by popular packages such as SPSS. Variance components can alternatively be estimated via the use of linear mixed-effects (LMMs) and generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLLMs; Nakagawa & Schielzeth, 2010). These models allow greater flexibility in dealing with distributional assumptions and confounding variables. Structural equation models have also grown increasingly popular in psychology (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988) as a method to examine relationships between constructs theorized to underlie observable behaviors (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). Factor analysis and structural equation modelling have been used previously to examine commonality among response inhibition and executive functioning tasks (see, e.g., Aichert et al., 2012; Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Stahl et al., 2014). An attractive feature of this approach is they allow for measurement error to be modelled separately from variance shared between measures. Latent variable models have also been applied to reliability estimates in the form of latent state-trait models. (Newsom, 2015; Steyer, Schmitt, & Eid, 1999; Steyer & Schmitt, 1990). They typically use data from three or more sessions, and can dissociate variance that is stable across sessions from session specific and residual (error) variance. Notably, one study has also applied this approach to the parameters of the drift-diffusion model derived from multiple tasks (Schubert, Frischkorn, Haemann, & Voss, 2016). A limiting factor is that structural equation models typically require large samples, with suggestions typically falling in the 100s (c.f. Wolf, Harrington, Clark, & Miller, 2013). This, in addition to the time required to administer multiple tasks or sessions, may make the approach infeasible for many researchers. Finally, Item Response Theory (IRT; see, e.g., Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991; Lord & Novick, 1968) has arguably superseded classical test theory in educational testing. The goal of IRT is to characterize the relationship between typically a single latent trait (e.g., maths ability) and the probability of a binary response (e.g., correct or incorrect) on individual test items. The resulting item response curve captures both the location of each item with respect to the latent trait (i.e., its difficulty), and the sensitivity of the item to differing levels of ability (i.e., its slope). Though not easily applicable to the current format of most experimental tasks, the contribution of IRT to educational testing is notable if constructing new tests for the purposes of cognitive and clinical measurement.

Interactions in experimental designs

In addition to factoring reliability into power calculations as detailed above, within-subject designs can be used to examine associations and dissociations between measures. For example, the absence of correlations in our data between SSRT and the Stroop task implies no relationship between performance in these tasks. In contrast, shared mechanisms have been implicated in experimental studies that have combined the tasks, where Stroop stimuli are used in place of the typical two choice stimuli used in the SST (Kalanthroff, Goldfarb, & Henik, 2013; Verbruggen, Liefooghe, & Vandierendonck, 2004). Verbruggen et al. observed longer SSRTs on incongruent trials relative to neutral trials, suggesting that the mechanisms underlying the resolution of conflict between stimuli overlaps with the mechanisms underlying response inhibition in the SST. Within-subject designs may be more appropriate to examine interactions and dissociations between underlying mechanisms when individual differences per se are not the primary focus (for further examples in cognitive control and other areas, see, e.g., Awh, Vogel, & Oh, 2006; Boy, Husain, et al., 2010; Hedge, Oberauer, & Leonards, 2015).

Conclusions

In concluding their prominent discussion of the reliability of difference scores, Cronbach and Furby ( 1970) offered the advice, "It appears that investigators who ask questions regarding gain scores would ordinarily be better advised to frame their questions in other ways" (p. 80). This damning statement has been qualified in subsequent work (Rogosa, 1988; Zimmerman & Williams, 1998; Zumbo, 1999), though as illustrated by our findings, robust experimental effects do not necessarily translate to optimal methods of studying individual differences. We suggest that this is because experimental designs have been developed and naturally selected for providing robust effects, which means low between-participant variance. Cronbach ( 1957) called for a bridging of the gap between experimental and correlational research in psychology, and we support this goal. However, our findings suggest more caution is required when translating tools used to understand mechanisms in one context to the other.

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The reliability paradox: Why robust cognitive tasks do not produce reliable individual differences

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Craig Hedge Georgina Powell Petroc Sumner Article Individual differences have been an annoyance rather than a challenge to the experimenter. His goal is to control behavior, and variation within treatments is proof that he has not succeeded... For reasons both statistical and philosophical, error variance is to be reduced by any possible device.

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Phrases in EAP academic writing pedagogy

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Phrases in EAP academic writing pedagogy

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Phrases in EAP academic writing pedagogy: Illuminating Halliday’s influence on research and practice

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158519300359

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David Oakey is a lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has taught undergraduate and graduate classes in EAP writing, grammar, lexis, and corpus linguistics at universities in China, Turkey, and the USA, and has published research on the phraseology of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourse.

