Papers

The notion of conversational salience has proven useful for linguistic theorizing. Regardless of whether salience determines facts about meaning or merely aids in the communication of meanings, what is said is tied up with what is salient. I argue that the linguistic notion of salience is best understood in terms of the psychological notion of mutual attention. I discuss competing options and argue that only mutual attention suffices for establishing conversational salience in the way required by linguistic theory. The picture that emerges is one on which conversational moves function in part to coordinate the attentional states of interlocutors.

This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text (such as the sentence “I’m hungry”). We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a proposition p provided by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an entirely independent contribution. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as “happy” and “unhappy”, respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how p bears on a contextually provided discourse value V of the author. Discourse values embody what an author desires, aspires to, wishes for, or hopes for. Our analysis derives a range of non-trivial generalizations, including (i) ordering restrictions with regards to the placement of emoji and text, (ii) cases of apparent mixed emotions, and (iii) cases where the lexical content of the accompanying text influences the acceptability of a face emoji.

Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic expression. I argue that deixis can play a more complex discourse function. A deictic gesture can be used to say something in conversation and can thereby become a full discourse contribution in its own right. To capture this phenomenon, which I call rich demonstration, I present an update semantics on which (a) deictic gestures can indicate situations from a conversation’s context, and (b) those situations coherently connect to prior discourse to generate information.

I discuss a phenomenon I call rich demonstration, wherein a demonstrative gesture is seemingly used to communicate an entire thought. I present an analysis based in discourse coherence theory on which rich demonstrations have their functions in virtue of the interpretive effects of discourse-structuring mechanisms.