Search Results (46)

We investigated how participants’ humor styles impact their sarcasm use. English-speaking participants (N = 179) completed online self-report measures of humor styles and sarcasm use. We conducted linear regressions to test whether their humor style scores could predict their sarcasm use scores. Participants with higher affiliative humor scores reported a greater tendency to use sarcasm in general and to use face-saving sarcasm to protect the social images of the speaker and addressee. People use face-saving sarcasm to enhance their relationships, to tease others, and to self-deprecate. Surprisingly, participants who scored high on aggressive humor reported using face-saving sarcasm often. We suspect this occurred because the aggressive humor and the face-saving scales contain conceptually similar items. Participants with high aggressive humor scores also reported frequently using sarcasm to diffuse frustration. Participants who scored high on self-defeating humor reported often using both face-saving sarcasm and sarcasm to diffuse embarrassment. Given that face-saving sarcasm use was uniquely predicted by affiliative humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor scores, we suggest that face-saving sarcasm use has utility for people with a wide range of humor styles. Our findings highlight how an individual’s humor style shapes their flexible use of sarcasm in interpersonal relationships. Full article

Aviation safety recommendations are the National Transportation Safety Board’s key mechanism for effecting improvements and curtailing subsequent accidents. Aviation safety recommendations and their associated correspondence have been minimally explored in the extant literature, potentially overlooking constrained versus successful risk mitigation themes. This research aimed to qualitatively explore 187 aviation safety recommendations using a framework adapted from the SHELL model. The research also examined the recommendations’ correspondence content to illuminate the characteristics typical of positive versus negative sentiments. The results included risk mitigation themes distributed across the categories of addressees, report statuses, and reiterations. Addressing company, management, manning, or regulatory issues was the most prevalent risk mitigation strategy, followed by physical environment and other human-system support mitigations. The sentiment analyses’ results included distributions across addressees, statuses, time, reiterations, and correspondences. NTSB and addressee correspondence sentiments remained mostly consistent over time and interactions, whereas differences were observed based on addressees and unacceptable report statuses. This article offers the first systematic analysis of NTSB aviation safety recommendations’ risk mitigation themes and addressee correspondences. Full article

This article reflects on explainability in the context of medical artificial intelligence (AI) applications, focusing on AI-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS). After introducing the concept of explainability in AI and providing a short overview of AI-based clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and the role of explainability in CDSSs, four use cases of AI-based CDSSs will be presented. The examples were chosen to highlight different types of AI-based CDSSs as well as different types of explanations: a machine language (ML) tool that lacks explainability; an approach with post hoc explanations; a hybrid model that provides medical knowledge-based explanations; and a causal model that involves complex moral concepts. Then, the role, relevance, and implications of explainability in the context of the use cases will be discussed, focusing on seven explainability-related aspects and themes. These are: (1) The addressees of explainability in medical AI; (2) the relevance of explainability for medical decision making; (3) the type of explanation provided; (4) the (often-cited) conflict between explainability and accuracy; (5) epistemic authority and automation bias; (6) Individual preferences and values; (7) patient autonomy and doctor–patient relationships. The case-based discussion reveals that the role and relevance of explainability in AI-based CDSSs varies considerably depending on the tool and use context. While it is plausible to assume that explainability in medical AI has positive implications, empirical data on explainability and explainability-related implications is scarce. Use-case-based studies are needed to investigate not only the technical aspects of explainability but also the perspectives of clinicians and patients on the relevance of explainability and its implications. Full article

Religious education is a standard in European schools, but it is implemented according to different models. Against this background, Poland, with its confessional religious education for which churches and religious associations are responsible, appears as a certain model. However, is this kind of religious education able to meet the needs of today’s children and young people? This article begins with a brief description of religious education in Poland and then focuses on the characteristics of contemporary changes that affect all areas of human life, including religiousness. The hypothesis of the authors, which has found its justification in the proposed text, is the conviction that confessional religious education is able to respond to the needs of its contemporary addressees, but it must also have the ability to change and adapt, especially from the perspective of didactics. It is also important to be able to function in the reality of pluralism and complexity, as well as in the increasingly widespread computerization. Full article

Interaction networks are a method of displaying the significant characters in a narrative text and their interactions. We automatically construct interaction networks from dialogues in German fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and subsequently visualize these networks. This requires the combination of algorithms for several tasks: coreference resolution for the identification of characters and their appearances, as well as speaker/addressee detection and the detection of dialogue boundaries for the identification of interactions. After an evaluation of the individual algorithms, the predicted networks are evaluated against benchmarks established by networks based on manually annotated coreference and speaker/addressee information. The evaluation focuses on specific components of the predicted networks, such as the nodes, as well as the overall network, employing a newly devised score. This is followed by an analysis of various types of errors that the algorithms can make, like a coreference resolution algorithm not realizing that the frog has transformed into a prince, and their impact on the created networks. We find that the quality of many predicted networks is satisfactory for use cases in which the reliability of edges and character types are not of critical importance. However, there is considerable room for improvement. Full article

