Publications

Abstract

This book explores the thesis that in the Kwa languages of West Africa, aspect and modality are more central to the grammar of the verb than tense. Where tense marking has emerged it is invariably in the expression of the future, and therefore concerned with the impending actualization or potentiality of an event, hence with modality, rather than the purely temporal sequencing associated with tense. The primary grammatical contrasts are perfective versus imperfective. The main languages discussed are Akan, Dangme, Ewe, Ga and Tuwuli while Nzema-Ahanta, Likpe and Eastern Gbe are also mentioned. Knowledge about these languages has deepened considerably during the past decade or so and ideas about their structure have changed. The volume therefore presents novel analyses of grammatical forms like the so-called S-Aux-O-V-Other or “future” constructions, and provides empirical data for theorizing about aspect and modality. It should be of considerable interest to Africanist linguists, typologists, and creolists interested in substrate issues.

Abstract

Understanding how communicative goals impact and drive the learning process has been a long-standing issue in the field of language acquisition. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the social and pragmatic aspects of language learning: the way interaction shapes what and how children learn. In this volume, we bring together researchers working on interaction in different domains to present a cohesive overview of ongoing interactional research. The studies address the diversity of the environments children learn in; the role of para-linguistic information; the pragmatic forces driving language learning; and the way communicative pressures impact language use and change. Using observational, empirical and computational findings, this volume highlights the effect of interpersonal communication on what children hear and what they learn. This anthology is inspired by and dedicated to Prof. Eve V. Clark – a pioneer in all matters related to language acquisition – and a major force in establishing interaction and communication as crucial aspects of language learning.

Abstract

Artificial lexicons have previously been used to examine the time course of the learning and recognition of spoken words, the role of segment type in word learning, and the integration of context during spoken word recognition. However, in all of these studies the experimenter determined the frequency and order of the words to be learned. In three experiments, we asked whether adult learners choose to listen to novel words in a particular order based on their acoustic similarity. We use a new paradigm for learning an artificial lexicon in which the learner, rather than the experimenter, determines the order and frequency of exposure to items. We analyze both the proportions of selections and the temporal clustering of subjects' sampling of lexical neighborhoods during training as well as their performance during repeated testing phases (accuracy and reaction time) to determine the time course of learning these neighborhoods. In the first experiment, subjects sampled the high and low density neighborhoods randomly in early learning, and then over-sampled the high density neighborhood until test performance on both neighborhoods reached asymptote. A second experiment involved items similar to the first, but also neighborhoods that are not fully revealed at the start of the experiment. Subjects adjusted their training patterns to focus their selections on neighborhoods of increasing density was revealed; evidence of learning in the test phase was slower to emerge than in the first experiment, impaired by the presence of additional sets of items of varying density. Crucially, in both the first and second experiments there was no effect of dense vs. sparse neighborhood in the accuracy results, which is accounted for by subjects’ over-sampling of items from the dense neighborhood. The third experiment was identical in design to the second except for a second day of further training and testing on the same items. Testing at the beginning of the second day showed impaired, not improved, accuracy, except for the consistently dense items. Further training, however, improved accuracy for some items to above Day 1 levels. Overall, these results provide a new window on the time-course of learning an artificial lexicon and the role that learners’ implicit preferences, stemming from their self-selected experience with the entire lexicon, play in learning highly confusable words.

Abstract

Several grammatical features in early Indo-European traditionally have not been understood. Although Latin, for example, was a nominative language, a number of its inherited characteristics do not fit that typology and are difficult to account for, such as stative mihi est constructions to express possession, impersonal verbs, or absolute constructions. With time these archaic features have been replaced by transitive structures (e.g. possessive ‘have’). This book presents an extensive comparative and historical analysis of archaic features in early Indo-European languages and their gradual replacement in the history of Latin and early Romance, showing that the new structures feature transitive syntax and fit the patterns of a nominative language.

Abstract

Disfluency is a common characteristic of spontaneously produced speech. Disfluencies (e.g., silent pauses, filled pauses [uh’s and uhm’s], corrections, repetitions, etc.) occur in both native and non-native speech. There appears to be an apparent contradiction between claims from the evaluative and cognitive approach to fluency. On the one hand, the evaluative approach shows that non-native disfluencies have a negative effect on listeners’ subjective fluency impressions. On the other hand, the cognitive approach reports beneficial effects of native disfluencies on cognitive processes involved in speech comprehension, such as prediction and attention.

This dissertation aims to resolve this apparent contradiction by combining the evaluative and cognitive approach. The reported studies target both the evaluation (Chapters 2 and 3) and the processing of fluency (Chapters 4 and 5) in native and non-native speech. Thus, it provides an integrative account of native and non-native fluency perception, informative to both language testing practice and cognitive psycholinguists. The proposed account of fluency perception testifies to the notion that speech performance matters: communication through spoken language does not only depend on what is said, but also on how it is said and by whom.

