Publications

Displaying 1 - 24 of 24
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    This study is about the principles for constructing polite speech. The core of it was published as Brown and Levinson (1978); here it is reissued with a new introduction which surveys the now considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests new directions for research. We describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languges and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated - politeness, broadly defined to include both polite friendliness and polite formality - and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of south India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England, supplemented by examples from other cultures. Of general interest is the point that underneath the apparent diversity of polite behaviour in different societies lie some general pan-human principles of social interaction, and the model of politeness provides a tool for analysing the quality of social relations in any society.
  • Coulson, S., & Lai, V. T. (Eds.). (2016). The metaphorical brain [Research topic]. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi:10.3389/978-2-88919-772-9.

    Abstract

    This Frontiers Special Issue will synthesize current findings on the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor, provide a forum for voicing novel perspectives, and promote new insights into the metaphorical brain.
  • Drozd, K., & Van de Weijer, J. (Eds.). (1997). Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1997. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., & Senft, G. (1987). Studienbrief Rituelle Kommunikation. Hagen: FernUniversität Gesamthochschule Hagen, Fachbereich Erziehungs- und Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Kommunikation - Wissen - Kultur.
  • Fernandez-Vest, M. M. J., & Van Valin Jr., R. D. (Eds.). (2016). Information structure and spoken language in a cross-linguistics perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Flores d'Arcais, G., & Lahiri, A. (1987). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.8 1987. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Holler, J., Kendrick, K. H., Casillas, M., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2016). Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi:10.3389/978-2-88919-825-2.

    Abstract

    The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language.

    Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time?

    The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain?

    Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes.

    All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields.
  • Kempen, G. (Ed.). (1987). Natural language generation: New results in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics. Dordrecht: Nijhoff.
  • Kempen, G. (Ed.). (1987). Natuurlijke taal en kunstmatige intelligentie: Taal tussen mens en machine. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.
  • Klein, W., & Musan, R. (Eds.). (1999). Das deutsche Perfekt [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (113).
  • Klein, W., & Zimmermann, H. (1971). Lemmatisierter Index zu Georg Trakl, Dichtungen. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.
  • Klein, W. (1971). Parsing: Studien zur maschinellen Satzanalyse mit Abhängigkeitsgrammatiken und Transformationsgrammatiken. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1997). Technologischer Wandel in den Philologien [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (106).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1987). Sprache und Ritual [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (65).
  • Kreuzer, H. (Ed.). (1971). Methodische Perspektiven [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (1/2).
  • Lutte, G., Sarti, S., & Kempen, G. (1971). Le moi idéal de l'adolescent: Recherche génétique, différentielle et culturelle dans sept pays dÉurope. Bruxelles: Dessart.
  • Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (Eds.). (2016). Speaking and Listening: Relationships Between Language Production and Comprehension [Special Issue]. Journal of Memory and Language, 89.
  • Monteiro, M., Rieger, S., Steinmüller, U., & Skiba, R. (1997). Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Fachsprache im Ingenieurstudium. Frankfurt am Main: IKO - Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation.
  • Rösler, D., & Skiba, R. (1987). Eine Datenbank für den Sprachunterricht: Ein Lehrmaterial-Steinbruch für Deutsch als Zweitsprache. Mainz: Werkmeister.
  • Schmid, M. S., Berends, S. M., Bergmann, C., Brouwer, S., Meulman, N., Seton, B., Sprenger, S., & Stowe, L. A. (2016). Designing research on bilingual development: Behavioral and neurolinguistic experiments. Berlin: Springer.
  • Senft, G. (Ed.). (1997). Referring to space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan languages. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2016). Excursies in de tijd: Episodes uit de geschiedenis van onze beschaving. Beilen: Pharos uitgevers.
  • Van Geenhoven, V., & Warner, N. (Eds.). (1999). Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1999. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D., & LaPolla, R. J. (1997). Syntax: Structure, meaning and function. Cambridge University Press.

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