Nicholas Elwyn Allott

• Mathisen, Emma Krane; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Ronderos, Camilo Rodriguez (2025). Cognitive mechanisms in simile and metaphor comprehension. Language and Cognition. ISSN 1866-9808. 17. doi: 10.1017/langcog.2025.10038. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This study investigates whether metaphors and similes are processed the same way or not. Comparison accounts of metaphor claim that metaphors and similes use the same cognitive mechanisms because metaphors are implicit similes, while Categorization accounts claim that the two figures of speech require different cognitive mechanisms. It is unclear which position has the most support. We address this by introducing the distinction between single and extended metaphors to this debate. Several experiments have shown that a metaphor preceded by another metaphor is read faster than a single metaphor. If similes in extended and non-extended contexts display a similar processing difference, this would support views saying that metaphors and similes are processed the same way. If not, it would be more in line with the view that they are processed differently. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we find that the difference between processing single and extended metaphors does not hold in the case of simile comprehension. This is more compatible with Categorization accounts than with Comparison accounts; if the cognitive mechanism behind metaphor and simile processing is the same, we would expect there to be a comparable processing difference between metaphors and similes in the single and extended conditions.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2023). Encapsulation, inference and utterance interpretation. Inquiry (Oslo). ISSN 0020-174X. doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2267084. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  While utterance interpretation is standardly understood as context-sensitive inference, there are prima facie reasons to doubt it is fully unencapsulated. First, utterance interpretation is normally fast and automatic, while it has been argued that unencapsulated processes are slow and reflective. Secondly, certain illusions appear to show that the processing of utterances is unrevisable in light of further information. I argue that these reasons are not conclusive, and utterance interpretation relies on indefinite tracts of background knowledge and contextual information. Examples show that interpretation requires the use of information that is not in the input and is neither purely linguistic nor purely stereotypical knowledge. I show that this applies to arriving at the proposition expressed (e.g. the proposition asserted) as well as implicatures. ‘Grammatical’ and ‘semantic’ illusions show less than one might think about encapsulation of utterance interpretation. Some do not depend on reaching any stable interpretation. The inversion illusion is due in part to background knowledge. While the Moses illusion is revisable, such revision may be performed by a distinct capacity, so is not clear evidence for cognitive penetrability of the normal utterance interpretation process.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2022). Literal and metaphorical meaning: in search of a lost distinction. Inquiry (Oslo). ISSN 0020-174X. doi: 10.1080/0020174x.2022.2128867. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinction has theoretical importance. The distinction between literal and metaphorical needs to be captured by our account of communication because literal uses transmit information in a way that metaphorical ones do not. We argue that there is a way to explain the literal/metaphorical distinction that preserves the core of the folk-linguistic idea and gives the distinction theoretical relevance. We propose that literal uses of a word are made with the intention to conform to an established practice of use, while metaphorical uses do not so conform, but depend on this pre-existing practice. Our account can deal with data that are problematic for other theories. A further advantage is that it extends naturally to other non-literal uses of words, including metonymy.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Smith, Neil (2021). Chomsky and Fodor on Modularity. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (Red.), A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119598701. s. 529–543. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (2021). Chomsky's "Galilean" Explanatory Style. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (Red.), A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119598701. s. 517–528. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  <p>Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. He thinks of this method as like that employed by Galileo and later physicists who proposed laws of motion in considerable abstraction from many of the motions we observe in daily life, focusing, for example, not on leaves in the wind, but on frictionless environments that virtually never occur on earth. Thus, Chomsky’s theoretical proposals are supported not by studies of the corpora of actual language use, but often by the intuitions of native speakers; and the relevant intuitions are not about what they think is <i>often</i> or is <i>likely</i> to be said, but rather about what “<i>can’t</i>” be said (so called “negative data”), and about what types of interpretation a sentence can or cannot have. But doesn't this fly in the face of good, commonsensical scientific methodology? Aren’t theories confirmed by greater data, and refuted by data that seem to conflict with them? With regard to this issue, Chomsky (1980) writes: <p>Substantial coverage of data is not a particularly significant result, it can be attained in many ways, and the result is not very informative as to the correctness of the principles employed. It will be more significant if we show that certain far-reaching principles interact to provide an explanation for crucial facts – the crucial nature of these facts deriving from their relation to proposed explanatory theories. (Chomsky 1980, 2) <p>We’ll argue below that Chomsky’s observation here in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. In the spirit of the positivism/empiricism of the 1930s, the ‘structuralist’ linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933, 20) insisted that “the only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations”, and linguists for the next several decades tried to specify ‘discovery procedures’, or rules for using a collection of phonetically characterized utterances to induce phonemic, morphemic and – it was hoped – finally syntactic analyses of the target language (see Sampson, 1980, 76ff). Such discovery procedures have fallen by the wayside, but many contemporary linguists would still agree with Bloomfield that linguistics seeks generalizations that both emerge from, and provide good coverage of, the data of language use.