Publications

Abstract

In everyday joint activities (e.g. playing cards, preparing potatoes, collecting empty plates), participants often request others to pass, move or otherwise deploy objects. In order to get these objects to or from the requestee, requesters need to manipulate them, for example by holding them out, reaching for them, or placing them somewhere. As they perform these manual actions, requesters may or may not accompany them with language (e.g. Take this potato and cut it or Pass me your plate). This study shows that adding or omitting language in the design of a request is influenced in the first place by a criterion of recognition. When the requested action is projectable from the advancement of an activity, presenting a relevant object to the requestee is enough for them to understand what to do; when, on the other hand, the requested action is occasioned by a contingent development of the activity, requesters use language to specify what the requestee should do. This criterion operates alongside a perceptual criterion, to do with the affordances of the visual and auditory modality. When the requested action is projectable but the requestee is not visually attending to the requester’s manual behaviour, the requester can use just enough language to attract the requestee’s attention and secure immediate recipiency. This study contributes to a line of research concerned with the organisation of verbal and nonverbal resources for requesting. Focussing on situations in which language is not – or only minimally – used, it demonstrates the role played by visible bodily behaviour and by the structure of everyday activities in the formation and understanding of requests.

Abstract

Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year- olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both preposition al and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation –Welsh–to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-year-olds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.

Abstract

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.

Abstract

This chapter describes how speakers access words from the mental lexicon. Lexical access is a crucial
component in the process of transforming thoughts into speech. Some theories consider lexical access to be
strictly serial and discrete, while others view this process as being cascading or even interactive, i.e. the different
sub-levels influence each other. We discuss some of the evidence in favour and against these viewpoints, and
also present arguments regarding the ongoing debate on how words are selected for production. Another important
issue concerns the access to morphologically complex words such as derived and inflected words, as well as
compounds. Are these accessed as whole entities from the mental lexicon or are the parts assembled online? This
chapter tries to provide an answer to that question as well.

Abstract

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 22, pp. 14879–14882, © 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

The basic idea behind this task is to find out how languages encode basic shape distinctions such as dimensionality, axial geometry, relative size, etc. More specifically, we want to find out (i) which formal means are used cross linguistically to encode basic shape distinctions, and (ii) which are the semantic distinctions that are made in this domain. In languages with many shape-classifiers, these distinctions are encoded (at least partially) in classifiers. In other languages, positional verbs, descriptive modifiers, such as “flat”, “round”, or nouns such as “cube”, “ball”, etc. might be the preferred means. In this context, we also want to investigate what other “grammatical work” shapeencoding expressions possibly do in a given language, e.g. unitization of mass nouns, or anaphoric uses of shape-encoding classifiers, etc. This task further seeks to determine the role of shape-related parameters which underlie the design of objects in the semantics of the system under investigation.

Abstract

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.

Abstract

This project aims to investigate how speakers of various languages in indigenous cultures verbally reason about moral issues. The ways in which a solution for a moral problem is found, phrased and justified will be taken as the basis for researching reasoning processes that manifest themselves verbally in the speakers’ arguments put forward to solve a number of moral problems which will be presented to them in the form of unfinished story plots or scenarios that ask for a solution. The plots chosen attempt to present common problems in human society and human behaviour. They should function to elicit moral discussion and/or moral arguments in groups of consultants of at least three persons.

Abstract

Multimodal integration is a central characteristic of human cognition. However our understanding of the interaction between modalities and its influence on behaviour is still in its infancy. This paper examines the value of the Hub & Spoke framework (Plaut, 2002; Rogers et al., 2004; Dilkina et al., 2008; 2010) as a tool for exploring multimodal interaction in cognition. We present a Hub and Spoke model of language–vision information interaction and report the model’s ability to replicate a range of phonological, visual and semantic similarity word-level effects reported in the Visual World Paradigm (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus et al, 1995). The model provides an explicit connection between the percepts of language and the distribution of eye gaze and demonstrates the scope of the Hub-and-Spoke architectural framework by modelling new aspects of multimodal cognition.

