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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Query Details


Query Subject:   (Un)certainty
Author:   Henny Klein
Submitter Email:  click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):  Discourse Analysis
Semantics
Subject Language(s):  English


Query:   Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:35:51 CET
Henny Klein
E.H.Klein@farm.rug.nl
(Un)certainty


As a linguist, I work at a project of information retrieval in the
medical field. Right now, I'm interested in ways to infer how CERTAIN
the writers of scientific texts are about phenomena they present and
discuss, such as the physiological or clinical effects of a medicine.
A first screening of such texts provided different lexical clues
related to certainty, like sentence adverbs (PROBABLY, SURELY) modal
verbs (MAY, COULD), epistemic and other groups of verbs (DOUBT,
SUGGEST, CONCLUDE), and modification operators (ALTHOUGH,
NEVERTHELESS). Questions that arise: Are there more such clues? How
must we interprete them? Can we for instance order epistemic verbs
according to their impact, their degree of certainty?
I like to know what has already be done on these subjects. The
fields of linguistics that may be of interest seem manyfold however
(lexical semantics, discourse analysis, comp. linguistics,..), and I
found only few tracks yet (modals mainly) so I turn to you for help:
If you know references to literature about linguistic means to
express confidence/ uncertainty, and their interpretation, please
mail me.
Best, Henny


Henny Klein email: hklein@farm.rug.nl
Groningen University Centre for Pharmacy tel: +31 50 3637571
Social Pharmacy and Pharmacoepidemiology fax: +31 50 3633311
A. Deusinglaan 2
9713 AW Groningen, The Netherlands
http://www.let.rug.nl/Linguistics/Klein.html
LL Issue: 9.218
Date posted: 12-Feb-1998



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