4 ms·

And it's more than just context, it's also the intent. Naturally you may have different intent in different contexts, but it doesn't end there. For example one

by DenisM 6y ago

And it's more than just context, it's also the intent. Naturally you may have different intent in different contexts, but it doesn't end there. For example one may chose to come across weak by using the passive voice, either to avoid responsibility, or to pay tribute to another person, or even to create a favorable background for a strong stance on a different subject. Passive voice itself is not a problem, lack of discretion is.

Kluny 6y ago
Passive voice is actually essential sometimes - for instance when you're editing someone's work or reviewing their code. "X can be changed to y" comes across a lot softer than "you should change x to y", and is likely to get better results.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  What works even better is, “To avoid <problem>, consider Y instead of X”. Passive voice tries to mitigate the impact of the problem of “arbitrary direction” rather than resolving the problem.
gkya 6y ago
Linguistics explores these phenomena from many directions, via it's subdisciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, semantics, and even syntax. A couple well known things the field mostly agrees: there are no real synonyms, in the sense that every word has its own semantic baggage, and that manifests different meanings in different contexts. So i.e. "use" and "utilise" are not at all the same words, one fancy. Same goes for syntactic structures. There's a variety of approaches here, but you'd be hard pressed to find even a supporter of transformational generative grammar, the Chomskyan paradigm who says active and passive sentences come from the same underlying deep structure (roughly speaking), who'd say active and passive voice sentences are equal or equivalent in discourse. Similarly, you can't boil down "complexity" to the length of sentences or number of clauses. I'd be more willing to concede if this was talking about the distance of things that refer to each other, or the number of words that refer to previous discourse or outer world (i.e. long-distance dependencies & deictic elements). But you can have paragraph long sentences that read just buttery smooth, and "sentence" itself is a pretty vague term that you can't really pin down. Like, if I splat that previous sentence into two around "and", would it really be two sentences, or is it really one sentence to begin with? All these weird stuff like "don't use active voice" or "use 'simpler' words" etc. are the product of the same mentality that in ye olde times wanted you not to split infinitives, not to end your sentences with prepositions, and other nonsense up with which you should not put.
- sxzxs 6y ago
  What kinds of techniques are used in discourse analysis? How do you approach investigating problems in pragmatics (like how can you really establish a context for asking questions about contexts?) and can you give me some examples of interesting cases? I've wanted to do deeper reading on this topic for a while, which has intensified since I've been getting deeper into pure math. Can you point me in some directions to look for book recommendations? I have this as a jumping off point: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0924-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0924-8 but anything else is much appreciated.
  - gkya 6y ago
    I'm only a lowly master's student so I don't have a good hold of all literature, and pragmatics & discourse aren't really my forte, so I think I'd rather refer you to a great resource: the Handbook of Linguistics, editors Aronoff and Rees-Miller. If you don't have hold of basic linguistics theory and concepts, you may give An Introduction to Language by Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams a go. For deepening on Chomskyan syntax, which has roots in mathematical / logical approaches, I suggest Syntactic Structures Revisited by Howard Lasnik, which is a truly wonderful pedagogical achievement, given the excess complexity of Chomskyan theory. In any case tho, if you are familiar with basics of linguistics, the Handbook is _the_ resource to familiarise yourself with latest research and history of ideas of any subdiscipline of linguistics. Trying to talk about it a bit myself, I think I should start with saying that I don't really know methodology in pragmatics, but it and discourse analysis (DA) are pretty close to each other. Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for many research methodologies, and it's a hugely multidisciplinary field, so it's hard to pin it down. Tho suffice to say the concerns of DA inside of linguistics is separate from that in literary studies and the Foucauldian tradition, which tend more towards philosophical approaches. DA in Linguistics is more exact in general and focused on extents of written or aural or signed text and conversations. One of the most common tools is transcriptions peculiar to DA. There on we investigate different properties like structure, pauses or intonation in how they relate to different pragmatic goals, like turn taking in speech and signaling coherence, deixis, etc., in more "purer" DA research, and other strands of research like Critical Discourse Analysis or Feminist Discourse Analysis may then extrapolate how these reflect power relations or social preconceptions. This probably overlaps a lot with pragmatics---and a lot of theoretical and analytical tooling like speech act theory or Gricean maxims are shared---but AFAIU DA is more interested in textual (i.e. speech, not necessarily written) context here, whereas pragmatics in more mechanical and semiotic workings---tho I doubt subfields of linguistics are as distinct as some of the literature makes them seem to be. In any case, a more concrete method that's used a lot in DA (or other subfields) is corpus analysis, where large, often annotated corpora is used in order to test what constituents are found together. Talking about your interest in math here, you may or may not find what you want in this. On the one hand, language is an incredibly flexible mechanism and almost everything, from words to farts to where one looks at has semiotic and discourse-relevant content, and this is something that conflicts a lot with more logically / mathematically motivated approaches like Chomskyan grammar. Simply put, language is hard to pin down, because unlike say in physics, chemistry, or astronomy, your subject matter is an extremely diverse, constantly changing beast that's produced with animals with extreme agency. But OTOH universe, biology, or materials are messy in their own ways and mathematical approaches have been useful in these pursuits. So it depends on where you come to it from, really. As to the article you linked I'd say it falls under the umbrella of computational semantics which is an area I'm totally alien to (FWIW I'm more partial to usage based grammar and sociolinguistics). It does use corpora but that's not exclusive to discourse analysis (in fact its a methodology that began around the 90s and is used across all subdisciplines of linguistics today, maybe bar phonetics). There's an over reliance on the concept of the "word" as some basic elementary unit here, which is not really the case. There being a word to express something in a language or not is not really a barrier or obstacle to expressing it in any language. The study feels like it could really make use of another linguist among its authors. There are disciplines that explore language contact and variation, second language education, and translation in itself, which could have a word or two here.
Bodell 6y ago
Passive voice is something as opposed to active voice. Passive voice does not imply weakness or passivity, it typically just means there was a subject/object switch-a-roo. Weak language, such as overuse of adverb qualifiers, is much more akin to the passive-aggressive tone that you’re referring to. Though, it can also just be the product of overly self-conscious writing. Also, intent is just a small part of context. Therefore, it would rarely if ever supersede the importance of context. For example: Two spies are sitting on a bench speaking in code to one another. Spy 1 gives up an important detail concerning the number of Tridents in a specific location in exchange for some equally important detail related to Spy 2’s national defense structure. Now, it may not have been Spy 1’s intention to divulge his nation’s exact percentage of Tridents stored in a single location, but nonetheless and unbeknownst to Spy 1, Spy 2 already knew the total number of Tridents and therefore could deduce from context. Shovel in a few more cascading deductions and maybe Spy 2 now knows a lot more than Spy 1 ever intended to tell him. This is true of a lot of things. You can make racists statements out of ignorance without intending to be racist. However, many things that may seem racist on the surface may in greater context be criticism, parody, or just an attempt at candid documentation. All of which are partially informed by intent, but only because intent is a part of context. Given this and people’s proclivity for hiding their intentions (and even with intentions stated can be either a lie or the truth and we wouldn’t really know so we have to yet still include it in our box of contextual evidence that is still yet to be determined, in terms of authenticity) I would choose to gather as many contextual clues as I could while keeping intent at arms length—still there and I see it, but maybe not the most important factor. Just for fun the “editor” put this comment at grade 10 and told me to aim lower, grade 9. Too many hard-to-read sentences, adverbs, and difficult words like “therefore”.