Abstract

When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about their interlocutor (thereby generating confirmation or revision). But within these types there are a variety of ways that these information elicitors can be designed. The goal of this task is to examine how different languages seek and provide information, the extent to which syntax vs prosodic resources are used (e.g., in questions), and the extent to which the design of information seeking actions and their responses display a structural preference to promote social solidarity.

Abstract

We investigate how the lexical nature of weak definites influences the phenomenon of direct object scrambling in Dutch. Earlier experiments have indicated that weak definites are more resistant to scrambling than strong definites. We examine how the notion of weak definiteness used in this experimental work can be reduced to lexical connectedness. We explore four different ways of quantifying the relation between a direct object and the verb. Our results show that predictability of a verb given the object (verb cloze probability) provides the best fit to the weak/strong distinction used in the earlier experiments

Abstract

This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the published version: Van Staden, M., & Majid, A. (2006). Body colouring task. Language Sciences, 28(2-3), 158-161. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2005.11.004.

Abstract

Left dislocation is characterized by a sentence-initial element which is crossreferenced in the remainder of the sentence, and often set off by an intonation break. Because of these properties, left dislocation has been analyzed as an extraclausal phenomenon. Whether or not left dislocation can occur within subordinate clauses has been a matter of debate in the literature, but has never been checked against corpus data. This paper presents data from Avatime, a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Ghana, showing that left dislocation occurs within subordinate clauses in spontaneous discourse. This poses a problem for the extraclausal analysis of left dislocation. I show that this problem can best be solved by assuming that Avatime allows the embedding of units larger than a clause

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the repercussions of a conceptual orientation on two crucial parts of the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) linking algorithm, that is, semantic representation and constructional schemas. Firstly, it is argued that adopting FunGramKB’s notion of conceptual logical structure (CLS) over standard RRG logical structures (LSs) has numerous advantages since meaning has now access to conceptual knowledge and therefore a CLS provides a format that goes beyond those aspects that are syntactically visible. The second part introduces the notion of the grammaticon, the component where constructional schemas actually reside. RRG constructional schemas are analyzed within a conceptual framework like that provided in FunGramKB. In essence, it is shown that a conceptual orientation to the RRG linking system by the addition of CLSs enriches the semantic representations in it substantially

Abstract

Within the first few years of life, children acquire many of the building blocks of their native language. This not only involves knowledge about the linguistic structure of spoken language, but also knowledge about the way in which this linguistic structure surfaces in their speech input. In this chapter, we review how infants and toddlers cope with differences between speakers and accents. Within the context of milestones in early speech perception, we examine how voice and accent characteristics are integrated during language processing, looking closely at the advantages and disadvantages of speaker and accent familiarity, surface-level deviation between two utterances, variability in the input, and prior speaker exposure. We conclude that although deviation from the child’s standard can complicate speech perception early in life, young listeners can overcome these additional challenges. This suggests that early spoken language processing is flexible and adaptive to the listening situation at hand.

Abstract

In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.

Abstract

Although in many respects sign languages have a similar structure to that of spoken languages, the different modalities in which both types of languages are expressed cause differences in structure as well. One of the most striking differences between spoken and sign languages is the influence of the interface between grammar and PF on the surface form of utterances. Spoken language words and phrases are in general characterized by sequential strings of sounds, morphemes and words, while in sign languages we find that many phonemes, morphemes, and even words are expressed simultaneously. A linguistic model should be able to account for the structures that occur in both spoken and sign languages. In this paper, I will discuss the morphological/ morphosyntactic structure of signs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands, henceforth NGT), with special focus on the components ‘place of articulation’ and ‘handshape’. I will focus on their multiple functions in the grammar of NGT and argue that the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), which accounts for word formation in spoken languages, is also suited to account for the formation of structures in sign languages. First I will introduce the phonological and morphological structure of NGT signs. Then, I will briefly outline the major characteristics of the DM framework. Finally, I will account for signs that have the same surface form but have a different morphological structure by means of that framework.