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Wilson, Deirdre (2021). Chomsky and pragmatics. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (Red.), A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119598701. s. 433–447. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (2021). Biographical Sketch. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (Red.), A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119598701. s. 18–22. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  As the synoptic introduction makes clear, Noam Chomsky is a unique intellectual figure who has had a huge impact on several fields. He was almost single-handedly responsible for initiating the cognitive revolution in linguistics, and, with others such as George Miller, Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, for the ensuing replacement of behaviorism by cognitive science in psychology generally, to say nothing of being a leading critic of American foreign policy since the American war in Vietnam.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (2021). Synoptic introduction. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (Red.), A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781119598701. s. 1–17. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Noam Chomsky is justly famous for his revolutionary contributions to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. He is presently in his 92nd year, and we thought it high time to provide an overview of the major achievements of his now more than sixty-year-old research program and its prospects for the future. This is particularly pressing in the light of persistent rumors, encouraged by a number of authors1, that his program has proven bankrupt, “completely wrong” and has been replaced by various sorts of proposals in general statistical learning and “functionalist/constructionist” linguistic theories (which we return to below).

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2020). Metacognition and inferential accounts of communication. I Nes, Anders & Chan, Timothy (Red.), Inference and consciousness. Routledge. ISSN 9781138557178. s. 125–148. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Utterance interpretation is widely seen as an inferential achievement, and utterance interpretation resembles ‘system 2’ reasoning in some respects: the inferences are generally warranted and unencapsulated. But in normal, smooth communication, they are quick and seemingly effortless and thus more akin to paradigm unconscious ‘system 1’ inferences. Resolving this tension is a goal for any cognitively realistic account of utterance interpretation. This chapter argues on theoretical and empirical grounds for a minimalist kind of metacognition whereby a mental process is unconsciously monitored and controlled by another, perhaps without the latter metarepresenting the former. Cognitively realistic inferential theories of utterance interpretation require there to be such feedback, even in normal smooth communication. Also, two separate sets of experiments, reviewed here, show that feedback occurs in comprehension without hearers being aware of it. A potential objection concerns levels of explanation (in David Marr’s sense): that some process is inferential seems to be a claim at Marr’s functional level, while claims about the way that feedback works in utterance interpretation are at the algorithmic level. This chapter notes that facts at the algorithmic level constrain facts at the functional level and suggests that processes for implementing abductive inference must have monitoring and control.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2020). Relevance theory. I Aronoff, Mark (Red.), Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199772810. doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0256. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2019). The responsibility of intellectuals in the era of bounded rationality and Democracy for Realists. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Knight, Chris & Smith, Neil (Red.), The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. UCL Press. ISSN 9781787355538. s. 32–44. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv9b2xdv.10. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.’ This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2019). Scientific tractability and relevance theory. I Scott, Kate; Clark, Billy & Carston, Robyn (Red.), Relevance, Pragmatics and Interpretation. Cambridge University Press. ISSN 9781108418638. s. 29–41. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In her work with Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95; Wilson & Sperber, 2012) has proposed a scientific account of communication founded on a theory of cognition, adopting Chomsky’s distinction between topics that are merely of antecedent human interest, and those where there is interesting, unified nomological structure to be discovered. Chomsky led the way for modern linguistics and cognitive science by proposing that one such aspect of the world is language as a mental system in abstraction from its use (see Smith & Allott, 2016). Sperber and Wilson claim that focussing on the processing of ostensive stimuli – that is actions of intentional overt modification of our conspecifics’ minds – does the same for the study of communication. However, many remain sceptical. Pragmatic theory is often seen as an unsystematic collection of truistic observations, and its subject matter as scientifically intractable: phenomena which need to be abstracted away from in order to make progress in other areas amenable to systematic study (e.g. syntax and semantics of natural languages).