Abstract

First published in 1973, this important work was the first systematic attempt to apply theoretical and methodological tools developed in America to the acquisition of a language other than English. Dr Bowerman presents and analyses data from a longitudinal investigation of the early syntactic development of two Finnish children, and compares their speech at two stages of development with that of American, Samoan and Luo children. The four language families (Finno-Ugric, Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian and Nilotic respectively) with very different structures, and this is the first systematic comparison of the acquisition of several types of native language within a common analysis. Similarities in the linguistic behaviour of children learning these four different languages are used to evaluate hypotheses about universals of language, and to generate new proposals.

Abstract

This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on verb argument structure and its role in language acquisition. Much contemporary work in linguistics and psychology assumes that argument structure is strongly constrained by a set of universal principles, and that these principles are innate, providing children with certain “bootstrapping” strategies that help them home in on basic aspects of the syntax and lexicon of their language. Drawing on a broad range of crosslinguistic data, this volume shows that languages are much more diverse in their argument structure properties than has been realized. This diversity raises challenges for many existing proposals about language acquisition, affects the range of solutions that can be considered plausible, and highlights new acquisition puzzles that until now have passed unnoticed. The volume is the outcome of an integrated research project and comprises chapters by both specialists in first language acquisition and field linguists working on a variety of lesser-known languages. The research draws on original fieldwork and on adult data, child data, or both from thirteen languages from nine different language families. Some chapters offer typological perspectives, examining the basic structures of a given language with language-learnability issues in mind. Other chapters investigate specific problems of language acquisition in one or more languages. Taken as a whole, the volume illustrates how detailed work on crosslinguistic variation is critical to the development of insightful theories of language acquisition.

Abstract

This special issue is the outcome of collaborative work on the relationship between language and landscape, carried out in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The contributions explore the linguistic categories of landscape terms and place names in nine genetically, typologically and geographically diverse languages, drawing on data from first-hand fieldwork. The present introductory article lays out the reasons why the domain of landscape is of central interest to the language sciences and beyond, and it outlines some of the major patterns that emerge from the cross-linguistic comparison which the papers invite. The data point to considerable variation within and across languages in how systems of landscape terms and place names are ontologised. This has important implications for practical applications from international law to modern navigation systems.

Abstract

This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANGX), held in Vienna on 14–17th April 2014. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterised by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, computer science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology and psychology. For this 10th conference, the proceedings will include a special perspectives section featuring prominent researchers reflecting on the history of the conference and its impact on the field of language evolution since the inaugural EVOLANG conference in 1996.

Abstract

Seeing someone breaking a stick into two, an English speaks typically describes with a verb break, but a Mandarin speaker has to say bai1-duan4 ‘bend-be.broken’, a verb
compound composed of two free verbs with each verb encoding one aspect of the breaking event. Verb compounding represents a typical and productive way to describe
events of motion (e.g., zou3-chu1 ‘walk-exit’), and state change (e.g., bai1-duan4 ‘bendbe.broken’), the most common types of events that children of all languages are exposed
to from an early age. Since languages vary in how events are linguistically encoded and categorized, the development of verb compounding provides a window to investigate the
acquisition of form and meaning mapping for highly productive but constrained constructions and the interaction between children’s linguistic development and cognitive
development. The theoretical analysis of verb compounds has been one of the central issues in Chinese linguistics, but the acquisition of this grammatical system has never
been systematically studied. This dissertation constitutes the first in-depth study of this topic. It analyzes speech data from two longitudinal corpora as well as the data collected from five experiments on production and comprehension of verb compounds from children in P. R. China. It provides a description of the developmental process and unravels the complex learning tasks from the perspective of language production, comprehension, event categorization, and the interface of semantics and syntax. In showing how first-language learners acquire the Mandarin-specific way of representing and encoding causal events and motion events, this study has significance both for studies of language acquisition and for studies of cognition and event construal.

Abstract

This thesis examines the semantic structures underlying the encoding of space in Chintang, a Kiranti (Sino-Tibetan) language of Nepal. It provides a short general introduction to the history of thinking and speaking about space as well as to the notions of deixis and transposition, and sketches a state-of-the-art theory for categorizing spatial semantics (Levinson 2003). Drawing on targeted elicitation with native speakers, the empirical part then relates linguistic items of Chintang to the theoretical framework, with a focus on the nominal domain. After an analysis of deictic, topological, intrinsic and absolute spatial relations and their reflections in the language, the investigation concludes by comparing sets of Chintang deictics to those found in neighbouring Belhare (Bickel 2001). Despite striking formal resemblances, the semantic differences found indicate that even across closely related languages, meaning does not generalize easily.