by DenisM 6y ago

Kluny 6y ago

Passive voice is actually essential sometimes - for instance when you're editing someone's work or reviewing their code. "X can be changed to y" comes across a lot softer than "you should change x to y", and is likely to get better results.

dragonwriter 6y ago
What works even better is, “To avoid <problem>, consider Y instead of X”. Passive voice tries to mitigate the impact of the problem of “arbitrary direction” rather than resolving the problem.

gkya 6y ago

Linguistics explores these phenomena from many directions, via it's subdisciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, semantics, and even syntax. A couple well known things the field mostly agrees: there are no real synonyms, in the sense that every word has its own semantic baggage, and that manifests different meanings in different contexts. So i.e. "use" and "utilise" are not at all the same words, one fancy. Same goes for syntactic structures. There's a variety of approaches here, but you'd be hard pressed to find even a supporter of transformational generative grammar, the Chomskyan paradigm who says active and passive sentences come from the same underlying deep structure (roughly speaking), who'd say active and passive voice sentences are equal or equivalent in discourse. Similarly, you can't boil down "complexity" to the length of sentences or number of clauses. I'd be more willing to concede if this was talking about the distance of things that refer to each other, or the number of words that refer to previous discourse or outer world (i.e. long-distance dependencies & deictic elements). But you can have paragraph long sentences that read just buttery smooth, and "sentence" itself is a pretty vague term that you can't really pin down. Like, if I splat that previous sentence into two around "and", would it really be two sentences, or is it really one sentence to begin with? All these weird stuff like "don't use active voice" or "use 'simpler' words" etc. are the product of the same mentality that in ye olde times wanted you not to split infinitives, not to end your sentences with prepositions, and other nonsense up with which you should not put.