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2018). Conversational implicature. I Aronoff, Mark (Red.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780199384655. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.205. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Conversational implicatures (i) are implied by the speaker in making an utterance; (ii) are part of the content of the utterance, but (iii) do not contribute to direct (or explicit) utterance content; and (iv) are not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been uttered. In (1), Amelia asserts that she is on a diet, and implicates something different: that she is not having cake. (1) Benjamin: Are you having some of this chocolate cake? Amelia: I’m on a diet. Conversational implicatures are a subset of the implications of an utterance: namely those that are part of utterance content. Within the class of conversational implicatures, there are distinctions between particularized and generalized implicatures; implicated premises and implicated conclusions; and weak and strong implicatures. An obvious question is how implicatures are possible: how can a speaker intentionally imply something that is not part of the linguistic meaning of the phrase she utters, and how can her addressee recover that utterance content? Working out what has been implicated is not a matter of deduction, but of inference to the best explanation. What is to be explained is why the speaker has uttered the words that she did, in the way and in the circumstances that she did. Grice proposed that rational talk exchanges are cooperative and are therefore governed by a Cooperative Principle (CP) and conversational maxims: hearers can reasonably assume that rational speakers will attempt to cooperate and that rational cooperative speakers will try to make their contribution truthful, informative, relevant and clear, inter alia, and these expectations therefore guide the interpretation of utterances. On his view, since addressees can infer implicatures, speakers can take advantage of their ability, conveying implicatures by exploiting the maxims. Grice’s theory aimed to show how implicatures could in principle arise. In contrast, work in linguistic pragmatics has attempted to model their actual derivation. Given the need for a cognitively tractable decision procedure, both the neo-Gricean school and work on communication in relevance theory propose a system with fewer principles than Grice’s. Neo-Gricean work attempts to reduce Grice’s array of maxims to just two (Horn) or three (Levinson), while Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory rejects maxims and the CP and proposes that pragmatic inference hinges on a single communicative principle of relevance. Conversational implicatures typically have a number of interesting properties, including calculability, cancelability, nondetachability, and indeterminacy. These properties can be used to investigate whether a putative implicature is correctly identified as such, although none of them provides a fail-safe test. A further test, embedding, has also been prominent in work on implicatures. A number of phenomena that Grice treated as implicatures would now be treated by many as pragmatic enrichment contributing to the proposition expressed. But Grice’s postulation of implicatures was a crucial advance, both for its theoretical unification of apparently diverse types of utterance content and for the attention it drew to pragmatic inference and the division of labor between linguistic semantics and pragmatics in theorizing about verbal communication.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Rey, Georges (2017). The many errors of Vyvyan Evans' the Language Myth. The Linguistic Review. ISSN 0167-6318. 34(3), s. 569–588. doi: 10.1515/tlr-2017-0011. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Vyvyan Evans’ The Language Myth argues that Chomsky’s program of Universal Grammar (UG) is “completely wrong,” and it has attracted much recent discussion, some of it laudatory. We set out what we take to be its many serious errors, including: (i) a misunderstanding of the empirical character of the evidence that Chomsky and other generativists have adduced for UG, in English as well as in many other languages, coupled with a mistaken claim that the theory is unfalsifiable; (ii) a confusion of superficial typological universals, or features present at the surface of all of the world’s languages, with UG features that are apparent only under analysis; and (iii) a failure to appreciate the significance of Fine Thoughts (the things one cannot say in natural languages, even though it would be clear what they would mean) as critical evidence of UG, and of the difficulties presented by them for the kinds of “language-as-use” and related empiricist theories that he favors. Indeed, Evans also (iv) fails to address the issues of competence and constraints that are raised by Fine Thoughts and that are a central concern of UG; and (v) conflates UG with a computational theory of mind, a Fodorean conception of modules and a Pinkerean interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2017). Inference and intention in legal interpretation. I Giltrow, Janet & Stein, Dieter (Red.), The Pragmatic Turn: Inference and Interpretation in Legal Discourse. De Gruyter Mouton. ISSN 9781501513268. s. 83–118. doi: 10.1515/9781501504723-004. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2017). The illocutionary force of laws. Inquiry (Oslo). ISSN 0020-174X. 61(4), s. 351–369. doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2017.1371865. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2017). Lexical modulation without concepts: Introducing the derivation proposal. Dialectica. ISSN 0012-2017. 71(3), s. 399–424. doi: 10.1111/1746-8361.12190. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  We argue against the dominant view in the literature that concepts (understood as the standing meanings of general terms) are modulated in lexical modulation. We also argue against the alternative view that ‘grab bags’ of information that don’t determine extensions are the starting point for lexical modulation. In response to the problems with these views we outline a new model for lexical modulation that dispenses with the assumption that there is a standing meaning of a general term that is modified in the cases under consideration. In applying general terms we intend to conform with our linguistic ancestors and in doing so we take facts about the referents of these terms for granted. In cases of lexical modulation we become aware of facts we took for granted and we need to change the facts we take for granted in order to see ourselves as continuing in a practice. These changes result in utterances of the general term referring to different properties. In general, concepts are neither the starting point for lexical modulation nor the standing meanings of words.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2017). Legal speech and the elements of adjudication. I Slocum, Brian (Red.), The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn About Legal Interpretation From Linguistics and Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISSN 9780226445021. s. 191–217. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  © 2017 University of Chicago Press

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2017). Metarepresentation. I Barron, Anne; Gu, Yueguo & Steen, Gerard (Red.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Routledge. ISSN 9780415531412. s. 295–309. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Humans and other thinking beings can represent the world. My cat knows which cupboard her food is in: she has a mental representation of that state of affairs. Given that I believe that she knows where her food is, I have a mental representation of her mental representation. I also know where it is, and I know that I know that: I have a mental representation of my own mental representation about the food’s location. What is more, using language I can describe all of these facts about representations. The capacity to think and talk about representations, that is, to represent representations or metarepresent, is a species characteristic of human beings. All developmentally normal human beings, across all cultures, metarepresent, and with considerable facility; and metarepresentation is a central property of both human language use and human thought. [...] The original research has been published in Routledges' Handbook of Pragmatics. The publication can be found at this URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Pragmatics/Barron-Gu-Steen/p/book/9780415531412

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2016). Misunderstandings in verbal communication. I Rocci, Andrea & Saussure, Louis de (Red.), Verbal Communication. De Gruyter Mouton. ISSN 9783110255478. s. 485–508. doi: 10.1515/9783110255478-025. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2013). Some linguistic properties of legal notices. Canadian Journal of Linguistics. ISSN 0008-4131. 58(1), s. 43–+. doi: 10.1017/s0008413100002516. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2013). Relevance theory. I Capone, Alessandro; Piparo, F Lo & Carapezza, M (Red.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Springer. ISSN 9783319010144. s. 57–98. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0256. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2012). Lexical pragmatic adjustment and the nature of ad hoc concepts. International Review of Pragmatics. ISSN 1877-3095. 4(2), s. 185–208. doi: 10.1163/18773109-00040204. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2010). Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. The Reasoner. 4(12), s. 180–181. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Uchida, Hiroyuki (2009). Classical Logic, conditionals and "non-monotonic" reasoning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. ISSN 0140-525X. 32(1). Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2006). Game theory and communication. I Benz, Anton; Jäger, Gerhard & Rooij, Robert van (Red.), Game Theory and Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9781403945723. s. 123–151. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Borthen, Kaja; Falkum, Ingrid Lossius; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Berthelin, Signe Rix (2025). Kommunikasjon, ass! Innføringsbok i pragmatikk. Fagbokforlaget. ISBN 9788245028522. 445 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Lohndal, Terje & Rey, Georges (2021). A Companion to Chomsky. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781119598701. 618 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Knight, Chris & Smith, Neil (2019). The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. UCL Press. ISBN 9781787355538. 156 s. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv9b2xdv. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.’ This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Smith, Neil (2016). Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107082144. 461 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2010). Key Terms in Pragmatics. Continuum. ISBN 9781847063786. 264 s. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Reksnes, Vilde Regine Stugaard; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2026). Investigating expectations about informatively in human-LLM interactions. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2026). The literal/figurative distinction and the function of figurative use. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Yuan, Yuting; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Kissine, Mikhail (2026). Belief Revision in Human-LLM Communication. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Yuan, Yuting; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Kissine, Mikhail (2026). Belief Revision in Human-LLM Communication: Effects of Source Identity, Reliability, and Initial Confidence. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2025). LLMs: Illusions of meaningfulness. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Falkum, Ingrid Lossius & Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2025). How do we communicate with chatbots? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Falkum, Ingrid Lossius & Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2025). Hvordan kommuniserer vi med språkmodeller? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2025). LLMs, intentions, illusions and bullshit. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Some people are deluded about LLMs in that they think they are sentient, and have mental states like beliefs and intentions, but most of us probably aren’t and don’t. But this raises questions about how we understand their ‘utterances’ and how we learn from them, since leading accounts of utterance interpretation are intentionalist (Grice 1957; Green 2007). We suggest that people are subject to an illusion that LLMs text productions are meaningful. A recent paper (Hicks et al., 2024) has suggested that the ‘utterances’ of LLMs are bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense since the LLMs are indifferent to their truth value. On a Frankfurtian process view, a machine with no intentions cannot be a bullshitter, for two reasons that we explain, while on a product view (Cohen 2002) only some LLM productions are bullshit. We argue that our illusion account has the benefits of Hicks et al’s bullshit view while avoiding these difficulties.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2025). Polysemy and lexical change. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Lexical semantic change often, perhaps always, involves a polysemous stage in which the old and new conventional senses co-exist (Bréal 1900[1897]: 139; Egg 2005; Traugott 2006). What does this imply about the lexical semantic representations of words, i.e. what is in the mental lexicon for each word? According to ‘one-representation’ accounts (Falkum 2015; Vicente 2024), at any given time each word has one unified lexical semantic representation underlying its conventional sense or senses. I argue that diachronic lexical narrowing raises difficult questions for such accounts. Diachronic narrowing seems to require addition of a feature, but narrowing can be to polysemy or monosemy. To account for polysemy the newly added feature has to be optional in use; to account for monosemy it has to be obligatory. Should we introduce such a distinction into our model? I will suggest that to do this is to give up the advantage in parsimony that one-representation accounts have over sense enumeration, lending support to the latter, at least for irregular polysemy.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2025). Polysemy and lexical change. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2025). LLMs: Intentions, illusion and bullshit. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Toh, Kevin (2025). The Scope of Legal Interpretation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2025). Radical pragmatics and the literal/figurative distinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  According to radical pragmatics the meaning of lexical words is routinely modulated in use (Carston & Powell 2006). Since many such modulated uses are non-figurative this casts doubt on the literal/figurative distinction (Wilson & Carston 2007): deviation from lexically encoded meaning is the norm, not an exception. But the literal/figurative distinction matters to accounts of communication because literal uses carry information that figurative ones don’t: if used literally “John is a gorilla” tells us about gorillas, but not when it is meant as a metaphor (Searle 1979). The distinction is also needed to state the plausible view that compositional linguistic semantics outputs a constraint on what proposition a sentence can be used to literally express (Collins 2017; Harris 2022). We propose a Non-Conformity View of Non-Literal Use: literal uses of a word are made with the intention to continue a ‘tradition’ of using a word; figurative uses are made with the intention to deviate from the tradition (Allott & Textor 2022). A recent paper argues the distinction is instead between quantitative and qualitative deviation from linguistically encoded senses, and provides arguments against our view (Genovesi & Hesse 2025). We evaluate their arguments and raise some problems for their view. This leads to discussion of lexical semantic representations and the (several) varieties of polysemy.