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Phrases in EAP academic writing pedagogy: Illuminating Halliday's influence on research and practice

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David Oakey is a lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has taught undergraduate and graduate classes in EAP writing, grammar, lexis, and corpus linguistics at universities in China, Turkey, and the USA, and has published research on the phraseology of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourse.

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Folks'Talks Game is creating a video game were computer will acquire the player's language
https://www.patreon.com/Folks_Talks?fbclid=IwAR0fOQCZRMQJVG2Pu66oAeyiXdILs7EnvN_iaLA9lsRZ2kqxExNU7pY8xXk

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Folks'Talks Game is creating a video game were computer will acquire the player's language | Patreon

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Become a patron of Folks'Talks Game today: Read 3 posts by Folks'Talks Game and get access to exclusive content and experiences on the world's largest membership platform for artists and creators.

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Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/englishhistorycreativewriting/research/corpus-approaches-to-lexicogrammar-lxgr/?utm_source=ehuacuk&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=lxgr

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https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/f1ml9b/how_to_say_yes_in_european_languages/

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2,306 votes and 311 comments so far on Reddit

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Job adverts on The Linguist List
https://new.linguistlist.org/career/search/

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The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

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http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/corpora/

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Sydney Speaks 2010s Corpus

The Sydney Speaks 2010s corpus is currently in preparation. It includes a cross-section of Sydney's residents, consisting of recordings from older and younger adult males and females who are of varied socio-economic status, region within Sydney, and ethnic community. Participants are Anglo Australians whose parents and grandparents were born in Australia, and 2nd generation Australians of different ethnic communities. The focus for 2017-2018 is on Anglo, Italian and Chinese communities; Greek, Vietnamese and Lebanese communities are also of particular interest to the project.

Data is collected via sociolinguistic interviews, conducted by community Research Assistants with their extended network, providing long samples of natural speech for analysis and, at the same time, detailed information about participants' demographic profile, their sociolinguistic history and their social network.

Sydney Social Dialect Survey

The Sydney Social Dialect Survey was compiled by Barbara Horvath between 1977 and 1980. The corpus comprises 177 sociolinguistic interviews, with adult and teenage Australians of Anglo, Greek and Italian descent (including 1st and 2nd generation), stratified according to gender and socio-economic status. In the 120 hours of recorded speech, among other topics, participants talk about schooling, childhood games, and attitudes to Australian English.

The Sydney Speaks project has digitised a subset of the Sydney Social Dialect Survey data, which serves as an invaluable benchmark from which to track change in contemporary Australian English. This subset consists of over 40 hours of speech (approximately 400,000 words) from 20 Anglo adults and 72 (2nd generation) teenagers, roughly evenly distributed across Anglo, Italian, and Greek communities.

We thank Barbara Horvath for making the recordings from the Sydney Social Dialect Survey available to us.
Selected publications using the Sydney Social Dialect Survey:
Horvath, Barbara. (1985). Variation in Australian English: The sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, Barbara. (1991). Finding a place in Sydney: Migrants and language change. In: S. Romaine (ed.), Language in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 304-317

Horvath, Barbara, & Sankoff, David. (1987). Delimiting the Sydney speech community. Language in Society 16(2):179-204.

Guy, Gregory R., Horvath, Barbara M., Vonwiller, Julia, Daisley, Elaine, & Rogers, Inge. (1986). An intonational change in progress in Australian English. Language in Society 15(1):23-52.

NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection

The NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection was produced in 1988 by the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Project, funded by a bicentennial grant to the NSW Council on the Ageing and the Oral History Association of Australia (NSW). The Collection includes two hundred recorded interviews with men and women born before 1910 who lived in NSW between 1900 and 1930. The interviews focus on everyday life in the early 20th Century, and speakers talk about topics such as education, health, employment, religion and courtship.

The Sydney Speaks project analyses the data from 31 speakers who were born and grew up in the Sydney area, and whose parents also did so (or at most have one parent born in the UK). Born around the turn of the 20th Century, these speakers give greater time depth to the changes examined.

The collection is available online via the State Library of NSW and the National Library of Australia. We thank the National Library of Australia for granting us extended access to this collection.
Selected publications using recordings from the Bicentennial Oral History Collection:
Cox, Felicity, & Palethorpe, Sallyanne. (2017). Open vowels in historical Australian English. In: R. Hickey (ed.), Listening to the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 502-528.

