Displaying 1 - 100 of 161
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Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. L., & Twomey, K. E. (2020). Introduction. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. E. Twomey (
Eds. ), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn (pp. 1-7). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.27.int. -
Ameka, F. K. (2007). Grammatical borrowing in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé). In Y. Matras, & J. Sakel (
Eds. ), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 107-122). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Ameka, F. K. (2017). The Uselessness of the Useful: Language Standardisation and Variation in Multilingual Context. In I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, & C. Percy (
Eds. ), Prescription and tradition in language: Establishing standards across the time and space (pp. 71-87). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. -
Amora, K. K., Garcia, R., & Gagarina, N. (2020). Tagalog adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: History, process and preliminary results. In N. Gagarina, & J. Lindgren (
Eds. ), New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised (pp. 221-233).Abstract
This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines,
specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language.
Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and
adults (N=27) are presented. The results showed that Story Structure is similar across the
two languages and that it develops significantly with age. -
Baayen, R. H. (2007). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In G. Jarema, & G. Libben (
Eds. ), The mental lexicon: Core perspectives (pp. 81-104). Amsterdam: Elsevier. -
Barbiers, S., & Van Dooren, A. (2017). Modal Auxiliaries. In M. Everaert, & H. C. Van Riemsdijk (
Eds. ), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley.Abstract
In many languages modal auxiliaries such as English can, must, may, need, will, ought, want are ambiguous between two types of interpretations: epistemic and root interpretations. In the epistemic interpretation the modal expresses how likely it is that a proposition is true (for example, necessarily, possibly, probably true) while in the root interpretations the modal expresses the obligatoriness, permissibility, desirability, or possibility of a state or event. A central question in much syntactic research on modal auxiliaries has been whether this systematic semantic ambiguity corresponds to a syntactic distinction. A commonly accepted answer has been that in epistemic interpretations the modal verb is a monadic predicate while in root interpretations it is a dyadic predicate, typically a relation between a subject and an infinitival verb. This distinction between monadic and dyadic modal predicates has been modeled syntactically in various ways: (i) in terms of lexical argument structure, that is, as the distinction between raising and control verbs; (ii) in terms of different base positions in the array of functional heads making up the clausal spine, with epistemic modals being higher than root modals; (iii) in terms of a higher syntactic position for epistemically interpreted modals after raising at the level of semantic interpretation (LF raising); (iv) in terms of the nature of the complement of the modal. This chapter evaluates these proposals, drawing on data from, among others, English, Dutch, Icelandic, German, and Catalan and taking into account cross-linguistic differences in the modal systems. One important conclusion is that the alleged correspondence between the epistemic/root distinction and the raising/control distinction is too simple, as there are sentences with root interpretations but a raising syntax. The chapter ends with a list of questions for future research. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2020). Appositive compounds in dialectal and sociolinguistic varieties of French. In M. Maiden, & S. Wolfe (
Eds. ), Variation and change in Gallo-Romance (pp. 326-346). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2007). The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category? In E. Stark, E. Leiss, & W. Abraham (
Eds. ), Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence (pp. 103-139). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Temporale Relatoren im Hispano-Yukatekischen Sprachkontakt. In A. Koechert, & T. Stolz (
Eds. ), Convergencia e Individualidad - Las lenguas Mayas entre hispanización e indigenismo (pp. 195-241). Hannover, Germany: Verlag für Ethnologie. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Sententiale Topics im Yukatekischen. In Z. Dietmar (
Ed. ), Deskriptive Grammatik und allgemeiner Sprachvergleich (pp. 55-85). Tübingen, Germany: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag.Files private
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Boroditsky, L., Gaby, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Time in space. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 10 (pp. 59-80). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468721.Abstract
This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2008 version: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.492932Files private
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Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition [Reprint]. In V. Evans, B. K. Bergen, & J. Zinken (
Eds. ), The cognitive linguistic reader (pp. 849-879). London: Equinox Publishing.Abstract
Reprinted from Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 387-427). Cambridge: MIT Press. -
Bowerman, M. (2007). Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing topological spatial categories in first language acquisition. In M. Aurnague, M. Hickmann, & L. Vieu (
Eds. ), The categorization of spatial entities in language and cognition (pp. 177-203). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
Among children’s earliest spatial words are topological forms like ‘in’ and ‘on’. Although these forms name spatial relationships, they also presuppose a classification of ground objects into entities such as “containers” and “surfaces”; hence their relevance for a volume on “spatial entities”. Traditionally, researchers have assumed that semantic categories of space are universal, reflecting a human way of nonlinguistically perceiving and cognizing space. But, as this chapter discusses, spatial categories in fact differ strikingly across languages, and children begin to home in on language-specific classifications extremely early, before age two. Learners do not, it seems, draw only on purely nonlinguistic spatial concepts; they can also actively construct spatial categories on the basis of the linguistic input. Evidence is drawn primarily from research on children learning Korean vs. English. -
Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Kształtowanie znaczeń dla języka: Zjawiska uniwersalne i charakterystyczne dla danego języka w przyswajaniu kategorii semantycznych odnoszących się do przestrzeni [Reprint]. In B. Bokus, & G. W. Shugar (
Eds. ), Psychologia języka dziecka (pp. 386-424). Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne.Abstract
Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In M. Bowerman & S.L. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Bowerman, M. (1989). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In M. L. Rice, & R. L. Schiefelbusch (
Eds. ), The teachability of language (pp. 133-169). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. -
Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). Predicting the dative alternation. In G. Bouma, I. Kraemer, & J. Zwarts (
Eds. ), Cognitive foundations of interpretation (pp. 69-94). Amsterdam: KNAW.Abstract