• Falkum, Ingrid Lossius & Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). How do we understand machines that talk to us? Communication with Large Language Models. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Why think polysemy exists? Revisiting traditional arguments in light of recent scepticism. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Moral ‘grammar’, the Linguistic Analogy and the competence/performance distinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Lexical Modulation and Legal Interpretation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Moral ‘grammar’, the Linguistic Analogy and the competence/performance distinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Speech act theory and the law. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2024). Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. I Chapelle, Carol A. (Red.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781405198431. doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1451.pub2. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Mathisen, Emma Krane; Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Ronderos, Camilo Rodriguez (2023). Processing single and extended metaphors and similes. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2023). Pragmatic development, sense conventions and the puzzle of non-literal uses. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2023). How do we understand what people mean when they do not say it directly? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2023). The inevitability of abstraction and the role of data: Why Chomsky was right about the philosophy of science. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Toh, Kevin (2023). The limits of legal interpretation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Textor, Mark (2023). Literal and metaphorical meaning: in search of a lost distinction. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). Review of Harris 2021 The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure. Journal of Pragmatics. ISSN 0378-2166. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2022.10.009. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Review of the second edition of a book about a dispute in the 1960s/70s between Chomsky and adherents of ‘generative semantics’ including George Lakoff, Robin Lakoff, James McCawley and Haj Ross. The new edition brings the story up to the present and reframes the conflict as one episode in a clash between two rival narratives about language. I argue that Harris is so convinced Lakoff and co are right about language and the mind that he is not a good guide to Chomsky's perspective. He completely misunderstands Chomsky's position on abstraction away from messy data. Chomsky doesn't advocate imposing “arbitrary” limits on the area of study to get a “more manageable data set” rather, that we focus on data that bear on questions that will admit of general, systematic explanation.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). How do we understand what people mean when they do not say it directly? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). How do we understand what people mean when they do not say it directly? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). Who is Noam Chomsky, is he still relevant, and if so why? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). Relevance theory and the cognitive principle of relevance. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2022). Abstraction in linguistics: Chomsky’s “Galilean” Explanatory Style. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Falkum, Ingrid Lossius (2022). Why do 5-year-olds have more difficulty with figurative use than younger children? Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2021). Legal interpretation and the forms of law. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Shaer, Benjamin (2021). Legal interpretation and the forms of law. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2021). What ‘grammatical’ and ‘semantic’ illusions don’t tell us about utterance interpretation, and some of what they do. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2021). Inference, encapsulation and utterance interpretation. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Lohndal, Terje (2021). The Pursuit of the Strong Minimalist Thesis. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2019). Introduction: ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’: what it does and does not say. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Knight, Chris & Smith, Neil (Red.), The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. UCL Press. ISSN 9781787355538. s. 1–4. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv9b2xdv.6. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.’ This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Knight, Chris & Smith, Neil (2019). Preface. I Allott, Nicholas Elwyn; Knight, Chris & Smith, Neil (Red.), The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. UCL Press. ISSN 9781787355538. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv9b2xdv.5. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam war period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.’ This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2019). Creativity and freedom: Nicholas Allott considers Chomsky at ninety. Philosophers' magazine. ISSN 1354-814X. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2015). Sperber, Dan (biographical entry). I Chapelle, C.A. (Red.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781405198431. doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1451. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2015). Wilson Deirdre and Relevance Theory. I Chapelle, C.A. (Red.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons. ISSN 9781405198431. doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1452. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2013). Kommunikasjon. I Godal, Anne Marit (Red.), Store norske leksikon (snl.no). Store norske leksikon AS. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Uchida, Hiroyuki (2010). Natural Language Indicative Conditionals Are Classical. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Natural language conditionals are often thought to be non-classical in the inferences that they support: classical patterns such as Antecedent Strengthening, Transitivity, and Weakening are thought to be invalid. This is often taken to show that the logic underlying human reasoning with conditionals is non-monotonic. This paper argues that indicative conditionals are in fact classical, i.e. that such inference patterns as Weakening and Antecedent Strengthening are valid. We argue that in the alleged counter-examples the apparent invalidity is a consequence of improperly failing to hold context constant while evaluating premises and conclusion. It is further shown that the apparent non-monotonicity of inferences with conditionals can be modelled with purely classical logic given a performance system which a) has a rule for recovering from derivation of contradiction and b) takes into account at each stage only the premises that are relevant. We believe that the extra apparatus that we have used effectively comes for free: any theory of utterance interpretation needs to account for the interplay of encoded content with context, and any theory of human reasoning system needs an account of how and when supplementary premises are brought in from world-knowledge and what the system does when a contradiction is derived.

• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn (2010). Response to Roberto de Almeida “The Psycholinguistic Case for Atomism: Causatives and Coercion”. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Allott, Nicholas Elwyn & Wilson, Deirdre (2008). Pragmatics and Rationality. School of Advanced Study, University of London. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957; 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our ‘finitary predicament’: we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b; Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers’ intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as if reasoning? Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is understood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a ‘hard way’ and a ‘quick way’ of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory’s view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the ‘quick way’ that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation.

Se alle arbeider i NVA