Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue

Breitholtz, Ellen

doi:10.1163/9789004436794

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…This approach is particularly useful in the context of a theory based on communicative events (Cooper 2019). We suggest developing this account by linking inferences and personae to topoi -principles of reasoning warranting inferences in interaction (Kennedy 2007;Ducrot 1988;Breitholtz 2020). In our account, sets of topoi are associated on one hand to particular personae, and on the other to particular inferences.…”

Section: Previous Treatments Of Dogwhistlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of (political) dogwhistles – a life cycle perspective

Sayeed,

Breitholtz,

Cooper

et al. 2024

JLP

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The term dogwhistle refers to an expression conveying a message to a subset of an audience which is not perceived by the rest of the group, in addition to a primary meaning directed at the group at large. We follow up on previous work in linguistics and political communication on defining dogwhistles, taking into account how they likely function in real-life political contexts. We consider the utility of dogwhistles in terms of their sensitivity and their specificity, which allows us to consider dogwhistles in terms of an idealized “life cycle”, whose phases we describe in terms of a multi-dimensional utility tradeoff, described in terms of dogwhistle users, the benefit they expect to receive from dogwhistling, and the deniability of controversial dogwhistle meanings. We propose an approach for the longitudinal study of dogwhistles, and describe the first stages of an experiment to characterize dogwhistles in terms of their lexical properties.

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Section: Previous Treatments Of Dogwhistlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of (political) dogwhistles – a life cycle perspective

Sayeed,

Breitholtz,

Cooper

et al. 2024

JLP

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“…à ce propos p. ex. : Adams, 1975 ;Banyś, 1989aBanyś, , 1989bBanyś, , 2000Bogusławski, 1986 ;Breitholtz, 2021 ;Ceniza, 1988 ;Pap, 1955 ;Sanford, 2003 ;Stenius, 1947) ; on va voir par la suite la place des implicatifs phrastiques au sein de la famille des inférences.…”

Section: Inférences Et Paraphrasesunclassified

Inférences textuelles et constructions à verbes supports

Banyś¹

2022

NEO

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Pour comprendre le langage naturel, les systèmes automatiques doivent avoir la capacité et la possibilité de savoir ce qui est inféré, et si oui, comment cela est inféré, et à partir de quoi dans un texte. Les implications linguistiquement déterminées imposées par un prédicat sur ses arguments propositionnels, apparaissant dans un texte comme des inférences textuelles, sont, avec d'autres éléments, tels que la connaissance du monde, les hypothèses des locuteurs sur l'utilisation de la langue, les stéréotypes situationnels, les implicatures, etc. l'un des éléments nécessaires pour qu'un système soit considéré comme comprenant le langage naturel. Dans cet article, nous nous concentrons sur l'une des parties importantes des inférences textuelles, qui n'a pratiquement pas été étudiée, à savoir les relations entre une catégorie particulière d'inférences textuelles constituée d'implicatifs phrastiques au sens de Karttunen (2012) et une catégorie particulière d'expressions polylexicales constituée de verbes supports. Nous donnons d'abord une brève introduction à l'état actuel de la description des deux catégories générales : les inférences, dont un type particulier d'inférences : les paraphrases (sec. 1), et les expressions polylexicales avec un type particulier de ces constructions : les verbes supports (sec. 2), ce qui nous permet de présenter les relations entre les verbes supports et les paraphrases (sec. 3). Nous passons ensuite à une discussion sur les implicatifs, y compris les implicatifs phrastiques (sec. 4), au sens de Karttunen (2012) et nous présentons une esquisse de la description de certains types de constructions à verbes supports du point de vue de leur pouvoir implicatif (sec. 5). Les analyses du type présenté sont à poursuivre et doivent être étendues à toutes les constructions du type analysé et font en même temps partie d'un projet beaucoup plus général. Elles sont un début d'une implémentation systématique à faire sur les matériaux français et polonais en corrélation avec l'anglais de la combinatoire des valeurs de vérité, "signatures implicatives", des prédicats, qu'ils soient verbaux, adjectivaux ou nominaux.

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“…which underpin inferences and associations made by interlocutors. Breitholtz (2020) discusses the link between such resources and the different types of rhetorical relations in discourse theories like Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher and Lascarides, 2003) and neo-Gricean pragmatic theories such as Relevance Theory (Wilson and Sperber, 2004). Breitholtz and Maraev (2019) suggest analysing humorous interactions in terms of enthymemes, arguments where the conclusion does not follow by necessity, usually because one or more premises are not explicit in the discourse.…”

Section: The Role Of Inference In Humourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are not intended to be complete formal representations, rather as a convenient and clear way of representing our intuitions about topoi and enthymemes. More complete formal representations are shown in Breitholtz (2020). The topos that if someone is at home they can receive a delivery is acceptable to most people.…”

Section: The Role Of Inference In Humourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This involves accommodation (Lewis, 1979;Beaver and Zeevat, 2007), integration of new information which is in some way conveyed or hinted at in an utterance but not explicitly stated. Accommodation is frequent in dialogue and often happens seamlessly as the things we accommodate are non-controversial (Larsson, 2002;Breitholtz, 2020). We believe that many or even all utterances which involve reasoning require the accommodation of topoi.…”

Section: Something Borrowedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour

et al. 2021

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In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old (existing), new (not previously existing), borrowed (associated with a different situation) and taboo (inappropriate in the context).

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Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue

Cited by 8 publications

References 62 publications

The utility of (political) dogwhistles – a life cycle perspective

The utility of (political) dogwhistles – a life cycle perspective

Inférences textuelles et constructions à verbes supports

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour

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