Theoretical linguists have traditionally relied on linguistic intuitions such as grammaticality judgments for their data. But the massive growth of computer-readable texts and recordings, the availability of cheaper, more powerful computers and software, and the development of new probabilistic models for language have now made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alternative source of data. Surprisingly, many linguists believe that such ‘usage data’ are irrelevant to the theory of grammar. Four problems are repeatedly brought up in the critiques of usage data— 1. correlated factors seeming to support reductive theories, 2. pooled data invalidating grammatical inference, 3. syntactic choices reducing to lexical biases, and 4. cross-corpus differences undermining corpus studies. Presenting a case study of work on the English dative alternation, we show first,that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed and seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility, and second, that the four problems in the critique of usage data are empirical issues that can be resolved by using modern statistical theory and modelling strategies widely used in other fields. The new models allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science. -
Brown, P. (2007). Principles of person reference in Tzeltal conversation. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (
Eds. ), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 172-202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
This paper focuses on ‘minimality’ in initial references to persons in the Mayan language Tzeltal, spoken in southern Mexico. Inspection of initial person-referring expressions in 25 Tzeltal videotaped conversations reveals that, in this language, if speaker and/or recipient are related through ‘kinship’ to the referent, a kin term (or other relational term like ‘namesake’) is the default option for initial reference to persons. Additionally, further specification via names and/or geographical location (of home base) is also often used to home in on the referent (e.g. ‘your-cousin Alonzo’, ‘our mother’s brother behind the mountain’). And often (~ 70 cases in the data examined) initial references to persons combine more than one referring expression, for example: ‘this old man my brother-in-law old man Antonio here in the pines’, or ‘the father of that brother-in-law of yours the father-in-law of your elder-sister Xmaruch’. Seen in the light of Schegloff’s (1979, 1996) two basic preferences for referring to persons in conversation: (i.) for a recognitional form and (ii.) for a minimal form, these Tzeltal person-referring expressions seem to be relatively elaborated. This paper examines the sequential contexts where such combinations appear, and proposes a third preference operative in Tzeltal (and possibly in other kinship-term-based systems) for associating the referent as closely as possible to the participants. -
Brown, C. M., & Hagoort, P. (1989). De LAT-relatie tussen lichaam en geest: Over de implicaties van neurowetenschap voor onze kennis van cognitie. In C. Brown, P. Hagoort, & T. Meijering (
Eds. ), Vensters op de geest: Cognitie op het snijvlak van filosofie en psychologie (pp. 50-81). Utrecht: Grafiet. -
Brown, P. (1998). Early Tzeltal verbs: Argument structure and argument representation. In E. Clark (
Ed. ), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 129-140). Stanford: CSLI Publications.Abstract
The surge of research activity focussing on children's acquisition of verbs (e.g., Tomasello and Merriman 1996) addresses some fundamental questions: Just how variable across languages, and across individual children, is the process of verb learning? How specific are arguments to particular verbs in early child language? How does the grammatical category 'Verb' develop? The position of Universal Grammar, that a verb category is early, contrasts with that of Tomasello (1992), Pine and Lieven and their colleagues (1996, in press), and many others, that children develop a verb category slowly, gradually building up subcategorizations of verbs around pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic properties of the language they are exposed to. On this latter view, one would expect the language which the child is learning, the cultural milieu and the nature of the interactions in which the child is engaged, to influence the process of acquiring verb argument structures. This paper explores these issues by examining the development of argument representation in the Mayan language Tzeltal, in both its lexical and verbal cross-referencing forms, and analyzing the semantic and pragmatic factors influencing the form argument representation takes. Certain facts about Tzeltal (the ergative/ absolutive marking, the semantic specificity of transitive and positional verbs) are proposed to affect the representation of arguments. The first 500 multimorpheme combinations of 3 children (aged between 1;8 and 2;4) are examined. It is argued that there is no evidence of semantically light 'pathbreaking' verbs (Ninio 1996) leading the way into word combinations. There is early productivity of cross-referencing affixes marking A, S, and O arguments (although there are systematic omissions). The paper assesses the respective contributions of three kinds of factors to these results - structural (regular morphology), semantic (verb specificity) and pragmatic (the nature of Tzeltal conversational interaction). -
Brown, P. (2007). Culture-specific influences on semantic development Acquiring the Tzeltal 'benefactive' construction. In B. Pfeiler (
Ed. ), Learning indigenous languages: Child language acquisition in Mesoamerica (pp. 119-154). Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.Abstract
Three-place predicates are an important locus for examining how children acquire argument structure and how this process is influenced by the typology of the language they are learning as well as by culturally-specific semantic categories. From a typological perspective, there is reason to expect children to have some trouble expressing three-participant events, given the considerable variation across languages in how these are linguistically coded. Verbs of transfer (‘give’, ‘receive’, etc.) are often considered to be the verbs which canonically appear with three arguments (e.g., Slobin 1985, Gleitman 1990). Yet in the Mayan language Tzeltal, verbs other than transfer verbs appear routinely in the ditransitive construction. Although the three participants are rarely all overtly expressed as NPs, this construction ensures that the ‘recipient’ or or ‘affectee’ participant is overtly marked on the verb. Tzeltal children’s early acquisition of this construction (well before the age of 3;0) shows that they are sensitive to its abstract constructional meaning of ‘affected’ third participant: they do not go initially for ‘transfer’ meanings but are attuned to benefactive or malefactive uses despite the predominance of the verb ‘give’ in the input with this construction. This poses a challenge to acquisition theories (Goldberg 2001, Ninio 1999) that see construction meaning arising from the meaning of the verb most frequently used in a construction. -
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Gesichtsbedrohende Akte [reprint: Face-threatening acts, 1987]. In S. K. Herrmann, S. Kraemer, & H. Kuch (
Eds. ), Verletzende Worte: Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung (pp. 59-88). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Abstract
This article is a reprint of parts of chapters 2 and 3 from Brown and Levinson (1987) discussing the concept of 'Face Threatening Acts'. -
Brown, P. (1998). How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In J. Coates (
Ed. ), Language and gender (pp. 81-99). Oxford: Blackwell. -
Brown, P. (2017). Politeness and impoliteness. In Y. Huang (
Ed. ), Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 383-399). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.16.Abstract
