Publications

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Chinese translation of the 2003 publication.

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This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts, since it would take a long questionnaire to fully explore this; 2. A suggestion about how to collect gestural data that might show us to what extent the spatial and temporal domains, have a psychological continuity. This is really the goal − but you need to do the linguistic work first or in addition. The goal of this task is to explore the extent to which time is conceptualised on a spatial basis.

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This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2009 version:
https://doi.org/10.17617/2.883570

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In this task we aim to find what the best exemplars or “focal colours” of each basic colour term is in our field languages. This is an important part of the evidence we need in order to understand the colour data collected using 'The Language of Vision I: Colour'. This task consists of an experiment where participants pick out the best exemplar for the colour terms in their language. The goal is to establish language specific focal colours.

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This thesis addressed the spoken production of complex numerals for time and space. The production of complex numerical expressions like those involved in telling time (e.g., 'quarter to four') or producing house numbers (e.g., 'two hundred forty-five') has been almost completely ignored. Yet, adult speakers produce such expressions on a regular basis in everyday communication. Thus, no theory on numerical cognition or speech production is complete without an account of the production of multi-morphemic utterances such as complex numeral expressions. The main question of this thesis is which particular speech planning levels are involved in the naming and reading of complex numerals for time and space. More specifically, this issue was investigated by examining different modes of response (clock times versus house numbers), alternative input formats (Arabic digit versus alphabetic format; analog versus digital clock displays), and different expression types (relative 'quarter to four' versus absolute 'three forty-five' time expressions).

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Wider knowledge of New Guinea's Bird's Head Peninsula, home to an indigenous population of 114,000 people who share more than twenty languages, was recently gained through an extensive interdisciplinary research project involving anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, demographers, geologists, linguists, and specialists in public administration. Analyzing the findings of the project, this book provides a systematic comparison with earlier studies, addressing the geological past, the latest archaeological evidence of early human habitation (dating back at least 26,000 years), and the region's diversity of languages and cultures. The peninsula is an important transitional area between Southeast Asia and Oceania, and this book provides valuable new insights for specialists in both the social and natural sciences into processes of state formation and globalization in the Asia-Pacific zone.

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Effekte linguisticher Typologie auf die Sprach-entwicklung. In G. Plehn (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max-Planck Gesellsch

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The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

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Typologies are critical tools for linguists, but typologies, like grammars, are known to leak. This book addresses the question of typological overlap from the perspective of a single language. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, a language of southern Mexico, change events are expressed with three types of predicates, and each predicate type corresponds to a different language type in the well-known typology of lexicalization patterns established by Talmy and elaborated by others. O’Connor evaluates the predictive powers of the typology by examining the consequences of each predicate type in a variety of contexts, using data from narrative discourse, stimulus response, and elicitation. This is the first de­tailed look at the lexical and grammatical resources of the verbal system in Chontal and their relation to semantics of change. The analysis of how and why Chontal speakers choose among these verbal resources to achieve particular communicative and social goals serves both as a documentation of an endangered language and a theoretical contribution towards a typology of language use.

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Our bodily experiences play an important role in the way that we think and speak. Abstract language is, however, difficult to reconcile with this body-centred view, unless we appreciate the role metaphors play. To explore the role of the senses across semantic domains, we focus on perception metaphors, and examine their realisation across diverse languages, methods, and approaches. To what extent do mappings in perception metaphor adhere to predictions based on our biological propensities; and to what extent is there space for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation? We find that while some metaphors have widespread commonality, there is more diversity attested than should be comfortable for universalist accounts.

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Language production involves the retrieval of information from memory, the planning of an articulatory program, and executive control and self-monitoring. These processes can be related to the domains of long-term memory, motor control, and executive control. Here, we argue that studying neuronal oscillations provides an important opportunity to understand how general neuronal computational principles support language production, also helping elucidate relationships between language and other domains of cognition. For each relevant domain, we provide a brief review of the findings in the literature with respect to neuronal oscillations. Then, we show how similar patterns are found in the domain of language production, both through review of previous literature and novel findings. We conclude that neurophysiological mechanisms, as reflected in modulations of neuronal oscillations, may act as a fundamental basis for bringing together and enriching the fields of language and cognition.