Abstract

Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Etnolinguïstiek, in het bijzonder die van Zuid-Oost Azië, aan de Faculteit der Letteren van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op woensdag 4 november 2009 door prof. dr. N.J. Enfield

Abstract

What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts. A biased transmission model provides a basis for understanding why certain things and not others are likely to develop, spread, and stick in languages. Because bits of language are always parts of systems, we also need to show how it is that items of knowledge and behavior become structured wholes. The book argues that to achieve this, we need to see how causal processes apply in multiple frames or 'time scales' simultaneously, and we need to understand and address each and all of these frames in our work on language. This forces us to confront implications that are not always comfortable: for example, that "a language" is not a real thing but a convenient fiction, that language-internal and language-external processes have a lot in common, and that tree diagrams are poor conceptual tools for understanding the history of languages. By exploring avenues for clear solutions to these problems, this book suggests a conceptual framework for ultimately explaining, in causal terms, what languages are like and why they are like that.

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afrodescendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America.

Abstract

Background Stroke-induced aphasia is associated with adverse effects on quality of life and the ability to return to work. However, the predictors of recovery are still poorly understood. Anatomical variability of the arcuate fasciculus, connecting Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, has been reported in the healthy population using diffusion tensor imaging tractography. In about 40% of the population the arcuate fasciculus is bilateral and this pattern is advantageous for certain language related functions, such as auditory verbal learning (Catani et al. 2007). Methods In this prospective longitudinal study, anatomical predictors of post-stroke aphasia recovery were investigated using diffusion tractography and arterial spin labelling. Patients An 18-subject strong aphasia cohort with first-ever unilateral left hemispheric middle cerebral artery infarcts underwent post stroke language (mean 5±5 days) and neuroimaging (mean 10±6 days) assessments and neuropsychological follow-up at six months. Ten of these patients were available for reassessment one year after symptom onset. Aphasia was assessed with the Western Aphasia Battery, which provides a global measure of severity (Aphasia Quotient, AQ). Results Better recover from aphasia was observed in patients with a right arcuate fasciculus [beta=.730, t(2.732), p=.020] (tractography) and increased fractional anisotropy in the right hemisphere (p<0.05) (Tract-based spatial statistics). Further, an increase in left hemisphere perfusion was observed after one year (p<0.01) (perfusion). Lesion analysis identified maximal overlay in the periinsular white matter (WM). Lesion-symptom mapping identified damage to periinsular structure as predictive for overall aphasia severity and damage to frontal lobe white matter as predictive of repetition deficits. Conclusion These findings suggest an important role for the right hemisphere language network in recovery from aphasia after left hemispheric stroke.

Abstract

Researchers have long avoided neurophysiological experiments of overt speech production due to the suspicion that artifacts caused by muscle activity may lead to a bad signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. However, the need to actually produce speech may influence earlier processing and qualitatively change speech production processes and what we can infer from neurophysiological measures thereof. Recently, however, overt speech has been successfully investigated using EEG, MEG, and fMRI. The aim of this Research Topic is to draw together recent research on the neurophysiological basis of language production, with the aim of developing and extending theoretical accounts of the language production process. In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Language Sciences, we invite both experimental and review papers, as well as those about the latest methods in acquisition and analysis of overt language production data. All aspects of language production are welcome: i.e., from conceptualization to articulation during native as well as multilingual language production. Focus should be placed on using the neurophysiological data to inform questions about the processing stages of language production. In addition, emphasis should be placed on the extent to which the identified components of the electrophysiological signal (e.g., ERP/ERF, neuronal oscillations, etc.), brain areas or networks are related to language comprehension and other cognitive domains. By bringing together electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence on language production mechanisms, a more complete picture of the locus of language production processes and their temporal and neurophysiological signatures will emerge.

Abstract

Gestures are prevalent in communication and tightly linked to language and speech. As such they can shed important light on issues of language development across the lifespan. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture Volume 8:2 (2008), brings together studies from different disciplines that examine language development in children and adults from varying perspectives. It provides a review of common theoretical and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically and atypically developing children and in second language learners, what gestures reveal about discourse, and how all languages that adult second language speakers know can influence each other. The papers exemplify a vibrant new field of study with relevance for multiple disciplines.

Abstract

To understand the nature of language learning, the factors that influence it, and the mechanisms that govern it, it is crucial to study the very earliest stages of language learning. This volume provides a state-of-the art overview of what we know about the cognitive and neurobiological aspects of the adult capacity for language learning. It brings together studies from several fields that examine learning from multiple perspectives using various methods. The papers examine learning after anything from a few minutes to months of language exposure; they target the learning of both artificial and natural languages, involve both explicit and implicit learning, and cover linguistic domains ranging from phonology and semantics to morphosyntax. The findings will inform and extend further studies of language learning in multiple disciplines.

Abstract

Rede uitgesproken op 12 mei 2000 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de neuropsychologie aan de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen KUN.