Although some research on forms of address toward adults in the South African context has been conducted in the past, there remains a gap regarding the use of oom and tannie as a specific informal Afrikaans form of address. This study comprises both a review of the existing literature and an empirical investigation to address this gap. A mixed-methods approach was used to conduct the empirical investigation. Quantitative data were collected through electronic questionnaires completed by adults and learners. Qualitative data were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews. Analysis of the data indicated that the use of oom and tannie is still prevalent in the Afrikaans-speaking community, demonstrating a high frequency of use. From the data, it becomes evident that age, respect, familiarity, social class, and status serve as determining factors in the use of oom and tannie. The age difference between speaker and addressee that serves as the accepted norm for using oom and tannie remains ten years or more. It seems that the Afrikaans community is moving toward a more informal and solidary society, with oom and tannie or first names being preferred over the use of titles. Without a doubt, oom and tannie are used in the Afrikaans community as alternative forms of respect. Full article

In this paper, I focus on the puzzling ending of the apostolic letter in Acts 15 in which the addressees are told that if they hold to four “essential” prohibitions, they will “do well” (εὖ πράξετε, v. 29). The question as to how, exactly, can destabilise some understandings of the decree, with alternative translations creating different problems, and particularly so where theological commitments are at play. Following Danker’s call for greater attention to this phrase, I undertake a fresh, stratified survey of Greek usage across corpora ranging from the arguably less to the more proximate and bring this into dialogue with the senses given in various literary and social approaches to the decree involving epistolary rhetoric, reciprocity theory, and intertextuality. This reveals how purely linguistic data can stand in tension with compositional arguments in different ways and require a more complex arbitration between possibility, likelihood and coherence when both lexical- and discourse-level constraints are applied. Whilst not solving the problem of the decree outright, observing the impacts of different readings of εὖ πράξετε on the delicate balances involved presses some oblique but productive questions into the interpretive task. Full article

Climate change is already having a significant impact, and Germany, the EU’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is experiencing this firsthand, prompting adaptation measures in cities. German companies must balance social and environmental responsibility with economic goals. Achieving sustainable business goals requires employee support and engagement, which can be facilitated through internal and external communication using storytelling and narratives. This paper addresses a gap in research on internal and external sustainability communication by examining both simultaneously. Using a semi-structured interview study, the paper examines the current state of sustainability communication in selected German companies, focusing on addressees, channels, structure, and content. The results revealed a high relevance of sustainability in companies, identified similarities between internal and external characteristics of communication, but also highlighted specific differences (e.g., with regard to communication strategies). This paper also identifies effects of communication and areas for improvement and suggests directions for future research to improve sustainability communication and its role in promoting a more sustainable society. Full article

Growing attention has been directed towards affects and emotions in the New Testament texts within recent scholarship over the course of the past two decades. Although biblical exegesis of the 20th century suspected psychological interpretations of New Testament texts of being highly subjective and hence frail, recent research has developed a number of approaches that allow for addressing the subject in a methodologically controlled way. The aim of the present article is to review important monographs from the field of New Testament emotion research with special attention to their particular focuses and research methods. Despite some degree of overlap between these perspectives, six major areas of scholarly work can be identified: (1) “text psychology” that explains New Testament findings against the backdrop of modern psychological theories; (2) historical psychology that explores ancient notions of the affects; (3) narratology that observes recurring a narrative pattern in ancient descriptions of the affects; (4) rhetorical criticism that traces the rhetorical presentation of affects as well as the capability of rhetorical language to evoke affects in the addressees; (5) philosophy of the body that examines the bodily aspects of psychological dynamics; and finally (6) social history that identifies social functions of collective affects, e.g., in the formation and stabilization of social groups. After introducing each of these approaches briefly, the affect of desire (gr. ἐπιθυμία) will serve as a test case to demonstrate the possibilities and usefulness that the different perspectives offer. This way, it becomes clear that affects are by no means a by-product of theological teaching in the New Testament, but in fact indicators of true relevance. Full article

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the so-called syntactization of discourse, that is, the projection of relevant pragmatic features in the narrow syntax. In particular, it analyses deictic inversion in English, a construction which is used by the speaker to point at a proximal or distal location and bring the addressee’s attention to an entity related to that location (e.g., Here comes the bus). It offers a novel account of this construction, which takes it to be an evidential strategy in a language that does not have standard evidential markers; this evidential status explains its main differences with locative inversion, a construction with which it is pragmatically and structurally related. Deictic inversion therefore receives a natural explanation in a framework that maps syntax with the speech act and introduces in the derivation pragmatic information about the participants in the communicative exchange and about the source of the information for the proposition asserted. Full article