This article selectively reviews the literature on politeness across different disciplines—linguistics, anthropology, communications, conversation analysis, social psychology, and sociology—and critically assesses how both theoretical approaches to politeness and research on linguistic politeness phenomena have evolved over the past forty years. Major new developments include a shift from predominantly linguistic approaches to those examining politeness and impoliteness as processes that are embedded and negotiated in interactional and cultural contexts, as well as a greater focus on how both politeness and interactional confrontation and conflict fit into our developing understanding of human cooperation and universal aspects of human social interaction.Files private
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Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1998). Politeness, introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In A. Kasher (
Ed. ), Pragmatics: Vol. 6 Grammar, psychology and sociology (pp. 488-554). London: Routledge.Abstract
This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press). -
Wu, D. H., & Bulut, T. (2020). The contribution of statistical learning to language and literacy acquisition. In K. D. Federmeier, & H. W. Huang (
Eds. ), Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 283-318). doi:10.1016/bs.plm.2020.02.001.Abstract
Acquisition and processing of written and spoken language is an impressive cognitive accomplishment considering the complexity of the tasks. While only humans seem to have evolved to the fullest extent the capacity that underpins these remarkable feats of development and civilization, the exact nature of such capacity has been subject to ongoing research. In this chapter, we focus on language competence and what makes it unique among the communication systems of different species. We then elaborate on the classical debate between nativist and environmentalist accounts of language acquisition, with reference to evidence for and against the critical period hypothesis. After introducing the regularity embedded in different languages and particularly in drastically different orthographies, we present behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the sensitivity to systematic mapping between orthography and phonology. Because learning to read is to master such mapping, we assume that the ability to use statistical learning to appreciate the dependency among items would contribute to literacy acquisition. Empirical results from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments conducted in our and other laboratories provide support for the close link between statistical learning and literacy acquisition in native and foreign language. Such findings highlight the significance of domain-general statistical learning to domain-specific language acquisition, and point to an important direction for theories and practices of language education.Files private
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Burenhult, N. (2020). Foraging and the history of languages in the Malay Peninsula. In T. Güldemann, P. McConvell, & R. Rhodes (
Eds. ), The language of Hunter-Gatherers (pp. 164-197). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Carota, F. (2007). Collaborative use of contrastive markers Contextual and co-textual implications. In A. Fetzer (
Ed. ), Context and Appropriateness: Micro meets macro (pp. 235-260). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
The study presented in this paper examines the context-dependence and
dialogue functions of the contrastive markers of Italian ma (but),
invece (instead), mentre (while) and per (nevertheless) within
task-oriented dialogues.
Corpus data evidence their sensitivity to a acognitive interpersonal
context, conceived as a common ground. Such a cognitive state - shared
by co-participants through the coordinative process of grounding -
interacts with the global dialogue structure, which is cognitively
shaped by ``meta-negotiating{''} and grounding the dialogue topic.
Locally, the relation between the current dialogue structural units and
the global dialogue topic is said to be specified by information
structure, in particular intra-utterance themes.
It is argued that contrastive markers re-orient the co-participants'
cognitive states towards grounding ungrounded topical aspects to be
meta-negotiated. They offer a collaborative context-updating strategy,
tracking the status of common ground during dialogue topic management. -
Casillas, M., & Hilbrink, E. (2020). Communicative act development. In K. P. Schneider, & E. Ifantidou (
Eds. ), Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics (pp. 61-88). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Abstract
How do children learn to map linguistic forms onto their intended meanings? This chapter begins with an introduction to some theoretical and analytical tools used to study communicative acts. It then turns to communicative act development in spoken and signed language acquisition, including both the early scaffolding and production of communicative acts (both non-verbal and verbal) as well as their later links to linguistic development and Theory of Mind. The chapter wraps up by linking research on communicative act development to the acquisition of conversational skills, cross-linguistic and individual differences in communicative experience during development, and human evolution. Along the way, it also poses a few open questions for future research in this domain. -
Chen, A. (2007). Language-specificity in the perception of continuation intonation. In C. Gussenhoven, & T. Riad (
Eds. ), Tones and tunes II: Phonetic and behavioural studies in word and sentence prosody (pp. 107-142). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Abstract
This paper addressed the question of how British English, German and Dutch listeners differ in their perception of continuation intonation both at the phonological level (Experiment 1) and at the level of phonetic implementation (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, preference scores of pitch contours to signal continuation at the clause-boundary were obtained from these listener groups. It was found that among contours with H%, British English listeners had a strong preference for H*L H%, as predicted. Unexpectedly, British English listeners rated H* H% noticeably more favourably than L*H H%; Dutch listeners largely rated H* H% more favourably than H*L H% and L*H H%; German listeners rated these contours similarly and seemed to have a slight preference for H*L H%. In Experiment 2, the degree to which a final rise was perceived to express continuation was established for each listener group in a made-up language. It was found that although all listener groups associated a higher end pitch with a higher degree of continuation likelihood, the perceived meaning difference for a given interval of end pitch heights varied with the contour shape of the utterance final syllable. When it was comparable to H* H%, British English and Dutch listeners perceived a larger meaning difference than German listeners; when it was comparable to H*L H%, British English listeners perceived a larger difference than German and Dutch listeners. This shows that language-specificity in continuation intonation at the phonological level affects the perception of continuation intonation at the phonetic level. -
Collins, J. (2017). Real and spurious correlations involving tonal languages. In N. J. Enfield (
Ed. ), Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistics systems (pp. 129-139). Berlin: Language Science Press. -
Crago, M. B., & Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Acquiring Inuktitut. In O. L. Taylor, & L. Leonard (
Eds. ), Language Acquisition Across North America: Cross-Cultural And Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 245-279). San Diego, CA, USA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. -
Cutler, A. (1989). Auditory lexical access: Where do we start? In W. Marslen-Wilson (
Ed. ), Lexical representation and process (pp. 342-356). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract
The lexicon, considered as a component of the process of recognizing speech, is a device that accepts a sound image as input and outputs meaning. Lexical access is the process of formulating an appropriate input and mapping it onto an entry in the lexicon's store of sound images matched with their meanings. This chapter addresses the problems of auditory lexical access from continuous speech. The central argument to be proposed is that utterance prosody plays a crucial role in the access process. Continuous listening faces problems that are not present in visual recognition (reading) or in noncontinuous recognition (understanding isolated words). Aspects of utterance prosody offer a solution to these particular problems. -
Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (
Ed. ), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer. -
Dediu, D. (2017). From biology to language change and diversity. In N. J. Enfield (
Ed. ), Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistics systems (pp. 39-52). Berlin: Language Science Press. -
Dimroth, C. (2007). Zweitspracherwerb bei Kindern und Jugendlichen: Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede. In T. Anstatt (
Ed. ), Mehrsprachigkeit bei Kindern und Erwachsenen: Erwerb, Formen, Förderung (pp. 115-137). Tübingen: Attempto.Abstract
This paper discusses the influence of age-related factors like stage of cognitive development, prior linguistic knowledge, and motivation and addresses the specific effects of these ‘age factors’ on second language acquisition as opposed to other learning tasks. Based on longitudinal corpus data from child and adolescent learners of L2 German (L1 = Russian), the paper studies the acquisition of word order (verb raising over negation, verb second) and inflectional morphology (subject-verb-agreement, tense, noun plural, and adjective-noun agreement). Whereas the child learner shows target-like production in all of these areas within the observation period (1½ years), the adolescent learner masters only some of them. The discussion addresses the question of what it is about clusters of grammatical features that make them particularly affected by age. -
Dingemanse, M. (2017). Brain-to-brain interfaces and the role of language in distributing agency. In N. J. Enfield, & P. Kockelman (
Eds. ), Distributed Agency (pp. 59-66). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190457204.003.0007.Abstract
Brain-to-brain interfaces, in which brains are physically connected without the intervention of language, promise new ways of collaboration and communication between humans. I examine the narrow view of language implicit in current conceptions of brain-to-brain interfaces and put forward a constructive alternative, stressing the role of language in organising joint agency. Two features of language stand out as crucial: its selectivity, which provides people with much-needed filters between public words and private worlds; and its negotiability, which provides people with systematic opportunities for calibrating understanding and expressing consent and dissent. Without these checks and balances, brain-to-brain interfaces run the risk of reducing people to the level of amoeba in a slime mold; with them, they may mature to become useful extensions of human agency -
Dingemanse, M. (2017). On the margins of language: Ideophones, interjections and dependencies in linguistic theory. In N. J. Enfield (
Ed. ), Dependencies in language (pp. 195-202). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.573781.Abstract
Linguistic discovery is viewpoint-dependent, just like our ideas about what is marginal and what is central in language. In this essay I consider two supposed marginalia —ideophones and interjections— which provide some useful pointers for widening our field of view. Ideophones challenge us to take a fresh look at language and consider how it is that our communication system combines multiple modes of representation. Interjections challenge us to extend linguistic inquiry beyond sentence level, and remind us that language is social-interactive at core. Marginalia, then, are not the obscure, exotic phenomena that can be safely ignored: they represent opportunities for innovation and invite us to keep pushing the edges of linguistic inquiry. -
Dingemanse, M. (2020). Recruiting assistance and collaboration: A West-African corpus study. In S. Floyd, G. Rossi, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments (pp. 369-241). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4018388.Abstract
Doing things for and with others is one of the foundations of human social life. This chapter studies a systematic collection of 207 requests for assistance and collaboration from a video corpus of everyday conversations in Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. A range of social action formats and semiotic resources reveals how language is adapted to the interactional challenges posed by recruiting assistance. While many of the formats bear a language-specific signature, their sequential and interactional properties show important commonalities across languages. Two tentative findings are put forward for further cross-linguistic examination: a “rule of three” that may play a role in the organisation of successive response pursuits, and a striking commonality in animal-oriented recruitments across languages that may be explained by convergent cultural evolution. The Siwu recruitment system emerges as one instance of a sophisticated machinery for organising collaborative action that transcends language and culture. -
Dunn, M. (2007). Vernacular literacy in the Touo language of the Solomon Islands. In A. J. Liddicoat (
Ed. ), Language planning and policy: Issues in language planning and literacy (pp. 209-220). Clevedon: Multilingual matters.Abstract
The Touo language is a non-Austronesian language spoken on Rendova Island (Western Province, Solomon Islands). First language speakers of Touo are typically multilingual, and are likely to speak other (Austronesian) vernaculars, as well as Solomon Island Pijin and English. There is no institutional support of literacy in Touo: schools function in English, and church-based support for vernacular literacy focuses on the major Austronesian languages of the local area. Touo vernacular literacy exists in a restricted niche of the linguistic ecology, where it is utilised for symbolic rather than communicative goals. Competing vernacular orthographic traditions complicate the situation further. -
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
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Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., De Ruiter, J. P., & Stivers, T. (2007). Building a corpus of multimodal interaction in your field site. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 96-99). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468728.Abstract
Research on video- and audio-recordings of spontaneous naturally-occurring conversation in English has shown that conversation is a rule-guided, practice-oriented domain that can be investigated for its underlying mechanics or structure. Systematic study could yield something like a grammar for conversation. The goal of this task is to acquire a corpus of video-data, for investigating the underlying structure(s) of interaction cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. -
Enfield, N. J. (2007). Meanings of the unmarked: How 'default' person reference does more than just refer. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (
Eds. ), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 97-120). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Enfield, N. J. (2017). Language in the Mainland Southeast Asia Area. In R. Hickey (
Ed. ), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 677-702). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107279872.026. -
Enfield, N. J. (2007). Repair sequences in interaction. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 100-103). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468724.Abstract