Abstract

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. The articles in this volume give an overview of what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language. Starting with an overview of the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense and aspect, the research presented in this volume addresses the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought, the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events, the development of temporal concepts, time perception, the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory, and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning. The psychological and neurobiological findings presented here will provide important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition.

Abstract

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. The articles in this volume give an overview of what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language. Starting with an overview of the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense and aspect, the research presented in this volume addresses the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought, the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events, the development of temporal concepts, time perception, the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory, and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning. The psychological and neurobiological findings presented here will provide important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition.

Abstract

Contains: Vol. 1 An introduction to the theory of formal languages and automata Vol. 2 Applications in linguistic theory Vol. 3 Psycholinguistic applications

Abstract

Chinese translation of the 2003 publication.

Abstract

The scope of this volume reflects how wide-ranging Karl Franklin’s research interests have been. He is not only a linguist, but also an anthropologist, sociolinguist, and creolist. The contributors who honor Karl in this volume represent an international community of scholars who have researched languages and cultures across the globe and through history. The volume has three sections, each with contributions listed alphabetically by the authors’ names. Studies in Language consists of eighteen papers in phonology, grammar, semantics, dialectology, lexicography, and speech acts. These papers reflect diverse theories. Studies in Culture has five studies relating to cultures of Papua New Guinea. Interdisciplinary Studies concerns matters relating to translation.

Abstract

The annual conference of the European Second Language Association provides an opportunity for the presentation of second language research with a genuinely European flavour. The theoretical perspectives adopted are wide-ranging and may fall within traditions overlooked elsewhere. Moreover, the studies presented are largely multi-lingual and cross-cultural, as befits the make-up of modern-day Europe. At the same time, the work demonstrates sophisticated awareness of scholarly insights from around the world. The EUROSLA yearbook presents a selection each year of the very best research from the annual conference. Submissions are reviewed and professionally edited, and only those of the highest quality are selected. Contributions are in English.

Abstract

Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed critiques of two nativist theories of wh- question acquisition, and third, by presenting a preliminary account of young children's wh-question development from a constructivist perspective. Analyses of the data from twelve 2 to 3 year old children collected over a year and of data from an older child (Adam from the Brown corpus, 1973) are described and three conclusions are drawn. First it is argued that the data suggest that children's knowledge of how to form wh-questions builds up gradually as they learn how to combine lexical items such as wh-words and auxiliaries in specific ways. Second, it is concluded that two nativist theories of grammatical development (Radford, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) fail to account successfully for the wh-question data produced by the children. Third, it is asserted that the lexically-specific nature of children's early wh-questions is compatible with a lexical constructivist view of development, which proposes that the language learning mechanism learns by picking up high frequency lexical patterns from the input. The implications of these conclusions for theories of language development and future research are discussed.

Abstract

Taking an accessible and cross-linguistic approach, Understanding Child Language Acquisition introduces readers to the most important research on child language acquisition over the last fifty years, as well as to some of the most influential theories in the field. Rather than just describing what children can do at different ages, Rowland explains why these research findings are important and what they tell us about how children acquire language. Key features include: Cross-linguistic analysis of how language acquisition differs between languages A chapter on how multilingual children acquire several languages at once Exercises to test comprehension Chapters organised around key questions that discuss the critical issues posed by researchers in the field, with summaries at the end Further reading suggestions to broaden understanding of the subject With its particular focus on outlining key similarities and differences across languages and what this cross-linguistic variation means for our ideas about language acquisition, Understanding Child Language Acquisition forms a comprehensive introduction to the subject for students of linguistics, psychology, and speech and language pathology. Students and instructors will benefit from the comprehensive companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/rowland) that includes a students’ section featuring interactive comprehension exercises, extension activities, chapter recaps and answers to the exercises within the book. Material for instructors includes sample essay questions, answers to the extension activities for students and PowerPoint slides including all the figures from the book

Abstract

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.

Abstract

German Version of (1996) Classificatory particles in Kilivila. New York: Oxford University Press

Abstract

The contributions to this book concern the documentation, archiving and revitalization of endangered language materials. The anthology focuses mainly on endangered Oceanic languages, with articles on Vanuatu by Darrell Tryon and the Marquesas by Gabriele Cablitz, on situations of loss and gain by Ingjerd Hoem and on the Kilivila language of the Trobriands by the editor. Nick Thieberger, Peter Wittenburg and Paul Trilsbeek, and David Blundell and colleagues write about aspects of linguistic archiving. Under the rubric of revitalization, Margaret Florey and Michael Ewing write about Maluku, Jakelin Troy and Michael Walsh about Australian Aboriginal languages in southeastern Australia, whilst three articles, by Sophie Nock, Diana Johnson and Winifred Crombie concern the revitalization of Maori.