Lonergan, John, & Cox, Felicity. (2010). Is there any evidence of rhoticity in historical Australian English? In: L. de Beuzeville & P. Peters (eds.), From the Southern hemisphere: Parameters of language variation, E-Proceedings of the 2008 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/6860

Trudgill, Peter, & Gordon, Elizabeth. (2006). Predicting the past: Dialect archaeology and Australian English rhoticity. English World-Wide 27(3):235-246.

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language dynamics arc centre shape learning processing evolution

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The Sydney Speaks 2010s corpus is currently in preparation. It includes a cross-section of Sydney's residents, consisting of recordings from older and younger adult males and females who are of varied socio-economic status, region within Sydney, and ethnic community. Participants are Anglo Australians whose parents and grandparents were born in Australia, and 2nd generation Australians of different ethnic communities.

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How to Talk Australians - Episode 1: ‘G’DAY KNACKERS’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQRZXM-4xI

How to Talk Australians - Episode 2: ‘GRUB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE-al0xSFJo’

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How to Talk Australians - Episode 2: ‘GRUB’

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Australian Voices - Macquarie University

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Australian Voices - Macquarie University

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Australian voices

This website celebrates the many and varied Australian English voices
https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/healthy-people/centres/centre-for-language-sciences-clas/australian-voices

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This website celebrates the many and varied Australian English voices

Aussie accents preserved for posterity

AusTalk (austalk.edu.au) was a national initiative to collect the accents of 1,000 Australian English speakers between 2011 and 2016. Australian English accents from adults of all ages from various locations in all states and territories were collected to represent the regional and social diversity of Australian English.

Language

Australian English

Australian English is the standard language spoken in Australia. It is the language used by people who are born and raised in this country and also by those who immigrate during childhood or early adolescence. In addition to English, over 300 languages are spoken in Australia and more than 60,000 people speak an Australian indigenous language (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).

Among native-born Australians, at least three categories of English exist: Standard Australian English, varieties of Aboriginal English, and various ethnocultural Australian English dialects. Australian English functions as a significant and extremely powerful symbol of national identity. It is one of the well-known World Englishes and is a mature dialect with its own internal norms and standards. All Australian English dialect types significantly reflect Australian identity but, in addition, reveal the cultural affiliation of the speaker, whether Australian, Lebanese, Greek, Indigenous, Vietnamese or the myriad of other cultural choices available to Australians in the 21st century. The label 'Australian English' should be considered a term that embraces all of these various dialectal types. Such a modification to the traditional concept of Australian English will help capture the linguistic landscape of the changing Australian culture.

Prominent Australian author, Tim Winton, in his 2009 Miles Franklin Award acceptance speech, acknowledged the important cultural value of embracing Australian stories and telling them with our own accent. "The cultural cringe died a long slow death while I was a kid. I was a beneficiary of a new optimism and confidence in Australia ... Australian writers began to be honoured at home and to be treated as equals abroad. I feel incredibly lucky to have come of age in a country that honours its own stories and accents." Listen to his speech here.

Level of study

Relevant information for your level of study

In addition to presenting an educational website, we have structured the site so that students and researchers can easily access the information most relevant to them.

If you have explored the introductory pages and are keen to learn more about the Australian accent, the Australian English section will equip you with a basic understanding of the relevant linguistics terms and approach to study so that you can better understand the Australian Accent information. On the Further study page, you'll find a great deal of information about the way in which vowels and consonants are pronounced by speakers of Australian English, including many audio examples and interactive charts.

This site will be updated as new research information becomes available.

Reference this site

Please acknowledge any reference to this site using the following:
Cox, F. and Palethorpe, S. (2010) Australian Voices, Macquarie University, Australian Voices

Warning: This site contains the images and voices of people who have passed away.

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This website celebrates the many and varied Australian English voices. Australian English is the standard language spoken in Australia. It is the language used by people who are born and raised in this country and also by those who immigrate during childhood or early adolescence.