This sub-project is concerned with analysis and cross-linguistic comparison of the mechanisms of signaling and redressing ‘trouble’ during conversation. Speakers and listeners constantly face difficulties with many different aspects of speech production and comprehension during conversation. A speaker may mispronounce a word, or may be unable to find a word, or be unable to formulate in words an idea he or she has in mind. A listener may have troubling hearing (part of) what was said, may not know who a speaker is referring to, may not be sure of the current relevance of what is being said. There may be problems in the organisation of turns at talk, for instance, two speakers’ speech may be in overlap. The goal of this task is to investigate the range of practices that a language uses to address problems of speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation. -
Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). Intraparadigmatic effects on the perception of voice. In J. van de Weijer, & E. J. van der Torre (
Eds. ), Voicing in Dutch: (De)voicing-phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics (pp. 153-173). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
In Dutch, all morpheme-final obstruents are voiceless in word-final position. As a consequence, the distinction between obstruents that are voiced before vowel-initial suffixes and those that are always voiceless is neutralized. This study adds to the existing evidence that the neutralization is incomplete: neutralized, alternating plosives tend to have shorter bursts than non-alternating plosives. Furthermore, in a rating study, listeners scored the alternating plosives as more voiced than the nonalternating plosives, showing sensitivity to the subtle subphonemic cues in the acoustic signal. Importantly, the participants who were presented with the complete words, instead of just the final rhymes, scored the alternating plosives as even more voiced. This shows that listeners’ perception of voice is affected by their knowledge of the obstruent’s realization in the word’s morphological paradigm. Apparently, subphonemic paradigmatic levelling is a characteristic of both production and perception. We explain the effects within an analogy-based approach. -
Fisher, V. J. (2017). Dance as Embodied Analogy: Designing an Empirical Research Study. In M. Van Delft, J. Voets, Z. Gündüz, H. Koolen, & L. Wijers (
Eds. ), Danswetenschap in Nederland. Utrecht: Vereniging voor Dansonderzoek (VDO). -
Floyd, S. (2017). Requesting as a means for negotiating distributed agency. In N. J. Enfield, & P. Kockelman (
Eds. ), Distributed Agency (pp. 67-78). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Fox, E. (2020). Literary Jerry and justice. In M. E. Poulsen (
Ed. ), The Jerome Bruner Library: From New York to Nijmegen. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
Frank, S. L., Koppen, M., Noordman, L. G. M., & Vonk, W. (2007). Modeling multiple levels of text presentation. In F. Schmalhofer, & C. A. Perfetti (
Eds. ), Higher level language processes in the brain: Inference and comprehension processes (pp. 133-157). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. -
Frost, R. L. A., & Monaghan, P. (2020). Insights from studying statistical learning. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. E. Twomey (
Eds. ), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn (pp. 65-89). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.27.03fro.Abstract
Acquiring language is notoriously complex, yet for the majority of children this feat is accomplished with remarkable ease. Usage-based accounts of language acquisition suggest that this success can be largely attributed to the wealth of experience with language that children accumulate over the course of language acquisition. One field of research that is heavily underpinned by this principle of experience is statistical learning, which posits that learners can perform powerful computations over the distribution of information in a given input, which can help them to discern precisely how that input is structured, and how it operates. A growing body of work brings this notion to bear in the field of language acquisition, due to a developing understanding of the richness of the statistical information contained in speech. In this chapter we discuss the role that statistical learning plays in language acquisition, emphasising the importance of both the distribution of information within language, and the situation in which language is being learnt. First, we address the types of statistical learning that apply to a range of language learning tasks, asking whether the statistical processes purported to support language learning are the same or distinct across different tasks in language acquisition. Second, we expand the perspective on what counts as environmental input, by determining how statistical learning operates over the situated learning environment, and not just sequences of sounds in utterances. Finally, we address the role of variability in children’s input, and examine how statistical learning can accommodate (and perhaps even exploit) this during language acquisition. -
Furuyama, N., & Sekine, K. (2007). Forgetful or strategic? The mystery of the systematic avoidance of reference in the cartoon story nsarrative. In S. D. Duncan, J. Cassel, & E. T. Levy (
Eds. ), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language: Essays in honor of David McNeill (pp. 75-81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. -
Goudbeek, M., Smits, R., Cutler, A., & Swingley, D. (2017). Auditory and phonetic category formation. In H. Cohen, & C. Lefebvre (
Eds. ), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (2nd revised ed.) (pp. 687-708). Amsterdam: Elsevier. -
Güldemann, T., & Hammarström, H. (2020). Geographical axis effects in large-scale linguistic distributions. In M. Crevels, & P. Muysken (
Eds. ), Language Dispersal, Diversification, and Contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Hagoort, P. (2007). The memory, unification, and control (MUC) model of language. In T. Sakamoto (
Ed. ), Communicating skills of intention (pp. 259-291). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo. -
Hagoort, P. (2007). The memory, unification, and control (MUC) model of language. In A. S. Meyer, L. Wheeldon, & A. Krott (
Eds. ), Automaticity and control in language processing (pp. 243-270). Hove: Psychology Press. -
Hagoort, P. (2017). It is the facts, stupid. In J. Brockman, F. Van der Wa, & H. Corver (
Eds. ), Wetenschappelijke parels: het belangrijkste wetenschappelijke nieuws volgens 193 'briljante geesten'. Amsterdam: Maven Press. -
Hagoort, P. (2020). Taal. In O. Van den Heuvel, Y. Van der Werf, B. Schmand, & B. Sabbe (
Eds. ), Leerboek neurowetenschappen voor de klinische psychiatrie (pp. 234-239). Amsterdam: Boom Uitgevers. -
Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meaning in patients with semantic impairments. In B. Stemmer, & H. Whitaker (
Eds. ), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 235-248). New York: Academic Press. -
Hagoort, P. (2017). The neural basis for primary and acquired language skills. In E. Segers, & P. Van den Broek (
Eds. ), Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy: In honor of Ludo Verhoeven (pp. 17-28). Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/z.206.02hag.Abstract
