Displaying 1 - 100 of 233
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Abbot-Smith, K., & Kidd, E. (2012). Exemplar learning and schematization in language development. In N. M. Seel (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning (2nd. ed., pp. 1200-1202). Berlin: Springer. -
Ameka, F. K. (2012). Ewe: Its grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices. München: LINCOM EUROPA.
Abstract
his work offers a modern description of Ewe(GBE), a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language of West Africa. It assumes that the “essence of linguistics is the quest for meaning” (Whorf) and investigates the meanings of grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices representing them in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) style explications. The explications account for the range of use of the constructions suggested by data from diversified mediated discourse: television and radio interviews and drama, written plays and fiction as well as insider knowledge of and observed behaviour both as participant and observer in Ewe communities of practice. The author draws ecumenically on insights from functional and formal linguistic approaches. The work opens with an overview of Ewe structural grammar. The rest of the work is divided into three parts. Part II concentrates on property denoting expressions, imperfective aspect constructions and possession. Part III examines the grammatical resources available to the Ewe speaker for packaging information in a clause: scene-setting constructions, a “capability passive” construction and experiential constructions. In Part IV illocutionary devices such as formulaic and routine expressions, address terms and interjections are described paying attention to their socio-cultural dimensions of use. This work is of interest to Africanists and linguists interested in grammatical description, typology, semantics and pragmatics as well as anthropologists interested in ethnography of communication and the relation between language and culture. -
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. -
Andics, A. (2012). The semantic role of agentive control in Hungarian placement events. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 183-200). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper explores the role of various types of location control in descriptions of placement events in Hungarian. It will be shown that general verb choices cannot be explained in terms of spatial relations (such as containment and support) or spatial relational changes (such as joining and separation). On the contrary, all main verb distinctions within the placement domain can be described in terms of agentive control settings between the Figure and agentive entities (e.g., the Agent, other persons). In Hungarian, only events with continuous agentive control along the motion trajectory are described as either ‘putting’ or ‘taking’, and only events where the Figure is furthermore controlled by a non-agentive entity at the Goal are described as ‘putting’. -
Baggio, G., Van Lambalgen, M., & Hagoort, P. (2012). Language, linguistics and cognition. In R. Kempson, T. Fernando, & N. Asher (
Eds. ), Philosophy of linguistics (pp. 325-356). Amsterdam: North Holland.Abstract
This chapter provides a partial overview of some currently debated issues in the cognitive science of language. We distinguish two families of problems, which we refer to as ‘language and cognition’ and ‘linguistics and cognition’. Under the first heading we present and discuss the hypothesis that language, in particular the semantics of tense and aspect, is grounded in the planning system. We emphasize the role of non-monotonic inference during language comprehension. We look at the converse issue of the role of linguistic interpretation in reasoning tasks. Under the second heading we investigate the two foremost assumptions of current linguistic methodology, namely intuitions as the only adequate empirical basis of theories of meaning and grammar and the competence-performance distinction, arguing that these are among the heaviest burdens for a truly comprehensive approach to language. Marr’s three-level scheme is proposed as an alternative methodological framework, which we apply in a review of two ERP studies on semantic processing, to the ‘binding problem’ for language, and in a conclusive set of remarks on relating theories in the cognitive science of language. -
Baggio, G., Van Lambalgen, M., & Hagoort, P. (2012). The processing consequences of compositionality. In M. Werning, W. Hinzen, & E. Machery (
Eds. ), The Oxford handbook of compositionality (pp. 655-672). New York: Oxford University Press. -
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. -
Bastiaansen, M. C. M., Mazaheri, A., & Jensen, O. (2012). Beyond ERPs: Oscillatory neuronal dynamics. In S. J. Luck, & E. S. Kappenman (
Eds. ), The Oxford handbook of event-related potential components (pp. 31-50). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2012). Chronologie et rythme du changement linguistique: Syntaxe vs. morphologie. In O. Spevak, & A. Christol (
Eds. ), Les évolutions du latin (pp. 45-65). Paris: L’Harmattan. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2017). Nominal apposition in Indo-European: Its forms and functions, and its evolution in Latin-Romance. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Abstract
Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in (Indo-European) linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology (i.c. composition). This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, its syntactic and morphological characteristics and functions in the early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere (e.g. noun classification and script determinatives), and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.
While nominal apposition is not exclusive to Indo-European, its development fits the evolution of Indo-European grammar.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2016). The development of the comparative in Latin texts. In J. N. Adams, & N. Vincent (
Eds. ), Early and late Latin. Continuity or change? (pp. 313-339). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Files private
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Bayer, J., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1986). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.7 1986. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
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Berthele, R. (2012). On the use of PUT Verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 145-166). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
In this chapter, the multilingual systems of bilingual speakers of Sursilvan Romansh and German are analyzed. The Romansh and the German systems show important differences in the domain of placement. Romansh has a fairly general verb metter ‘to put’ whereas German uses different verbs (e.g., setzen ‘to set’, legen ‘to lay’, stellen ‘to stand’). Whereas there are almost no traces of German in the Romansh data elicited from the German-Romansh bilinguals, it appears that their production of German yields uses of the verbs which differ from the typical German system. Although the forms of the German verbs have been acquired by the bilingual speakers, their distribution in the data arguably reflects traces of the Romansh category of metter ‘to put’. -
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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Bordulk, D., Dalak, N., Tukumba, M., Bennett, L., Bordro Tingey, R., Katherine, M., Cutfield, S., Pamkal, M., & Wightman, G. (2012). Dalabon plants and animals: Aboriginal biocultural knowledge from southern Arnhem Land, north Australia. Palmerston, NT, Australia: Department of Land and Resource Management, Northern Territory Government.