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Noam Chomsky, Fundamental Issues in Linguistics (April 2019 at MIT) - Lecture 1

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Noam Chomsky, Fundamental Issues in Linguistics (April 2019 at MIT) - Lecture 1

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Noam Chomsky, Fundamental Issues in Linguistics (April 2019 at MIT) - Lecture 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r514RhgISv0

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Noam Chomsky, Fundamental Issues in Linguistics (April 2019 at MIT) - Lecture 1

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Online Linguistics lectures by Martin Hilpert

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Online Linguistics lectures by Martin Hilpert

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Martin Hilpert - YouTuber
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaKHle4z5x4ECztKj38qj-A

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A course in Cognitive Linguistics: Polysemy

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-pragmatics

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Read the latest articles of Journal of Pragmatics at ScienceDirect.com, Elsevier's leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature

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https://www.daredictionary.com/regions?rcode=region.NJ#regionsMap

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QUARTERLY UPDATES

https://dare.wisc.edu/words/quarterly-updates/

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Since the launch of Digital DARE, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, DARE editors have continued to write new entries and senses and to update and revise existing ones. We present to you here ongoing Quarterly Updates, which will be (and will remain) freely available on this site, but they will also be incorporated, along with other revisions and corrections, in yearly updates to the Digital DARE. If you're new to DARE, please check out the Resources at Digital DARE which include how to read an entry.
All Updated Entries Quarterly Update 19, Winter 2020 Quarterly Update 18, Fall 2019 Quarterly Update 17, Summer 2019 Quarterly Update 16, Spring 2019 Quarterly Update 15, Winter 2019 Quarterly Update 14, Fall 2018 Quarterly Update 13, Summer 2018 Quarterly Update 12, Spring 2018 Quarterly Update 11, Winter 2018 Quarterly Update 10, Fall 2017 Quarterly Update 9, Summer 2017 Quarterly Update 8, Spring 2017 Quarterly Update 7, Winter 2017 Quarterly Update 6, Fall 2016 Quarterly Update 5, Summer 2016 Quarterly Update 4, Spring 2016 Quarterly Update 3, Winter 2016 Quarterly Update 2, Fall 2015 Quarterly Update 1, Summer 2015 About Online Survey of Wisconsin English (OSWE) quotations

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Since the launch of Digital DARE, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, DARE editors have continued to write new entries and senses and to update and revise existing ones. We present to you here ongoing Quarterly Updates, which will be (and will remain) freely available on this site, but they will also be incorporated,...

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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51362/4-changes-english-so-subtle-we-hardly-notice-theyre-happening

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Valentine's Day is the opportune holiday to express all the lovey-dovey feelings you may not usually take the time to put into words-simply calling your partner "pretty" on the most romantic day of the year, however, might not exactly make the sparks fly. To help you get creative, here are 11 old-fashioned romance terms from the days of yore.

1. Bughouse

Decades before Beyoncé created a chart-topping melody to describe the feeling of being "crazy in love," early 20th-century Americans simply called it " bughouse."

2. Buss

is an old-fashioned synonym of that originated around 1570, possibly from the Middle English verb bassen, meaning "to kiss." It also sounds fairly similar to a few kiss terms from Romance languages, like the French baiser, the Spanish beso, and Italian's bacio.

3. Dainty duck

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pyramus refers to his lover, Thisbe, as a "dainty duck." They didn't exactly live happily ever after, but that's no reason not to bring back dainty duck as an adorable (and alliterative) term of endearment.

4. Dimber

From stunning to hunky, there are plenty of satisfactory ways to call someone "attractive." None, however, have quite as much old-timey appeal as , a gender-neutral term for pretty from the 17th century. Dimber cove refers to a handsome man, while dimber mort is used for a pretty girl or woman.

5. Dulcinea

In Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, the titular character nicknames a lovely peasant girl "Dulcinea," derived from dulce, the Spanish word for sweet. Over time, people started using it as a general term for sweetheart.

6. Face Made of a Fiddle

If you find your partner irresistibly charming, you can tell them that they have a "face made of a fiddle"-a face so welcoming and attractive that it seems to mirror the smile-like curves of a fiddle. Just be careful not to confuse it with having a "face as long as a fiddle," which describes a dismal, unhappy demeanor.

7. Jam Tart

Because Valentine's Day is filled with sweet treats already, it's only fitting that you'd replace the word heart with -a classic bit of Cockney rhyming slang for your ticker.

8. Prigster

If you're fighting for the heart of a fair maiden, you can call your competitor a " prigster," a word dating back to the 1670s that means "a rival in love."

9. RILY

Lovers were expressing their feelings in shorthand long before the invention of texting-starting in the mid-1940s, telegrams sometimes contained the acronym RILY, for "Remember, I love you."

