The newly discovered gubernatorial edict from Laodicea, in which the proconsul of Asia (likely Marcus Ostorius? Scapula) issued a series of orders, contains references to precedents from his predecessors, including edicts from the proconsul Cornelius Tacitus and his deputy Saenius Sabinus, and a letter from the proconsul Vicirius Martialis. Why did Martialis issue a letter instead of an edict? What was the function of Martialis' correspondence, and what did it achieve? In Oliver, Greek Constitutions, pp. 20-21, Augustus and later principates continued to use written proclamations in edict form as a way of communicating with provincials, a tradition practiced by Roman magistrates in the Republic. We also learn that edicts were essentially "open letters to whom it might concern," and were not unlike epistles in terms of preparation, at times not carefully distinguished by the secretaries that prepared them. If there were edict and epistolary forms, it is not immediately clear how they differed in function and perception, both from the perspective of the senders and their intended recipients. Gubernatorial communications have received treatment by Meyer-Zweiffelhoffer (2002), Kokkinia (2003, 2004) Lavan (2013). Kokkinia states that there are approximately 90 examples, and they point to the pattern in which most governors were acting upon local requests to interevene (Kokkinia 2004: 49). If the purpose was to intervene, at what point will an epistle be no longer enough, but an edict will? This paper will first use Paulus Fabius Maximus' letter-edict to discuss a classical case in which an attempt to write a letter took a sinister turn towards an edict. We will then examine a range of cases including those from the Opramoas dossier to consider the various epistolary approaches that the Roman governors took in responding to local situations. The paper will use this assembled corpus to interpret the Vicirius Martialis' letter from both its immediate communicative context and also the general tradition in official correspondence. This paper also touches on the broader question of why governors need to write letters, when they could have just issued edicts, and what letters can do that edicts could not.
The visual world paradigm (VWP) is a widely used tool in psycholinguistics to study the time course of spoken language processing (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus et al., 1995). In this paradigm, eye movements are tracked while participants listen to spoken language and view visual scenes, providing precise temporal information about the processing of words and sentences. As acoustic input unfolds, comprehenders’ focus of attention on particular entities in the mental representations of spoken language changes, and their visual attention also shifts accordingly (Altmann & Mirkovi, 2009). Such allocation of attention can be manifested in eye movements as overt behavioral data.
Linking hypotheses of this field link eye movements in visual contexts with the mental representations of linguistic input. The coordinated interplay account proposed by Knoeferle and Crocker (2006, 2007) defines three phases in visually situated spoken language comprehension: integrating new words, searching for referents in visual contexts and matching linguistic input with objects and actions in the visual contexts. These three phases may take place sequentially or overlap with one another in time. An alternative linking hypothesis raised by Altmann and Mirkovi (2009), however, suggested that the processes of interpreting linguistic input and comprehending visual scenes are intertwined, as linguistic meanings and non-linguistic information (e.g., visual information and world knowledge) are stored in one unitary system and jointly contribute to the dynamic representation of situations. Salverda et al.’s (2011) goal-based linking hypothesis introduces a task-goal dimension into the theoretical model. That is, the goal of the task also affects language processing: Visual objects that are directly related to this goal would attract more attention; and additional tasks such as clicking or moving objects contribute to the goal structure of the task and directly influence eye movements.
The assets visual world paradigm has brought to the field—(i) the possibility to include a visual dimension in linguistic processing; (ii) a fine-grained time course measure of eye movements in real-time language comprehension—have greatly expanded the range of experimental designs for language studies. As the VWP relies primarily on listening tasks and does not require subjects to have full literacy skills in reading, it can be applied to examine language processing in young children, second language learners, and people with specific language impairments.
Dependent variables in a VWP experiment include fixation proportions, target ratio, latency of saccades, etc. Factors such as areas of interest, groups and experimental conditions can be included as independent variables. To make use of the fine-grained time-course data provided by the VWP, including a temporal dimension to the analytical models is crucial. While traditional analyses evaluate fixation/saccade differences between conditions during a time window (using t-test, ANOVA, and mixed-effect models), the divergent point analysis and cluster‑based permutation analysis are informative in detecting and comparing the emergence time of effects (Ito & Knoeferle, 2022). The growth-curve analysis, on the other hand, models the changes of looks to an interest area over time (Mirman, 2008).
Studies fueled by the VWP have revealed that language processing is incremental or even predictive, in contrast to the findings of earlier studies supporting delayed integration of language. At the early stage of word recognition, phonological cohorts compete with the target, and listeners may use phonetic information to anticipate upcoming words. The processing of semantic information in verb-argument and classifier-noun structures, for example, is highly incremental or anticipatory. Discourse processing, including referential processing and the comprehension of coherence relations, is also found to be immediate. In addition, the VWP has shown that the syntactic and pragmatic processing is in accordance with the constraint-based account (Trueswell et al., 1994)—multiple types of information including syntactic structures and pragmatic implicatures, form constraints to language processing at the very early stage, alongside other constraints such as contextual features, visual information, world knowledge, etc.
The VWP is limited in the sense that it cannot provide data on processing time and therefore cannot answer questions related to processing difficulties in language comprehension. Moreover, the VWP experiments can only present a limited number of static objects in visual space, which also differs from the complex visual environment of natural conversation. In experimental settings where only a limited number of objects are presented, listeners may anticipate linguistic input in advance and look strategically at certain objects (Henderson & Ferreira, 2004; see counter-argument in Dahan & Tanenhaus, 2004).
Developments of the VWP are driven by both theoretical and technological advances. For future studies, investigating the role of task-goal in real-time language processing situated in visual contexts is important. Technological innovations such as virtual reality (VR) create comparatively natural communication scenarios while maintaining precise experimental control, largely improving the ecological validity of eye-tracking experiments using the VWP.