sxzxs 6y ago
What kinds of techniques are used in discourse analysis? How do you approach investigating problems in pragmatics (like how can you really establish a context for asking questions about contexts?) and can you give me some examples of interesting cases? I've wanted to do deeper reading on this topic for a while, which has intensified since I've been getting deeper into pure math. Can you point me in some directions to look for book recommendations? I have this as a jumping off point: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0924-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0924-8 but anything else is much appreciated.
- gkya 6y ago
  I'm only a lowly master's student so I don't have a good hold of all literature, and pragmatics & discourse aren't really my forte, so I think I'd rather refer you to a great resource: the Handbook of Linguistics, editors Aronoff and Rees-Miller. If you don't have hold of basic linguistics theory and concepts, you may give An Introduction to Language by Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams a go. For deepening on Chomskyan syntax, which has roots in mathematical / logical approaches, I suggest Syntactic Structures Revisited by Howard Lasnik, which is a truly wonderful pedagogical achievement, given the excess complexity of Chomskyan theory. In any case tho, if you are familiar with basics of linguistics, the Handbook is _the_ resource to familiarise yourself with latest research and history of ideas of any subdiscipline of linguistics. Trying to talk about it a bit myself, I think I should start with saying that I don't really know methodology in pragmatics, but it and discourse analysis (DA) are pretty close to each other. Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for many research methodologies, and it's a hugely multidisciplinary field, so it's hard to pin it down. Tho suffice to say the concerns of DA inside of linguistics is separate from that in literary studies and the Foucauldian tradition, which tend more towards philosophical approaches. DA in Linguistics is more exact in general and focused on extents of written or aural or signed text and conversations. One of the most common tools is transcriptions peculiar to DA. There on we investigate different properties like structure, pauses or intonation in how they relate to different pragmatic goals, like turn taking in speech and signaling coherence, deixis, etc., in more "purer" DA research, and other strands of research like Critical Discourse Analysis or Feminist Discourse Analysis may then extrapolate how these reflect power relations or social preconceptions. This probably overlaps a lot with pragmatics---and a lot of theoretical and analytical tooling like speech act theory or Gricean maxims are shared---but AFAIU DA is more interested in textual (i.e. speech, not necessarily written) context here, whereas pragmatics in more mechanical and semiotic workings---tho I doubt subfields of linguistics are as distinct as some of the literature makes them seem to be. In any case, a more concrete method that's used a lot in DA (or other subfields) is corpus analysis, where large, often annotated corpora is used in order to test what constituents are found together. Talking about your interest in math here, you may or may not find what you want in this. On the one hand, language is an incredibly flexible mechanism and almost everything, from words to farts to where one looks at has semiotic and discourse-relevant content, and this is something that conflicts a lot with more logically / mathematically motivated approaches like Chomskyan grammar. Simply put, language is hard to pin down, because unlike say in physics, chemistry, or astronomy, your subject matter is an extremely diverse, constantly changing beast that's produced with animals with extreme agency. But OTOH universe, biology, or materials are messy in their own ways and mathematical approaches have been useful in these pursuits. So it depends on where you come to it from, really. As to the article you linked I'd say it falls under the umbrella of computational semantics which is an area I'm totally alien to (FWIW I'm more partial to usage based grammar and sociolinguistics). It does use corpora but that's not exclusive to discourse analysis (in fact its a methodology that began around the 90s and is used across all subdisciplines of linguistics today, maybe bar phonetics). There's an over reliance on the concept of the "word" as some basic elementary unit here, which is not really the case. There being a word to express something in a language or not is not really a barrier or obstacle to expressing it in any language. The study feels like it could really make use of another linguist among its authors. There are disciplines that explore language contact and variation, second language education, and translation in itself, which could have a word or two here.

Bodell 6y ago

Passive voice is something as opposed to active voice. Passive voice does not imply weakness or passivity, it typically just means there was a subject/object switch-a-roo. Weak language, such as overuse of adverb qualifiers, is much more akin to the passive-aggressive tone that you’re referring to. Though, it can also just be the product of overly self-conscious writing. Also, intent is just a small part of context. Therefore, it would rarely if ever supersede the importance of context. For example: Two spies are sitting on a bench speaking in code to one another. Spy 1 gives up an important detail concerning the number of Tridents in a specific location in exchange for some equally important detail related to Spy 2’s national defense structure. Now, it may not have been Spy 1’s intention to divulge his nation’s exact percentage of Tridents stored in a single location, but nonetheless and unbeknownst to Spy 1, Spy 2 already knew the total number of Tridents and therefore could deduce from context. Shovel in a few more cascading deductions and maybe Spy 2 now knows a lot more than Spy 1 ever intended to tell him. This is true of a lot of things. You can make racists statements out of ignorance without intending to be racist. However, many things that may seem racist on the surface may in greater context be criticism, parody, or just an attempt at candid documentation. All of which are partially informed by intent, but only because intent is a part of context. Given this and people’s proclivity for hiding their intentions (and even with intentions stated can be either a lie or the truth and we wouldn’t really know so we have to yet still include it in our box of contextual evidence that is still yet to be determined, in terms of authenticity) I would choose to gather as many contextual clues as I could while keeping intent at arms length—still there and I see it, but maybe not the most important factor. Just for fun the “editor” put this comment at grade 10 and told me to aim lower, grade 9. Too many hard-to-read sentences, adverbs, and difficult words like “therefore”.