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Bowerman, M. (1986). First steps in acquiring conditionals. In E. C. Traugott, A. G. t. Meulen, J. S. Reilly, & C. A. Ferguson (
Eds. ), On conditionals (pp. 285-308). Cambridge University Press.Abstract
This chapter is about the initial flowering of conditionals, if-(then) constructions, in children's spontaneous speech. It is motivated by two major theoretical interests. The first and most immediate is to understand the acquisition process itself. Conditionals are conceptually, and in many languages morphosyntactically, complex. What aspects of cognitive and grammatical development are implicated in their acquisition? Does learning take place in the context of particular interactions with other speakers? Where do conditionals fit in with the acquisition of other complex sentences? What are the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties of the first conditionals? Underlying this first interest is a second, more strictly linguistic one. Research of recent years has found increasing evidence that natural languages are constrained in certain ways. The source of these constraints is not yet clearly understood, but it is widely assumed that some of them derive ultimately from properties of children's capacity for language acquisition.Files private
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Bowerman, M. (1982). Reorganizational processes in lexical and syntactic development. In E. Wanner, & L. Gleitman (
Eds. ), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 319-346). New York: Academic Press. -
Bowerman, M. (1982). Starting to talk worse: Clues to language acquisition from children's late speech errors. In S. Strauss (
Ed. ), U shaped behavioral growth (pp. 101-145). New York: Academic Press. -
Bramão, I., Faísca, L., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2012). The contribution of color to object recognition. In I. Kypraios (
Ed. ), Advances in object recognition systems (pp. 73-88). Rijeka, Croatia: InTech. Retrieved from http://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-object-recognition-systems/the-contribution-of-color-in-object-recognition.Abstract
The cognitive processes involved in object recognition remain a mystery to the cognitive
sciences. We know that the visual system recognizes objects via multiple features, including
shape, color, texture, and motion characteristics. However, the way these features are
combined to recognize objects is still an open question. The purpose of this contribution is to
review the research about the specific role of color information in object recognition. Given
that the human brain incorporates specialized mechanisms to handle color perception in the
visual environment, it is a fair question to ask what functional role color might play in
everyday vision. -
Braun, B., & Chen, A. (2012). Now for something completely different: Anticipatory effects of intonation. In O. Niebuhr (
Ed. ), Understanding prosody: The role of context, function and communication (pp. 289-311). Berlin: de Gruyter.Abstract
INTRODUCTION It is nowadays well established that spoken sentence processing is achieved in an incremental manner. As a sentence unfolds over time, listeners rapidly process incoming information to eliminate local ambiguity and make predictions on the most plausible interpretation of the sentence. Previous research has shown that these predictions are based on all kinds of linguistic information, explicitly or implicitly in combination with world knowledge.1 A substantial amount of evidence comes from studies on online referential processing conducted in the visual-world paradigm (Cooper 1974; Eberhard, Spivey-Knowlton, Sedivy, and Tanenhaus 1995; Tanenhaus, Sedivy- Knowlton, Eberhard, and Sedivy 1995; Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, Carlson 1999). -
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. (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). -
Brown, P. (2012). To ‘put’ or to ‘take’? Verb semantics in Tzeltal placement and removal expressions. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 55-78). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper examines the verbs and other spatial vocabulary used for describing events of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ in Tzeltal (Mayan). I discuss the semantics of different ‘put’ and ‘take’ verbs, the constructions they occur in, and the extensional patterns of verbs used in ‘put’ (Goal-oriented) vs. ‘take’ (Source-oriented) descriptions. A relatively limited role for semantically general verbs was found. Instead, Tzeltal is a ‘multiverb language’ with many different verbs usable to predicate ‘put’ and ‘take’ events, with verb choice largely determined by the shape, orientation, and resulting disposition of the Figure and Ground objects. The asymmetry that has been observed in other languages, with Goal-oriented ‘put’ verbs more finely distinguished lexically than Source-oriented ‘take’ verbs, is also apparent in Tzeltal. -
Burenhult, N., & Kruspe, N. (2016). The language of eating and drinking: A window on Orang Asli meaning-making. In K. Endicott (
Ed. ), Malaysia’s original people: Past, present and future of the Orang Asli (pp. 175-199). Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. -
Burenhult, N. (2012). The linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Jahai. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 21-36). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper explores the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Jahai (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula) on the basis of descriptions from a video elicitation task. It outlines the structural characteristics of the descriptions and isolates semantically a set of situation types that find expression in lexical opposites: (1) putting/taking, (2) inserting/extracting, (3) dressing/undressing, and (4) placing/removing one’s body parts. All involve deliberate and controlled placing/removing of a solid Figure object in relation to a Ground which is not a human recipient. However, they differ as to the identity of and physical relationship between Figure and Ground. The data also provide evidence of variation in how semantic roles are mapped onto syntactic constituents: in most situation types, Agent, Figure and Ground associate with particular constituent NPs, but some placement events are described with semantically specialised verbs encoding the Figure and even the Ground. -