Southern Min is generally known for not using classifiers [CL] for expressing definiteness/indefiniteness as it is associated with the bare classifier construction [CL N]. This paper offers evidence from Xiamen Southern Min (XSM) that the use of a specific classifier vs. the general classifier é contributes to referentiality in an alternative way by supporting object identification as it is due to the semantic specificity present in specific classifiers and absent in the general classifier. In a dialogic cognitive experiment adapted from the “Hidden color-chips” task (Enfield and Bohnemeyer 2001), 18 participants had to manipulate their addressees’ attention toward various objects situated in their immediate physical space through language as well as deictic gestures. The objects were associated with different specific classifiers or with the general classifier, and they were arranged according to the factors of (a) distance from speaker, (b) visibility for speaker, and (c) uniqueness (adjacency of similar items). The results show, among other things, that there is a higher tendency to use the specific CL in the [demonstrative CL N] construction if adjacent similar objects [−unique] are too far away from the speaker for clear identification by a demonstrative or a pointing gesture. This is seen as a last-resort strategy for creating contrast. Further corroboration comes from the use of specific classifiers in later mentions after the general CL failed to achieve clear identification. These findings can be situated in the broader context of other languages with classifiers in contrastive function (Thai, Vietnamese, and Ponapean) and they show the relevance of using dialogic texts for modeling classifier selection in contrast to narrative texts. Finally, dialogic contexts may serve as bridging contexts for grammaticalization from numeral classifiers to definiteness markers. Full article

In this contribution, we will proceed in three steps. First of all, we will investigate the rhetorical approach for studying the Pauline letters, considering different methodological options. In this context, we will propose the approach of the literary rhetoric as the most valid. Secondly, we will analyse the autobiographical text of Philippians 3:1–4:1, starting from its delimitation, textual criticism, and its arrangement, according to oral and discursive models. Then, we will proceed with genre and literary origins; here, we will discover the periautologia as the point of reference of the Pauline autobiography. This eulogy of self is a genre, well known in the rhetorical tradition, to which Plutarch dedicated the treatise On praising oneself. This discovery determines the following exegetical analysis of the text. Thirdly, we will conclude with a reflection about Paul’s way of speaking about himself in this passage. In light of ancient rhetorical heritage, he does not use his autobiography to praise himself but to praise Christ, who completely changed his life. Ultimately, Paul’s talk about himself is a way of talking about Christ for the benefit of the addressees who should creatively imitate the Apostle and his Christian life. Full article

Some languages make a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address. When organizations communicate in such a language, they have to choose between the formal and informal form. The goal of this paper is to explore the role of the V-T distinction in organizational communication, specifically in generic job advertisements, through two empirical studies and to obtain a preliminary evidence-based framework for V and T in organizational communication. In a corpus study, we explore which form organizations from different industry types tend to use. We find that the choice of pronoun of address is associated with industry type in Netherlandic Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, but not in Belgian Dutch. In an experimental follow-up study, we explore the effect of pronouns of address on Dutch addressees in light of the perceived personality of the companies using these forms. We find an interaction between the pronoun of address used and the level of competence a company is associated with. Based on these studies and the existing literature, we propose a framework for V and T in organizational communication. In this framework, local linguaculture and industry culture play a role in the organizational choice between V and T. Furthermore, the way in which pronouns of address affect the addressee is determined by an interplay of company characteristics and addressee characteristics. Full article

This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the omnipresent second person is granted a variety of referents that coexist along a “continuum of reference” (as defined by Bettina Kluge), from a “you” that is speaker-oriented to one that is addressee-oriented. Sorlin’s intersection of Kluge’s continuum with a gradient from personalisation to generalisation (2022) is illuminating when examining the manifold significance of Ford’s use of the second person, as it brings to light its ethical impact. Ford’s war essays shift from the general to the particular and from the collective to the individual in a manner that opposes propaganda rhetorics. Furthermore, the gradient established by Sandrine Sorlin to account for the pragmatic effect of “you” also proves remarkably useful when applied to the pronoun “one”. Scrutinising the interplay between these various pronouns allows us to investigate the multifarious relationships that Ford establishes in his war essays between the persona, the reader, those he often called “my men”, and the collective ethos of wartime Britain. Full article

In this paper, we discuss the evidential properties of inferential interrogative sentences with qué in Spanish. This interrogative type exhibits the shape of a wh-question but the interpretation of a polar question. These sentences have the additional particularity that they are interrogatives with evidential material, which are attested but not frequent crosslinguistically, if compared with declarative evidentials. An interesting consequence of their double interrogative and evidential nature is the fact that both discourse participants have a prominent role in the interpretation of these sentences, as the Speaker makes the inference but the Addressee is requested for confirmation. To account for the construction, we assume a multiple-layered system that includes both Speech Act projection and Finiteness projection. In these two areas we simultaneously find evidential material housing the Speaker’s inference, and a raised Addressee in its prominent interrogative position as the participant with the knowledge to provide the requested confirmation of the interrogative’s truth value. Full article