Reading is a cultural invention that needs to recruit cortical infrastructure that was not designed for it (cultural recycling of cortical maps). In the case of reading both visual cortex and networks for speech processing are recruited. Here I discuss current views on the neurobiological underpinnings of spoken language that deviate in a number of ways from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. More areas than Broca’s and Wernicke’s region are involved in language. Moreover, a division along the axis of language production and language comprehension does not seem to be warranted. Instead, for central aspects of language processing neural infrastructure is shared between production and comprehension. Arguments are presented in favor of a dynamic network view, in which the functionality of a region is co-determined by the network of regions in which it is embedded at particular moments in time. Finally, core regions of language processing need to interact with other networks (e.g. the attentional networks and the ToM network) to establish full functionality of language and communication. The consequences of this architecture for reading are discussed. -
Holler, J., & Bavelas, J. (2017). Multi-modal communication of common ground: A review of social functions. In R. B. Church, M. W. Alibali, & S. D. Kelly (
Eds. ), Why gesture? How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating (pp. 213-240). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
Until recently, the literature on common ground depicted its influence as a purely verbal phenomenon. We review current research on how common ground influences gesture. With informative exceptions, most experiments found that speakers used fewer gestures as well as fewer words in common ground contexts; i.e., the gesture/word ratio did not change. Common ground often led to more poorly articulated gestures, which parallels its effect on words. These findings support the principle of recipient design as well as more specific social functions such as grounding, the given-new contract, and Grice’s maxims. However, conceptual pacts or linking old with new information may maintain the original form. All together, these findings implicate gesture-speech ensembles rather than isolated effects on gestures alone. -
Hunley, K., Dunn, M., Lindström, E., Reesink, G., Terrill, A., Norton, H., Scheinfeldt, L., Friedlaender, F. R., Merriwether, D. A., Koki, G., & Friedlaender, J. S. (2007). Inferring prehistory from genetic, linguistic, and geographic variation. In J. S. Friedlaender (
Ed. ), Genes, language, & culture history in the Southwest Pacific (pp. 141-154). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
This chapter investigates the fit of genetic, phenotypic, and linguistic data to two well-known models of population history. The first of these models, termed the population fissions model, emphasizes population splitting, isolation, and independent evolution. It predicts that genetic and linguistic data will be perfectly tree-like. The second model, termed isolation by distance, emphasizes genetic exchange among geographically proximate populations. It predicts a monotonic decline in genetic similarity with increasing geographic distance. While these models are overly simplistic, deviations from them were expected to provide important insights into the population history of northern Island Melanesia. The chapter finds scant support for either model because the prehistory of the region has been so complex. Nonetheless, the genetic and linguistic data are consistent with an early radiation of proto-Papuan speakers into the region followed by a much later migration of Austronesian speaking peoples. While these groups subsequently experienced substantial genetic and cultural exchange, this exchange has been insufficient to erase this history of separate migrations. -
Indefrey, P. (2007). Brain imaging studies of language production. In G. Gaskell (
Ed. ), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 547-564). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
Neurocognitive studies of language production have provided sufficient evidence on both the spatial and the temporal patterns of brain activation to allow tentative and in some cases not so tentative conclusions about function-structure relationships. This chapter reports meta-analysis results that identify reliable activation areas for a range of word, sentence, and narrative production tasks both in the native language and a second language. Based on a theoretically motivated analysis of language production tasks it is possible to specify relationships between brain areas and functional processing components of language production that could not have been derived from the data provided by any single task. -
Jordens, P. (1998). Defaultformen des Präteritums. Zum Erwerb der Vergangenheitsmorphologie im Niederlänidischen. In H. Wegener (
Ed. ), Eine zweite Sprache lernen (pp. 61-88). Tübingen, Germany: Verlag Gunter Narr. -
Kastens, K. (2020). The Jerome Bruner Library treasure. In M. E. Poulsen (
Ed. ), The Jerome Bruner Library: From New York to Nijmegen (pp. 29-34). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
Kempen, G. (2007). De kunst van het weglaten: Elliptische nevenschikking in een model van de spreker. In F. Moerdijk, A. van Santen, & R. Tempelaars (
Eds. ), Leven met woorden: Afscheidsbundel voor Piet van Sterkenburg (pp. 397-407). Leiden: Brill.Abstract
This paper is an abridged version (in Dutch) of an in-press article by the same author (Kempen, G. (2008/9). Clausal coordination and coordinate ellipsis in a model of the speaker. To be published in: Linguistics). The two papers present a psycholinguistically inspired approach to the syntax of clause-level coordination and coordinate ellipsis. It departs from the assumption that coordinations are structurally similar to so-called appropriateness repairs Ñ an important type of self-repairs in spontaneous speech. Coordinate structures and appropriateness repairs can both be viewed as ÒupdateÓ con-structions. Updating is defined as a special sentence production mode that efficiently revises or augments existing sentential structure in response to modifications in the speakerÕs communicative intention. This perspective is shown to offer an empirically satisfactory and theoretically parsimonious account of two prominent types of coordinate ellipsis, in particular Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR) and Gapping (including Long-Distance Gapping and Subgapping). They are analyzed as different manifestations of Òincremental updatingÓ Ñ efficient updating of only part of the existing sentential structure. Based on empirical data from Dutch and German, novel treatments are proposed for both types of clausal coordinate ellipsis. Two other forms of coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF (ÒSubject Gap in Finite clauses with fronted verbÓ), and Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR; also known as Right Node Raising or RNR) Ñ are shown to be incompatible with the notion of incremental updating. Alternative theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are proposed. The four types of clausal coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF, Gapping, FCR and BCR Ñ are argued to originate in four different stages of sentence production: Intending (i.e. preparing the communicative intention), Conceptualization, Grammatical Encoding, and Phonological Encoding, respectively. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2017). Frequential test of (S)OV as unmarked word order in Dutch and German clauses: A serendipitous corpus-linguistic experiment. In H. Reckman, L. L. S. Cheng, M. Hijzelendoorn, & R. Sybesma (
Eds. ), Crossroads semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar (pp. 107-123). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
In a paper entitled “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”, Haspelmath argues “that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous”, and that frequency asymmetries often explain structural (un)markedness asymmetries (Haspelmath 2006). We investigate whether this argument applies to Object and Verb orders in main (VO, marked) and subordinate (OV, unmarked) clauses of spoken and written German and Dutch, using English (without VO/OV alternation) as control. Frequency counts from six treebanks (three languages, two output modalities) do not support Haspelmath’s proposal. However, they reveal an unexpected phenomenon, most prominently in spoken Dutch and German: a small set of extremely high-frequent finite verbs with unspecific meanings populates main clauses much more densely than subordinate clauses. We suggest these verbs accelerate the start-up of grammatical encoding, thus facilitating sentence-initial output fluency -