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Cognates and interlingual homographs are words that exist in multiple languages. Cognates, like “wolf” in Dutch and English, also carry the same meaning. Interlingual homographs do not: the word “angel” in English refers to a spiritual being, but in Dutch to the sting of a bee. The six experiments included in this thesis examined how these words are represented in the bilingual mental lexicon. Experiment 1 and 2 investigated the issue of task effects on the processing of cognates. Bilinguals often process cognates more quickly than single-language control words (like “carrot”, which exists in English but not Dutch). These experiments showed that the size of this cognate facilitation effect depends on the other types of stimuli included in the task. These task effects were most likely due to response competition, indicating that cognates are subject to processes of facilitation and inhibition both within the lexicon and at the level of decision making. Experiment 3 and 4 examined whether seeing a cognate or interlingual homograph in one’s native language affects subsequent processing in one’s second language. This method was used to determine whether non-identical cognates share a form representation. These experiments were inconclusive: they revealed no effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. Most likely this was because a lexical decision task was used to probe an effect that is largely semantic in nature. Given these caveats to using lexical decision tasks, two final experiments used a semantic relatedness task instead. Both experiments revealed evidence for an interlingual homograph inhibition effect but no cognate facilitation effect. Furthermore, the second experiment found evidence for a small effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. After comparing these findings to the monolingual literature on semantic ambiguity resolution, this thesis concludes that it is necessary to explore the viability of a distributed connectionist account of the bilingual mental lexicon.

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Although humans are the ultimate “natural language generators”, the area of psycholinguistic modeling has been somewhat underrepresented in recent approaches to Natural Language Generation in computer science. To draw attention to the area and illustrate its potential relevance to Natural Language Generation, I provide an overview of recent work on psycholinguistic modeling of language production together with some key empirical findings, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and their historical roots. The techniques include analyses of speech-error corpora, chronometric analyses, eyetracking, and neuroimaging.
The overview is built around the issue of cognitive control in natural language generation, concentrating on the production of single words, which is an essential ingredient of the generation of larger utterances. Most of the work exploited the fact that human speakers are good but not perfect at resisting temptation, which has provided some critical clues about the nature of the underlying system.

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This paper deals with the Shawi nominalizing suffixes -su’~-ru’~-nu’ ‘general nominalizer’, -napi/-te’/-tun‘performer/agent nominalizer’, -pi’‘patient nominalizer’, and -nan ‘instrument nominalizer’. The goal of this article is to provide a description of nominalization in Shawi. Throughout this paper I apply the Generalized Scale Model (GSM) (Malchukov, 2006) to Shawi verbal nominalizations, with the intention of presenting a formal representation that will provide a basis for future areal and typological studies of nominalization. In addition, I dialogue with Shibatani’s model to see how the loss or gain of categories correlates with the lexical or grammatical nature of nominalizations. strong nominalization in Shawi correlates with lexical nominalization, whereas weak nominalizations correlate with grammatical nominalization. A typology which takes into account the productivity of the nominalizers is also discussed.

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Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker to continue with his/her next turn, they do not add any new information to the discourse of the conversation. The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behaviour during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalisation. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

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The study endeavors a detailed and systematic classification of linguistic simultaneity expressions. Further, it aims at a well described survey of how simultaneity is expressed by native speakers in their own language. On the basis of real production data the book answers the questions of how native speakers express temporal simultaneity in general, and how learners at different levels of proficiency deal with this situation under experimental test conditions. Furthermore, the results of this study shed new light on our understanding of aspect in general, and on its acquisition by adult learners.