10. Spoon

Engaging in a little foolish flirtation this Valentine's Day? Your 19th-century ancestors might call that " spooning."

11. Sugar Report

Sugar report caught on during World War II as a slang term for the letters that soldiers received from their wives and girlfriends back home. If you're sending a lengthy email to your partner detailing your romantic itinerary for Valentine's Day, feel free to type Sugar Report as the subject line.

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4 Subtle Changes to English People Hardly Notice

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Valentine's Day is the opportune holiday to express all the lovey-dovey feelings you may not usually take the time to put into words-simply calling your partner "pretty" on the most romantic day of the year, however, might not exactly make the sparks fly.

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http://vocabulary.englishprofile.org/dictionary/show/uk/1005172?s
howLevel=c2#3417514

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http://www.wordreference.com/EnglishCollocations/totally

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Australian Review of Applied Linguistics

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Australian Review of Applied Linguistics

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Australian Review of Applied Linguistics

https://benjamins.com/catalog/aral?fbclid=IwAR1MYfXXQRHoy5Bd4R6CgpGKwO_jR4xkKBY24qbX4l5PCUd8RF-rLkqgbOo

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https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/perfective-done?fbclid=IwAR3PpjzerFn4rfTKcEPGxdGY83QyqlJfIw5xg1vA3d3Pkuq9WCs5q3w9VpU

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-Johnny Mercer, "Blues in the Night", as sung by Ella Fitzgerald

Perfective done, sometimes referred to as preverbal done or dǝn, is a verbal marker used in sentences such as the following:

1) a. I done lost my wallet!
(Green 2002:61)

b. I told him you done changed.
(Green 2002:60)

The use of done expresses that the action or state being described by the clause has come to an end (Green 2002). It may also convey an attitude of surprise or shock on the part of the speaker (Harris, in progress).

Who says this?

Perfective done is a characteristic feature of African American (Vernacular) English (AAE), as has been documented since at least the 1970s (Labov 1972, Schneider 1983, Green 2002, among others).

This construction is also used by Southern speakers who are not African American, in at least Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina (Feagin 1979). However, perfective done in the speech of white Southerners may have slightly different properties than in AAE-for more on this, see Syntactic Properties.

Syntactic properties

Eventive or stative verbs

Perfective done usually precedes an eventive verb with a past tense form, such as the -ed suffix (Green 2002), as in (2a). However, it may also precede some present tense verbs, as in (2b), from the August Wilson play "Fences."

2) a. I done pushed it.
(Green 2002:60)

b. Now I done give you everything I got to give you!
(Wilson 1985)

Due to its completive meaning, perfective done often appears with eventive verbs, which have a natural endpoint. However, in certain contexts, perfective done can occur with stative verbs, which do not have natural endpoints. For example, the following sentence includes perfective done with the stative verb know:

3) Long as I done known you (you've been chasing after women)
(Wilson 1985)

Time adverbs

As expected from its meaning, perfective done can appear with time adverbs that describe completed events. The following examples from Green (2002:62) show perfective done with time adverbs ( already, before) that are compatible with an event being over:

4) a. I done finished that already.

b. I done drove that car before.

In special contexts, however, perfective done can also appear with time adverbs that refer to an incomplete event, such as for five years. An example of perfective done with for five years in an acceptable context appears in the following sentence from Green (2002:61):

5) I can't believe that dance class is cancelled after I done wanted to take dance for five years!

Perfective done also appears with adverbs that refer to a time in the past, such as yesterday in (6a) below. This is in contrast to the standard English perfect, which cannot appear with such adverbs, as illustrated in (6b).

6) a. John done baked a cake yesterday. (AAE)

b. *John has baked a cake yesterday. (standard English)

This may be surprising given that the standard English perfect is otherwise quite similar in meaning to perfective done (see Semantic Properties for more details).

Negation

For many speakers, negative markers don't combine naturally with perfective done (Harris in progress). Some speakers negate sentences with perfective done by replacing done with the auxiliary ain't, as in the following examples. Speakers who use this negation strategy can use either the present or past form of the verb:

7) a. John ain't called me.
(Harris in progress)

b. John ain't call me.
(Harris in progress)

However, other speakers can negate sentences with perfective done by using the auxiliary ain't or didn't with done, as in (8):

8) a. My daughter ain't done went to sleep.
(Harris in progress)

b. My daughter didn't done went to sleep.
(Harris in progress)

In Southern English: Auxiliary be and adjectives

In the speech of white Southerners, perfective done has a wider distribution than it does in AAE. It can occur following the auxiliary be, which has not been reported in AAE (Green 2002):

9) Lord, I'm done died!
(Feagin 1979:127)

It can also precede adjectives, such as dead in (10):

10) Some of 'em's done dead an' gone.
(Feagin 1979:131)

Semantic properties

Perfective done has traditionally been analyzed as a perfect aspect
marker, which indicates that the event or state is completed (Edwards 1991, Déchaine 1993, Dayton 1996, Green 2002).

