Implicit Communication

Robots must be cognizant of how their actions will be interpreted in context. Actions performed in the context of a joint activity comprise two aspects: functional and communicative. The functional component achieves the goal of the action, whereas its communicative component, when present, expresses some information to the actor's partners in the joint activity. The interpretation of such communication requires leveraging information that is public to all participants, known as common ground. Much of human communication is performed through this implicit mechanism, and humans cannot help but infer some meaningwhether or not it was intended by the actor-from most actions. We present a framework for robots to utilize this communicative channel on top of normal functional actions to work more effectively with human partners. We consider the role of the actor and the observer, both individually and jointly, in implicit communication, as well as the effects of timing. We also show how the framework maps onto various modes of action, including natural language and motion. We consider these modes of action in various human-robot interaction domains, including social navigation and collaborative assembly.

È ormai noto che molti dei significati trasmessi da un enunciato sono in realtà sotto-codificati (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1994; Sbisà, 2002, 2007, Lombardi Vallauri & Masia 2014). Questo caratterizza pervasivamente gli usi associati ad intenti persuasivi (Sbisà, 2007; Lombardi Vallauri, 2016). Il fatto che la sotto-codifica di contenuti – quando non siano previamente condivisi dall’interlocutore – trovi un impiego più rilevante in determinati generi testuali (es. programmi politici, brochure turistiche, discorsi elettorali) piuttosto che in altri (es. lezioni universitarie, bugiardini, manuali di istruzioni) suggerisce di verificare l’ipotesi che le diverse tipologie di testi (sia orali che scritti) siano caratterizzate da variazione sistematica per quanto riguarda la frequenza e gli effetti delle principali strategie della comunicazione implicita.
Il presente contributo propone un’analisi qualitativa e quantitativa della comunicazione implicita come variabile dipendente dal genere testuale, con particolare attenzione all’uso di presupposizioni (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker 1974), implicature (Grice 1975), vaghezza (Machetti 2006, Voghera & Collu 2017), topicalizzazioni (Cresti 2000; Lombardi Vallauri 2009), linguaggio figurato (Bianchi 2009) e deissi (Vanelli & Renzi 1995). Sulla base di dati raccolti da corpora orali (discorsi politici, giornalismo televisivo, lezioni universitarie) e scritti (cataloghi turistici, programmi politici, manuali di istruzioni) si mostrerà come la funzione e lo statuto discorsivo delle strategie di implicito cambino in relazione agli scopi, agli utenti e all’articolazione dei contenuti nel testo.
Ad esempio, se in determinate tipologie testuali (tipicamente quelle con basso grado di persuasività) la comunicazione implicita è meno frequente e ha come sua funzione principale quella di sveltire l’esposizione, limitandone il carattere ridondante, in altre tipologie essa è destinata a costruire consensi nella mente dell’interlocutore in modo inavvertito (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1986; de Saussure, 2013, 2014).
In tal senso, oltre a caratterizzare un testo come più o meno persuasivo, la presenza e la funzione delle strategie di implicito contribuisce a individuarne il genere di appartenenza. La comunicazione implicita viene pertanto ad essere non solo un meccanismo di confezionamento dei contenuti in un messaggio, ma anche un preciso fattore di variazione che caratterizza il confine tra tipologie testuali.

Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics.

In this paper, we claim that we cannot really live or collaborate with a robot not able to read our behavior in terms of ‘signals’, to ‘understand’ what we are doing and that we – while doing – expect that it observes, understands, and anticipates. In other words, for an effective HR social interaction behavior, practical actions must be implicit communication, at least from one side. For an efficient coordination communication is crucial, but not necessarily or mainly communication via natural language, or specialized protocols, or ‘gestures’. A much more natural and economic form of communication is needed: just behaviors and its observable traces (stigmergy). Our paper is focused on the possibility of evolving communication from the observation of practical actions. We believe that observing other agents performing actions in a shared environment is a basic way of embodied communication, and the first one. We will introduce our theory of Behavioral Implicit Communication (BIC), explaining the main ‘steps’ from mere observation and signification to true communication and messages; the main kind of meanings that can be tacitly conveyed; how we can tacitly coordinate with each other. We will argue – with several examples – that BIC could be precious to fill the “communicative gap” between humans and robots.

In casual conversations, interlocutors often merely hint at intertextual references. The elusive design of such references ranges from extremely truncated or modified quotes, or mentions of names, to the rendition of generic patterns and enregistered (Agha, 2007) varieties associated with social or ethnic stereotypes. The paper refers to such non-explicitly marked references as allusions and discusses the methodological challenges posed by their detection and analysis. Qualitative analyses of four conversational episodes illustrate how Russian speakers and interlocutors draw on such allusions and playfully exploit the meaning potential of the (con-)text referenced. The talk that thereby emerges points, in various ways, to the recognition and possible understanding of an allusion. Allusive talk is thus both based on, and points to, a common ground shared by the interlocutors and providing a rich inferential substrate of interaction (Haugh, 2017) that usually remains unexposed.

Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die Fortsetzung der in Weiss (2009) vorgestellten Studie dar, die im Rahmen des in Bergen / NO geleiteten, den Sprachkrisen der 20er und 90er Jahren gewidmeten Forschungsvorhabens "The Landslide of the Norm" entstanden war. Die letzte der in diesem Rahmen durchgeführten Tagungen (Solstrand 2008) galt dem Thema "Norm Negotiations". Die in meiner genannten Studie behandelten Gegenstände fügten sich insofern in diese Rahmenthematik ein, als es um die Bedeutung linguistischer Gutachten für die Auslegung straf-und zivilrechtlicher Verbaldelikte ging. Hier soll darauf verzichtet werden, nochmals die ganze Breite der in Frage kommenden Sachverhalte aufzuzeigen, zu deren rechtlicher Würdigung die Fachexpertise von Linguisten in der Rechtssprechung der Russischen Föderation beigezogen wird. Ebenso wenig wird nochmals auf die Eigenart der juristischen Fachsprache und die unterschiedliche Autorisierung (±juristisch / ±linguistisch) der zugehörigen Grundbegriffe eingegangen. 1 Stattdessen wird der Fokus auf der Behandlung von Ehrverletzungsdelikten liegen, d.h. der Tatbestände Oskorblenie (Art. 130 UK), Kleveta (UK 129) sowie Zaščita česti, dostoinstva i delovoj reputacii (GK 152). Aus der verfügbaren linguistischen Spezialliteratur, die dank der (auch pekuniären!) Bedeutung der gerichtlichen Gutachtertätigkeit in den letzten Jahren stark angewachsen ist, sei v.a. auf ) und Brinev (2009) verwiesen, daneben auf Osadčij (2007, und die einschlägigen Beiträge in der Zeitschrift "Jurislingvistika" (Barnaul 2002 ff.). Am Rande wird auch kurz auf die eventuelle sprachliche Verletzung werberechtlicher Bestimmungen eingegangen.

Our contribution is devoted to analyze how linguistic communication could have arisen from other kinds of pre-linguistic communication. One of these forms could have been Behavioural Implicit Communication, i.e. communication based on usual actions that are used also to convey messages. Behaviour-based communication seems to be a useful resource in order to explain the evolution of communication and of its cognitive pre-requisites, as well as its development in children. It is also a very important tool for improving Human-robot cooperation and collaboration, thanks to its spontaneous emergence.

Becoming effective hunters of manipulative communicative moves is far from an easy capacity to develop. This book aims at offering a guide to the most dangerous traps of deceptive language as triggered by implicit communication strategies such as presupposition, implicature, topicalization and vague expressions. A look at different contexts of language use highlights some of the most remarkable implications of using indirect speech and of how it affects the correct comprehension of a message. Within the remit of communication and pragmatics studies, this work marks an advancement in the direction of delving into the linguistic manifestations of manipulative discourse, its most common contexts of use and the educational paths that can be undertaken to master it in everyday interactions.

Please quote as:
Brocca, Nicola, 2020: Implizite Bedeutung in sozialen Netzwerken. Stärkung des gesellschaftlich-demokratischen Bewusstseins im Französisch als Fremdspracheunterricht. In: Kapelari S. (Hr.), Vierte „Tagung der Fachdidaktik“ 2019
Interdisziplinäre fachdidaktische Diskurse zur Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Fachdidaktik 8. innsbruck university press, iup S. 177-205.

Open Access-Publikation
DOI: 10.15203/99106-019-2-09

Indirect speech is a remarkable trait of human communication. The present paper tackles the sociobiological underpinnings of communicative indirectness discussing both socio-interactional and cognitive rationales behind its manifestation in discourse. From a social perspective, the use of indirect forms in interactions can be regarded as an adaptive response to the epistemic implications of transacted new information in small primary groups, representing -in Givón's terms -our "bio-cultural" descent. The design features of indirect strategies today may therefore be explained in terms of a form-function mapping in which indirect communicative expressions allowed a "safer" transaction of contents and a more cooperative attitude of speakers in both face-to-face and public contexts of communication. The unchallengeability effects notably induced by underencoded meanings have now received extensive experimental backing, unveiling intriguing underlying cognitive mechanisms such as the well-known cognitive illusions or fallacies.