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This volume of new work explores the nature of verb serialisation in a range of languages from the Pacific region – both Austronesian and non-Austronesian. Serial verbs can be described linguistically as a sequence of verbs which behave as a single complex predicate. A particular focus of this book is the detailed examination given by most authors to the relationship of such uniclausal linguistic structures with the real world notion of eventhood. The book also makes a valuable addition to the description and analysis of serial verb constructions from the Pacific, a region which has generally been under-represented in cross-linguistic discussions of verb serialisation.

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The paper describes how the documentation of a popular song of the adolescents of Tauwema in 1982 lead to the collection of the myth of Imdeduya and Yolina, one of the most important myths of the Trobriand Islands. When I returned to my fieldsite in 1989 Tokunupei, one of my best consultants in Tauwema, remembered my interest in the myth and provided me with further information on this topic. Tokunupei's teachings open up an important access to Trobriand eschatology.

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When we communicate, we communicate in a certain context, and this context shapes our utterances. Natural languages are context-bound and deixis 'concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalise features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance' (Stephen Levinson). The systems of deixis and demonstratives in the Oceanic languages represented in the contributions to this volume illustrate the fascinating complexity of spatial reference in these languages. Some of the studies presented here highlight social aspects of deictic reference illustrating de Leon's point that 'reference is a collaborative task' . It is hoped that this anthology will contribute to a better understanding of this area and provoke further studies in this extremely interesting, though still rather underdeveloped, research area.

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Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.

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This book addresses the fundamental linguistic question of how the perceived world is expressed through systems of nominal classification that are grammatically encoded in various languages. A team of leading international scholars reviews the whole spectrum of nominal classification, from gender systems through to numeral classifiers, providing cutting-edge theoretical interpretations and empirical case studies based on a wide range of languages. The volume presents ideas about the problems of classification, advances theory by proposing typological categories and clarifies the interface between anthropological and grammatical work. Focusing on systems that have a conceptual-semantic basis, the contributors reflect and represent approaches in nominal classification research. This invaluable reference work will appeal to linguists, anthropologists and psychologists alike, as well as specialists in languages as diverse as Australian, Amazonian, Mayan and Japanese.

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Die Sprachwissenschaft hat den Begriff und das Konzept ›Rituelle Kommunikation‹ von der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung übernommen. Humanethologen unterscheiden eine Reihe von sogenannten ›Ausdrucksbewegungen‹, die in der Mimik, der Gestik, der Personaldistanz (Proxemik) und der Körperhaltung (Kinesik) zum Ausdruck kommen. Viele dieser Ausdrucksbewegungen haben sich zu spezifischen Signalen entwickelt. Ethologen definieren Ritualisierung als Veränderung von Verhaltensweisen im Dienst der Signalbildung. Die zu Signalen ritualisierten Verhaltensweisen sind Rituale. Im Prinzip kann jede Verhaltensweise zu einem Signal werden, entweder im Laufe der Evolution oder durch Konventionen, die in einer bestimmten Gemeinschaft gültig sind, die solche Signale kulturell entwickelt hat und die von ihren Mitgliedern tradiert und gelernt werden.

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This article places the debate between Chomskyan autonomous syntax and Generative Semantics in the context of the first beginnings of syntactic theory set out in Perì suntáxeõs ('On syntax') by Apollonius Dyscolus (second century CE). It shows that, theoretically speaking, the Apollonian concept of syntax implied an algorithmically organized system of composition rules with lexico-semantic, not a sound-based, input, unlike Apollonius's strictly sound-based postulated rule systems for the composition of phonemes into syllables and of syllables into words. This meaning-based notion of syntax persisted essentially unchanged (though refined by Sanctius during the sixteenth century) until the 1930s, when structuralism began to take the notion of algorithmically organized rule systems for the generation of sentences seriously. This meant a break with the Apollonian meaning-based approach to syntax. The Generative Semantics movement, which arose during the 1960s but was nipped in the bud, implied a return to the tradition, though with much improved formal underpinnings.