Kempen, G. (1989). Informatiegedragskunde: Pijler van de moderne informatieverzorging. In A. F. Marks (
Ed. ), Sociaal-wetenschappelijke informatie en kennisvorming in onderzoek, onderzoeksbeleid en beroep (pp. 31-35). Amsterdam: SWIDOC. -
Kempen, G. (1989). Language generation systems. In I. S. Bátori, W. Lenders, & W. Putschke (
Eds. ), Computational linguistics: An international handbook on computer oriented language research and applications (pp. 471-480). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. -
Kempen, G. (1998). Sentence parsing. In A. D. Friederici (
Ed. ), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 213-228). Berlin: Springer. -
Kidd, E., Bigood, A., Donnelly, S., Durrant, S., Peter, M. S., & Rowland, C. F. (2020). Individual differences in first language acquisition and their theoretical implications. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. E. Twomey (
Eds. ), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn (pp. 189-219). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.27.09kid.Abstract
Much of Lieven’s pioneering work has helped move the study of individual differences to the centre of child language research. The goal of the present chapter is to illustrate how the study of individual differences provides crucial insights into the language acquisition process. In part one, we summarise some of the evidence showing how pervasive individual differences are across the whole of the language system; from gestures to morphosyntax. In part two, we describe three causal factors implicated in explaining individual differences, which, we argue, must be built into any theory of language acquisition (intrinsic differences in the neurocognitive learning mechanisms, the child’s communicative environment, and developmental cascades in which each new linguistic skill that the child has to acquire depends critically on the prior acquisition of foundational abilities). In part three, we present an example study on the role of the speed of linguistic processing on vocabulary development, which illustrates our approach to individual differences. The results show evidence of a changing relationship between lexical processing speed and vocabulary over developmental time, perhaps as a result of the changing nature of the structure of the lexicon. The study thus highlights the benefits of an individual differences approach in building, testing, and constraining theories of language acquisition. -
Kita, S., & Ozyurek, A. (2007). How does spoken language shape iconic gestures? In S. Duncan, J. Cassel, & E. Levy (
Eds. ), Gesture and the dynamic dimension of language (pp. 67-74). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Klaas, G. (2007). Hints and recommendations concerning field equipment. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 10 (pp. 5-6). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
Klamer, M., Trilsbeek, P., Hoogervorst, T., & Haskett, C. (2017). Creating a Language Archive of Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. In J. Odijk, & A. Van Hessen (
Eds. ), CLARIN in the Low Countries (pp. 113-121). London: Ubiquity Press. doi:10.5334/bbi.10.Abstract
The geographical region of Insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an
area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area:
over a quarter of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages,
most of them will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The project described
here ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated
by them in the region. The language resources were gathered by twenty linguists at,
or in collaboration with, Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and were compiled and
archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute in
Nijmegen. The resulting archive constitutes a collection ofmultimediamaterials and written
documents from 48 languages in Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. At TLA,
the data was archived according to state-of-the-art standards (TLA holds the Data Seal of
Approval): the component metadata infrastructure CMDI was used; all metadata categories
as well as relevant units of annotation were linked to the ISO data category registry ISOcat.
This guaranteed proper integration of the language resources into the CLARIN framework.
Through the archive, future speaker communities and researchers will be able to extensively
search thematerials for answers to their own questions, even if they do not themselves know the language, and even if the language dies. -
Klein, W. (1998). Ein Blick zurück auf die Varietätengrammatik. In U. Ammon, K. Mattheier, & P. Nelde (
Eds. ), Sociolinguistica: Internationales Jahrbuch für europäische Soziolinguistik (pp. 22-38). Tübingen: Niemeyer. -
Klein, W. (1998). Assertion and finiteness. In N. Dittmar, & Z. Penner (
Eds. ), Issues in the theory of language acquisition: Essays in honor of Jürgen Weissenborn (pp. 225-245). Bern: Peter Lang. -
Klein, W., & Klein, W. (1971). Formale Poetik und Linguistik. In Beiträge zu den Sommerkursen des Goethe-Instituts München (pp. 190-195).
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Klein, W. (1989). La variation linguistique. In P. Cadiot, & N. Dittmar (
Eds. ), La sociolinguistique en pays de langue allemande (pp. 101-124). Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. -
Klein, W., & Vater, H. (1998). The perfect in English and German. In L. Kulikov, & H. Vater (
Eds. ), Typology of verbal categories: Papers presented to Vladimir Nedjalkov on the occasion of his 70th birthday (pp. 215-235). Tübingen: Niemeyer. -
Klein, W., & Perdue, C. (1989). The learner's problem of arranging words. In B. MacWhinney, & E. Bates (
Eds. ), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 292-327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Kuijpers, C. T., Coolen, R., Houston, D., & Cutler, A. (1998). Using the head-turning technique to explore cross-linguistic performance differences. In C. Rovee-Collier, L. Lipsitt, & H. Hayne (
Eds. ), Advances in infancy research: Vol. 12 (pp. 205-220). Stamford: Ablex. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). De connectionistische mode: Symbolische en subsymbolische modellen van het menselijk gedrag. In C. M. Brown, P. Hagoort, & T. Meijering (
Eds. ), Vensters op de geest: Cognitie op het snijvlak van filosofie en psychologie (pp. 202-219). Utrecht: Stichting Grafiet. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (1962). Motion breaking and the perception of causality. In A. Michotte (
Ed. ), Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales: Etudes de psychologie expérimentale (pp. 244-258). Louvain: Publications Universitaires. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (2007). Levensbericht Detlev W. Ploog. In Levensberichten en herdenkingen 2007 (pp. 60-63). Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
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Levelt, W. J. M. (2020). The alpha and omega of Jerome Bruner's contributions to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In M. E. Poulsen (
Ed. ), The Jerome Bruner Library: From New York to Nijmegen (pp. 11-18). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Presentation of the official opening of the Jerome Bruner Library, January 8th, 2020Additional information
Link to booklet - The Jerome Bruner Library: From New York to Nijmegen -
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Working models of perception: Five general issues. In B. A. Elsendoorn, & H. Bouma (
Eds. ), Working models of perception (pp. 489-503). London: Academic Press. -
