Browsing by Author "Kleiber, Judit"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ Meaning construction in medical encounters
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2019) Kárpáti, Eszter; Kleiber, Judit
    This paper investigates interpretation in medical context. Our question is how institutional context influences the utterance meaning: if it is really triple layered (literal, utterance-type or pragmatic, Levinson 2000), or rather a continuum (Wilson 2016). Even idiomatic language use (Kecskes 2017) can induce uncertainty and obscurity, which can be and has to be solved in the given dialogue or discourse context (Wilson and Kolaiti 2017). The paper analyzes various medical encounters in a formal pragmasemantic model called ÂeALIS (Alberti and Kleiber 2014). The benefit of applying this system is that it represents the interlocutors’ mental states (beliefs, desires, and intentions) supplemented by the parameter of authority, by which the occurring mismatches can be captured formally. We have found that two main types of mismatch can be differentiated, and both of them can be originated from the fact that the context is not the same for the participants. Our findings support the view that meaning construction is rather flexible and context-sensitive: it can be considered as wandering along the meaning continuum without any clues.
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    Compositional analysis of interrogative imperatives in Hungarian
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017) Kleiber, Judit; Alberti, Gábor
    The paper investigates utterances which combine imperative and interrogative elements in Hungarian. We intend to explore the scope of the hypothesis that the pragmatico-semantic content of mixed-type sentences can be obtained compositionally. We present four types of interrogative imperative. The imperative factor is indicated by subjunctive morphology on the verb. The interrogative character is represented by (1) rise-fall intonation which marks polar questions, (2) the discourse marker ugye expressing bias, (3) the particle vajon expressing self-reflection or hesitation, and (4) wavy intonation which indicates surprise. We claim that such sentences are primarily questions with their main function being ‘request for instruction’. For the analysis, we take a formal pragmatico-semantic point of view. Our goal is to demonstrate how these sentences can be analyzed compositionally within a belief–desire–intention frame. We apply the formal dynamic discourse- and mind-representation theory ReALIS. We have found that the pragmatico-semantic content (intensional profile) of each type can be constructed via using two formal operations: concatenation and pragmasemantic blending. The composition produces the required output, namely that the interrogation / bias / speculation / surprise which pertains to an eventuality in the case of a simple question, pertains to the “commanding” of this eventuality in the case of interrogative imperatives.
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    Intensional profiles and different kinds of human minds. “Case studies” about Hungarian imperative-like sentence types
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Alberti, Gábor; Kleiber, Judit; Schnell, Zsuzsanna; Szabó, Veronika
    The paper offers such description of some imperative-like sentence types in potential well-formed Hungarian utterances which includes a parallel representation of the linguistically encoded intensional profiles of the sentence types and actual information states in potential interlocutors’ minds. In our representational dynamic pragmasemantics framework ReALIS, we demonstrate the intensional profiles of the five basic and two “fine-tuned” sentence types as members of a system enabling addressers’ of utterances to express their beliefs, desires and intentions concerning the propositional content of the given utterances as well as the addressees’ and other people’s certain beliefs, desires and intentions (concerning the propositional content, too, or each other’s thoughts). We also provide “case studies” in which actual beliefs, desires and intentions in potential interlocutors’ minds are compared to the linguistically encoded intensional profiles of Hungarian imperative-like sentence types. In this context, the listener’s task is to calculate the speaker’s intentions (and hidden motives) on the basis of the mismatches that this comparison reveals. The paper concludes with an insight into our attempts to model the mind of individuals living with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This latter subproject is relevant since our framework provides solutions to pragmaticosemantic phenomena “at the cost” of undertaking the complex task of actually representing the structure of the human mind itself – which is not impossible but requires an adequate decision of the level of abstraction and the components to be used.
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    Similarities and differences between two Hungarian particles for also: szintén and is
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2020) Farkas, Judit; Futó, Bettina; Huszics, Aliz; Kleiber, Judit; Dóla, Mónika; Alberti, Gábor
    The paper provides a comparative analysis of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of two Hungarian particles with the same logical core meaning also: is and szintén. The analysis yields important theoretical implications since it demonstrates how two particles sharing the same logical-propositional/truth-functional core meaning can expand into two different markers. In discourse, is acts as an intensional/metacognitive pragmatic marker in the sense as proposed by Aijmer et al. (2006), while szintén functions as a coherence-signaling discourse marker. The two particles share certain syntactic-semantic properties: neither of them can be followed by a topic, they both have distributive meaning, and both of them can pertain to the noun phrase that they immediately follow, as well as to ordered n-tuples of noun phrases. However, there are also syntactic and pragmasemantic differences between them. Namely, their ordered n-tuples have different word orders; is can function as a pragmatic marker while szintén cannot; szintén can appear as a separate clause, while is cannot (this is presumably related to the fact that szintén can be stressed, while is is obligatorily unstressed); and finally, szintén can have a peculiar discourse-preserving function. We explain the syntactic differences between the two particles using the partial spell-out technique of minimalist generative syntacticians (first applied to Hungarian by Surányi 2009), and the Cinque-hierarchy-based approach to Hungarian sentence- and predicate-adverbials (Surányi 2008). We account for the pragmasemantic properties of the pragmatic-marker variant of is in the formal representational dynamic theory of interpretation called ReALIS, already presented in the LingBaW series (Alberti et al. 2016, Kleiber and Alberti 2017, Viszket et al. 2019).