Chi-Hé Elder
Biographic Data
| ID | 950288 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chi-Hé Elder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chi-Hé |
| FAMILY NAME | Elder |
| SIGNATURE | ELDER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3702-5397 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Fragile men and fishy arguments: Attributing and disputing offence in online interaction
What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask on what grounds a speaker can be labelled as offended, even when the speaker does not claim any feelings…
“I never said that”: Negotiating misunderstandings in police interviews
Police interviewers in England and Wales engage in the practice of investigative interviewing that is based on obtaining neutral, institutionally accepted account from suspects. This involves a process not only of eliciting information from suspects, but also of managing the interview by choosing topics for questioning, seeking clarification and additional details, and shaping the account to fulfil institutional requirements. Interviewers must th…
The joke and the joker: Ascribing accountability for offensive humour in stand-up comedy
The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is ‘off limits’, while also taking a stance against those who argue for more empathetic comedy that does not reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs. Taking Jimmy Carr’s ‘holocaust joke’ (2021) as a case study, we…
Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges
In this special issue, we view ‘offensive humour’ as a purposefully broad, catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put downs and jocular insults (e.g., Dynel & Sinkeviciute 2021). While both ‘offence’ and ‘humour’ are notoriously difficult to define, across the papers in this collection we find the common threads that identify offensive humour are (a) a speaker’s (assumed) intent to amuse, and (b) recipients’ judgements or reactions to…
Towards a dynamic functional proposition for dynamic discourse meaning
Theories of utterance meaning in the post-Gricean tradition have typically focused on the main proposition expressed by the speaker that is recovered by the addressee. In this tradition, successful communication rests on the assumption that speakers and addressees come to a shared understanding of these propositions as they are produced in conversation. We now have a wealth of empirical evidence that speakers and addressees need not always conver…
The role of inference and inferencing in pragmatic models of communication
Exposing and avoiding unwanted inferences in conversational interaction
Utterances give rise to many potential inferences. They can be communicated explicitly or implicitly, they may or may not be intended, and they may or may not even be inferred. In this paper, we focus on how speakers orient to ‘unwanted inferences’: potential inferences (or inferables) that can - but need not - be inferred from what has been said. Such inferences can be ‘unwanted’ in different ways: as secondary propositions that the speaker does…
We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired
We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participan…
Microaggression or misunderstanding? Implicatures, inferences and accountability
Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content
This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due t…
The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference
Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers ca…
Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface
Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals
The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference
Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers ca…
Microaggression or misunderstanding? Implicatures, inferences and accountability
Exposing and avoiding unwanted inferences in conversational interaction
Utterances give rise to many potential inferences. They can be communicated explicitly or implicitly, they may or may not be intended, and they may or may not even be inferred. In this paper, we focus on how speakers orient to ‘unwanted inferences’: potential inferences (or inferables) that can - but need not - be inferred from what has been said. Such inferences can be ‘unwanted’ in different ways: as secondary propositions that the speaker does…
Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals
We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired
We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participan…
Towards a dynamic functional proposition for dynamic discourse meaning
Theories of utterance meaning in the post-Gricean tradition have typically focused on the main proposition expressed by the speaker that is recovered by the addressee. In this tradition, successful communication rests on the assumption that speakers and addressees come to a shared understanding of these propositions as they are produced in conversation. We now have a wealth of empirical evidence that speakers and addressees need not always conver…
Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface
Towards a pragmatic category of conditionals
The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference
Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers ca…
Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface
Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content
This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due t…
Microaggression or misunderstanding? Implicatures, inferences and accountability
We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired
We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participan…
Exposing and avoiding unwanted inferences in conversational interaction
Utterances give rise to many potential inferences. They can be communicated explicitly or implicitly, they may or may not be intended, and they may or may not even be inferred. In this paper, we focus on how speakers orient to ‘unwanted inferences’: potential inferences (or inferables) that can - but need not - be inferred from what has been said. Such inferences can be ‘unwanted’ in different ways: as secondary propositions that the speaker does…
Towards a dynamic functional proposition for dynamic discourse meaning
Theories of utterance meaning in the post-Gricean tradition have typically focused on the main proposition expressed by the speaker that is recovered by the addressee. In this tradition, successful communication rests on the assumption that speakers and addressees come to a shared understanding of these propositions as they are produced in conversation. We now have a wealth of empirical evidence that speakers and addressees need not always conver…
The role of inference and inferencing in pragmatic models of communication
“I never said that”: Negotiating misunderstandings in police interviews
Police interviewers in England and Wales engage in the practice of investigative interviewing that is based on obtaining neutral, institutionally accepted account from suspects. This involves a process not only of eliciting information from suspects, but also of managing the interview by choosing topics for questioning, seeking clarification and additional details, and shaping the account to fulfil institutional requirements. Interviewers must th…
The joke and the joker: Ascribing accountability for offensive humour in stand-up comedy
The ongoing and divisive discourse regarding the use of offensive humour in stand-up comedy is taking place both off-stage and on-stage: comedians use jokes that target sensitive characteristics ostensibly to show that no topic is ‘off limits’, while also taking a stance against those who argue for more empathetic comedy that does not reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs. Taking Jimmy Carr’s ‘holocaust joke’ (2021) as a case study, we…
Offensive humour: Theoretical and practical challenges
In this special issue, we view ‘offensive humour’ as a purposefully broad, catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put downs and jocular insults (e.g., Dynel & Sinkeviciute 2021). While both ‘offence’ and ‘humour’ are notoriously difficult to define, across the papers in this collection we find the common threads that identify offensive humour are (a) a speaker’s (assumed) intent to amuse, and (b) recipients’ judgements or reactions to…
Fragile men and fishy arguments: Attributing and disputing offence in online interaction
What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask on what grounds a speaker can be labelled as offended, even when the speaker does not claim any feelings…
Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Pragmatics (5 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (5 works)