Stephen C. Levinson

Publications

Displaying 1 - 14 of 14
  • Levinson, S. C. (1995). 'Logical' Connectives in Natural Language: A First Questionnaire. In D. Wilkins (Ed.), Extensions of space and beyond: manual for field elicitation for the 1995 field season (pp. 61-69). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3513476.

    Abstract

    It has been hypothesised that human reasoning has a non-linguistic foundation, but is nevertheless influenced by the formal means available in a language. For example, Western logic is transparently related to European sentential connectives (e.g., and, if … then, or, not), some of which cannot be unambiguously expressed in other languages. The questionnaire explores reasoning tools and practices through investigating translation equivalents of English sentential connectives and collecting examples of “reasoned arguments”.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1995). Interactional biases in human thinking. In E. N. Goody (Ed.), Social intelligence and interaction (pp. 221-260). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1995). Three levels of meaning. In F. Palmer (Ed.), Grammar and meaning: Essays in honour of Sir John Lyons (pp. 90-115). Cambridge University Press.
  • Wilkins, D., Pederson, E., & Levinson, S. C. (1995). Background questions for the "enter"/"exit" research. In D. Wilkins (Ed.), Extensions of space and beyond: manual for field elicitation for the 1995 field season (pp. 14-16). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3003935.

    Abstract

    How do languages encode different kinds of movement, and what features do people pay attention to when describing motion events? This document outlines topics concerning the investigation of “enter” and “exit” events. It helps contextualise research tasks that examine this domain (see 'Motion Elicitation' and 'Enter/Exit animation') and gives some pointers about what other questions can be explored.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). 'Uphill' and 'downhill' in Tzeltal. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 3(1), 46-74. doi:10.1525/jlin.1993.3.1.46.

    Abstract

    In the face of the prevailing assumption among cognitive scientists that human spatial cognition is essentially egocentric, with objects located in reference to the orientation of ego's own body (hence left/right, up/down, and front/back oppositions), the Mayan language Tzeltal provides a telling counterexample. This article examines a set of conceptual oppositions in Tzeltal, uphill/downhill/across, that provides an absolute system of coordinates with respect to which the location of objects and their trajectories on both micro and macro scales are routinely described.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: Explorations in Mayan cognition. Working Paper 24. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Brown, P. (1993). Background to "Immanuel Kant among the Tenejapans". Anthropology Newsletter, 34(3), 22-23. doi:10.1111/an.1993.34.3.22.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1993). La Pragmatica [Italian translation of Pragmatics]. Bologna: Il Mulino.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1993). Raumkonzeptionen mit absoluten Systemen. In Max Planck Gesellschaft Jahrbuch 1993 (pp. 297-299).
  • Gumperz, J. J., & Levinson, S. C. (1991). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Current Anthropology, 32(5), 613-623. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743696.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1991). Deixis. In W. Bright (Ed.), Oxford international encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 343-344). Oxford University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Senft, G. (1991). Forschungsgruppe für Kognitive Anthropologie - Eine neue Forschungsgruppe in der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Linguistische Berichte, 133, 244-246.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Senft, G. (1991). Research group for cognitive anthropology - A new research group of the Max Planck Society. Cognitive Linguistics, 2, 311-312.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1991). Pragmatic reduction of the Binding Conditions revisited. Journal of Linguistics, 27, 107-161. doi:10.1017/S0022226700012433.

    Abstract

    In an earlier article (Levinson, 1987b), I raised the possibility that a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions; the briefest of outlines is given in Section 2.1 below but the argumentation will be found in the earlier article. In this article I want, first, to show how that account might be further justified and extended, but then to introduce a radical alternative. This alternative uses the same pragmatic framework, but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. Finally, I shall attempt to show that both accounts can be combined by taking a diachronic perspective. The attraction of the combined account is that, suddenly, many facts about long-range reflexives and their associated logophoricity fall into place.

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