The Semantics And Pragmatics Of Honorification

This book explores the semantics and pragmatics of honorifics, expressions that indicate the degree of formality that a speaker feels is required in interacting with another person. Although these expressions are found in many languages worldwide, this volume is the first to approach the area from the perspective of formal semantics and pragmatics. Elin McCready treats honorifics - and expressions with honorific import - as carriers of expressive content that contributes either directly or indirectly to a register corresponding to the current formality of the speech situation. The analysis is applied to a variety of empirical examples, including utterance and argument honorifics in Japanese, Thai, and several other languages. It is proposed that the distinct strategies that different languages use for honorification have implications for the grammaticality of certain combination of honorifics. The volume also explores the connections between honorification and a range of theoretical issues in social meaning and the expression of gender. It will hence appeal not only to researchers in formal semantics and pragmatics, but also to sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, and philosophers.

This book explores the semantics and pragmatics of honorifics, expressions that indicate the degree of formality that a speaker feels is required in interacting with another person. Although these expressions are found in many languages worldwide, this volume is the first to approach the area from the perspective of formal semantics and pragmatics. Elin McCready treats honorifics - and expressions with honorific import - as carriers of expressive content that contributes either directly or indirectly to a register corresponding to the current formality of the speech situation. The analysis is applied to a variety of empirical examples, including utterance and argument honorifics in Japanese, Thai, and several other languages. It is proposed that the distinct strategies that different languages use for honorification have implications for the grammaticality of certain combination of honorifics. The volume also explores the connections between honorification and a range of theoretical issues in social meaning and the expression of gender. It will hence appeal not only to researchers in formal semantics and pragmatics, but also to sociolinguists, anthropological linguists, and philosophers.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause. The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

This book constitutes extended, revised and selected papers from the 11th International Symposium of Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2019. It was held in November 2019 in Yokohama, Japan. The 26 papers were carefully selected from 46 submissions and deal with topics of AI research and are organized into 4 sections, according to the 4 workshops: JURISIN 2019, AI-Biz 2019, LENLS 16, and Kansei-AI 2019.

This book constitutes extended, revised, and selected papers from the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2020. Organized in the Tokyo Institute of Technology, it was held virtually due to COVID-19 pandemic. The 19 full papers were carefully selected from 50 submissions and present two workshops: Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS 2020) focus on the formal and theoretical aspects of natural language. It is an annual International Workshop recognized internationally in the formal syntax-semantics-pragmatics community. The 14th International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2020) details legal issues for the perspective of information science. This workshop covers a wide range of topics, including any theories and technologies which are not directly related with juris-informatics but have a potential to contribute to this domain.

This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources

This book constitutes extended, revised, and selected papers from the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2021, held online in November 2021. The 26 full papers were carefully selected from 86 submissions. The papers are organized in the volume according to the following workshops: 15th International Workshop on Juris-Informatics, JURISIN 2021; 18th Workshop on Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics, LENLS 18, 5th International Workshop on SCIentific DOCument Analysis, SCI-DOCA 2021; Workshop on Artificial Affective (Kansei) Intelligence, KANSEI-AI 2021; 5th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence of and for Business, AI-Biz 2021.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the JSAI-isAI 2016 Workshops, LENLS 13, HAT-MASH, AI-Biz, JURISIN and SKL, held in Kanagawa, Japan, in November 1016. The 22 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. LENLS 13 was the 13th event in the series, and it focused on the formal and theoretical aspects of natural language. LENLS (Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics) is an annual international workshop recognized internationally in the formal syntax-semantics-pragmatics community. It has been bringing together for discussion and interdisciplinary communication researchers working on formal theories of natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics, (formal) philosophy, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. HAT-MASH 2016 (Healthy Aging Tech mashup service, data and people) was the second international workshop bridges healthy aging and elderly care technology, information technology and service engineering. The main objective of this workshop was to provide a forum to discuss important research questions and practical challenges in healthy aging and elderly care support to promote transdisciplinary approaches. AI-Biz 2016 (Artificial Intelligence of and for Business) was the first workshop held to foster the concepts and techniques of Business Intelligence (BI) in Artificial Intelligence. BI should include such cutting-edge techniques as data science, agent-based modelling, complex adaptive systems, and IoT. The main purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss important research questions and practical challenges in Business Intelligence, Business Informatics, Data Analysis and Agent-based Modelling to exchange latest results, to join efforts in solving the common challenges. JURISIN 2016 was the tenth international workshop on Juris-informatics. Juris-informatics is a new research area which studies legal issues from the perspective of informatics. The purpose of this workshop was to discuss both the fundamental and practical issues among people from the various backgrounds such as law, social science, information and intelligent technology, logic and philosophy, including the conventional “AI and law” area. SKL 2016 (The Third International Workshop on Skill Science) was aimed to internationalize the research on skill sciences through organizing the meeting. Human skills involve well-attuned perception and fine motor control, often accompanied by thoughtful planning. The involvement of body, environment, and tools mediating them makes the study of skills unique among researches of human intelligence.