This analysis is supported by the observation that AAE speakers can use perfective done and the perfect marker have to describe the same event, as in the following example:

11) My mother done realized I'm a senior before I have [realized I'm a senior].
(Harris in progress)

Furthermore, the perfect in standard English has four uses (Comrie 1976, Portner 2003, among others): the perfect of result (the conclusion of the event causes a particular outcome), the existential perfect (the event has occurred at some point), the recent past (the event took place and concluded recently) and the universal perfect (the event has always occurred/been occurring). These four uses are illustrated by the following examples from Harris (in progress):

12) a. Perfect of Result: John has eaten the steak (so there's nothing left at home).

b. Existential Perfect: John has eaten steak (at some point in his life).

c. Recent Past: John has (finally) eaten a steak today (after fasting all week).

d. Universal Perfect: John has eaten steak (all his life).

Perfective done in AAE can also be used in all four of these situations (Harris in progress):

13) a. Perfect of Result: [My] face done broke out.

b. Existential Perfect: Every female done thought about being a stripper (at least once).

c. Recent Past: My ex done reached out talmbout he sorry for hurting me.

d. Universal Perfect: She done been an invalid all her life.

The standard English perfect also requires that the event or state the verb refers to must have some "current relevance" (McCawley 1971, Dowty 1979, Portner 2003, among others). This distinguishes the perfect from other ways of referring to the past. Edwards (1991) argues that AAE perfective done shares this attribute.

However, as we've already seen, AAE perfective done is not identical to the standard English perfect. Edwards (1991), Dayton (1996), Labov (1998) and Terry (2010) have all observed that sentences with perfective done are "stronger or more emphatic" than their standard English perfect equivalents (Harris in progress). Edwards (1991) and Terry (2010) note, respectively, that perfective done appears in negative and excessively positive contexts. These two uses are shown in the following examples from Harris (in progress):

14) a. It done started raining. (disappointment/surprise)

b. My baby done won the race! (excitement/surprise)

Harris (in progress) proposes that AAE perfective done contributes an attitude of surprise or shock on the part of the speaker. In other words, the event, action or state being described in a sentence with perfective done must violate the speaker's expectations.

Similar constructions

Guyanese Creole also has a preverbal done ( don) construction, as noted by Edwards (1991). It appears in sentences like the following, and functions similarly to AAE perfective done in that it indicates that an action/event is completed:

15) Dem don gat di koolii-man rom.
'They already have the Indian man's rum'
(Edwards 1991: 240)

15) Horbi don sii wa hi waan sii.
'Herby has finished seeing what he wants to see'
(Edwards 1991: 240)

However, unlike AAE perfective done, preverbal done in Guyanese Creole is pronounced with stress (Edwards 1991:248, Green 2002:63). Guyanese Creole done also does not contribute shock or negative opinion on the part of the speaker, while Edwards (1991) and Harris (in progress), among others, suggest that AAE done does.

Origin

Dillard (1972:47) argues that AAE perfective done originated from similar preverbal done constructions in West African languages such as Weskos Pidgin. Edwards (1991:251) also supports this hypothesis on the grounds that the presence of preverbal done constructions in the speech of black Americans and Caribbeans can be attributed to their shared African cultural heritage. He also notes that the development and distribution of AAE perfective done mirrors other constructions adapted from creole languages.

In contrast, Wolfram and Christian (1976) and Feagin (1979), among others, argue that AAE perfective done is derived from the perfective done construction in Southern white English.
Page contributed by Katie Martin on June 22, 2018.
Please cite this page as: Martin, Katie. 2018. Perfective done. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. (Available online at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/perfective-done. Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD).

References

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Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America

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Johnny Mercer, "Blues in the Night", as sung by Ella Fitzgerald Perfective done, sometimes referred to as preverbal done or dǝn, is a verbal marker used in sentences such as the following: 1) a. I done lost my wallet! (Green 2002:61) b. I told him you done changed.