Levinson, S. C. (2007). Optimizing person reference - perspectives from usage on Rossel Island. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (
Eds. ), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 29-72). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
This chapter explicates the requirement in person–reference for balancing demands for recognition, minimalization, explicitness and indirection. This is illustrated with reference to data from repair of failures of person–reference within a particular linguistic/cultural context, namely casual interaction among Rossel Islanders. Rossel Island (PNG) offers a ‘natural experiment’ for studying aspects of person reference, because of a number of special properties: 1. It is a closed universe of 4000 souls, sharing one kinship network, so in principle anyone could be recognizable from a reference. As a result no (complex) descriptions (cf. ‘ the author of Waverly’) are employed. 2. Names, however, are never uniquely referring, since they are drawn from a fixed pool. They are only used for about 25% of initial references, another 25% of initial references being done by kinship triangulation (‘that man’s father–in–law’). Nearly 50% of initial references are semantically underspecified or vague (e.g. ‘that girl’). 3. There are systematic motivations for oblique reference, e.g. kinship–based taboos and other constraints, which partly account for the underspecified references. The ‘natural experiment’ thus reveals some gneral lessons about how person–reference requires optimizing multiple conflicting constraints. Comparison with Sacks and Schegloff’s (1979) treatment of English person reference suggests a way to tease apart the universal and the culturally–particular. -
Levinson, S. C. (1989). Conversation. In E. Barnouw (
Ed. ), International encyclopedia of communications (pp. 407-410). New York: Oxford University Press. -
Levinson, S. C. (1998). Deixis. In J. L. Mey (
Ed. ), Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp. 200-204). Amsterdam: Elsevier. -
Levinson, S. C., Senft, G., & Majid, A. (2007). Emotion categories in language and thought. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 46-52). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492892.Additional information
French_emotion_questionnaire.pdf -
Levinson, S. C. (1998). Minimization and conversational inference. In A. Kasher (
Ed. ), Pragmatics: Vol. 4 Presupposition, implicature and indirect speech acts (pp. 545-612). London: Routledge. -
Levinson, S. C., Majid, A., & Enfield, N. J. (2007). Language of perception: The view from language and culture. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 10-21). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468738. -
Levinson, S. C. (2017). Living with Manny's dangerous idea. In G. Raymond, G. H. Lerner, & J. Heritage (
Eds. ), Enabling human conduct: Studies of talk-in-interaction in honor of Emanuel A. Schegloff (pp. 327-349). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Levinson, S. C. (2017). Speech acts. In Y. Huang (
Ed. ), Oxford handbook of pragmatics (pp. 199-216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.22.Abstract
The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversationFiles private
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Levinson, S. C., & Majid, A. (2007). The language of sound. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 29-31). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468735. -
Levinson, S. C., & Majid, A. (2007). The language of vision II: Shape. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 26-28). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468732. -
Lindström, E., Terrill, A., Reesink, G., & Dunn, M. (2007). The languages of Island Melanesia. In J. S. Friedlaender (
Ed. ), Genes, language, and culture history in the Southwest Pacific (pp. 118-140). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the Papuan and the Oceanic languages (a branch of Austronesian) in Northern Island Melanesia, as well as phenomena arising through contact between these groups. It shows how linguistics can contribute to the understanding of the history of languages and speakers, and what the findings of those methods have been. The location of the homeland of speakers of Proto-Oceanic is indicated (in northeast New Britain); many facets of the lives of those speakers are shown; and the patterns of their subsequent spread across Island Melanesia and beyond into Remote Oceania are indicated, followed by a second wave overlaying the first into New Guinea and as far as halfway through the Solomon Islands. Regarding the Papuan languages of this region, at least some are older than the 6,000-10,000 ceiling of the Comparative Method, and their relations are explored with the aid of a database of 125 non-lexical structural features. The results reflect archipelago-based clustering with the Central Solomons Papuan languages forming a clade either with the Bismarcks or with Bougainville languages. Papuan languages in Bougainville are less influenced by Oceanic languages than those in the Bismarcks and the Solomons. The chapter considers a variety of scenarios to account for their findings, concluding that the results are compatible with multiple pre-Oceanic waves of arrivals into the area after initial settlement. -
Liszkowski, U. (2007). Human twelve-month-olds point cooperatively to share interest with and helpfully provide information for a communicative partner. In K. Liebal, C. Müller, & S. Pika (
Eds. ), Gestural communication in nonhuman and human primates (pp. 124-140). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper investigates infant pointing at 12 months. Three recent experimental studies from our lab are reported and contrasted with existing accounts on infant communicative and social-cognitive abilities. The new results show that infant pointing at 12 months already is a communicative act which involves the intentional transmission of information to share interest with, or provide information for other persons. It is argued that infant pointing is an inherently social and cooperative act which is used to share psychological relations between interlocutors and environment, repairs misunderstandings in proto-conversational turn-taking, and helps others by providing information. Infant pointing builds on an understanding of others as persons with attentional states and attitudes. Findings do not support lean accounts on early infant pointing which posit that it is initially non-communicative, does not serve the function of indicating, or is purely self-centered. It is suggested to investigate the emergence of reference and the motivation to jointly engage with others also before pointing has emerged. -
Liszkowski, U., & Brown, P. (2007). Infant pointing (9-15 months) in different cultures. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 82-88). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492895.Abstract
There are two tasks for conducting systematic observation of child-caregiver joint attention interactions. Task 1 – a “decorated room” designed to elicit infant and caregiver pointing. Task 2 – videotaped interviews about infant pointing behaviour. The goal of this task is to document the ontogenetic emergence of referential communication in caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, during the critical age of 8-15 months when children come to understand and share others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction and human communication; it does not require specialist knowledge of children. -
Majid, A., & Enfield, N. J. (2017). Body. In H. Burkhardt, J. Seibt, G. Imaguire, & S. Gerogiorgakis (
Eds. ), Handbook of mereology (pp. 100-103). Munich: Philosophia. -
Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Language of perception: Overview of field tasks. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 8-9). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492898.
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