Carroll, M., & Flecken, M. (2012). Language production under time pressure: insights into grammaticalisation of aspect (Dutch, Italian) and language processing in bilinguals (Dutch, German). In B. Ahrenholz (
Ed. ), Einblicke in die Zweitspracherwerbsforschung und Ihre methodischen Verfahren (pp. 49-76). Berlin: De Gruyter. -
Casasanto, D. (2012). Whorfian hypothesis. In J. L. Jackson, Jr. (
Ed. ), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0058.Abstract
Introduction
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (a.k.a. the Whorfian hypothesis) concerns the relationship between language and thought. Neither the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (b. 1884–d. 1939) nor his student Benjamin Whorf (b. 1897–d. 1941) ever formally stated any single hypothesis about the influence of language on nonlinguistic cognition and perception. On the basis of their writings, however, two proposals emerged, generating decades of controversy among anthropologists, linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. According to the more radical proposal, linguistic determinism, the languages that people speak rigidly determine the way they perceive and understand the world. On the more moderate proposal, linguistic relativity, habits of using language influence habits of thinking. As a result, people who speak different languages think differently in predictable ways. During the latter half of the 20th century, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was widely regarded as false. Around the turn of the 21st century, however, experimental evidence reopened debate about the extent to which language shapes nonlinguistic cognition and perception. Scientific tests of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity help to clarify what is universal in the human mind and what depends on the particulars of people’s physical and social experience.
General Overviews and Foundational Texts
Writing on the relationship between language and thought predates Sapir and Whorf, and extends beyond the academy. The 19th-century German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that language constrains people’s worldview, foreshadowing the idea of linguistic determinism later articulated in Sapir 1929 and Whorf 1956 (Humboldt 1988). The intuition that language radically determines thought has been explored in works of fiction such as Orwell’s dystopian fantasy 1984 (Orwell 1949). Although there is little empirical support for radical linguistic determinism, more moderate forms of linguistic relativity continue to generate influential research, reviewed from an anthropologist’s perspective in Lucy 1997, from a psychologist’s perspective in Hunt and Agnoli 1991, and discussed from multidisciplinary perspectives in Gumperz and Levinson 1996 and Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003. -
Chen, J. (2012). “She from bookshelf take-descend-come the box”: Encoding and categorizing placement events in Mandarin. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 37-54). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper investigates the lexical semantics of placement verbs in Mandarin. The majority of Mandarin placement verbs are directional verb compounds (e.g., na2-xia4-lai2 ‘take-descend-come’). They are composed of two or three verbs in a fixed order, each encoding certain semantic components of placement events. The first verb usually conveys object manipulation and the second and the third verbs indicate the Path of motion, including Deixis. The first verb, typically encoding object manipulation, can be semantically general or specific: two general verbs, fang4 ‘put’ and na2 ‘take’, have large but constrained extensional categories, and a number of specific verbs are used based on the Manner of manipulation of the Figure object, the relationship between and the physical properties of Figure and Ground, intentionality of the Agent, and the type of instrument. -
Chen, A. (2012). Shaping the intonation of Wh-questions: Information structure and beyond. In J. P. de Ruiter (
Ed. ), Questions: Formal, functional and interactional perspectives (pp. 146-164). New York: Cambridge University Press.Files private
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Chen, A. (2012). The prosodic investigation of information structure. In M. Krifka, & R. Musan (
Eds. ), The expression of information structure (pp. 249-286). Berlin: de Gruyter. -
Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2012). The role of spontaneous gestures in spatial problem solving. In E. Efthimiou, G. Kouroupetroglou, & S.-E. Fotinea (
Eds. ), Gesture and sign language in human-computer interaction and embodied communication: 9th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2011, Athens, Greece, May 25-27, 2011, revised selected papers (pp. 57-68). Heidelberg: Springer.Abstract
When solving spatial problems, people often spontaneously produce hand gestures. Recent research has shown that our knowledge is shaped by the interaction between our body and the environment. In this article, we review and discuss evidence on: 1) how spontaneous gesture can reveal the development of problem solving strategies when people solve spatial problems; 2) whether producing gestures can enhance spatial problem solving performance. We argue that when solving novel spatial problems, adults go through deagentivization and internalization processes, which are analogous to young children’s cognitive development processes. Furthermore, gesture enhances spatial problem solving performance. The beneficial effect of gesturing can be extended to non-gesturing trials and can be generalized to a different spatial task that shares similar spatial transformation processes. -
Clark, E. V., & Casillas, M. (2016). First language acquisition. In K. Allen (
Ed. ), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics (pp. 311-328). New York: Routledge. -
Clark, E. V., & Bowerman, M. (1986). On the acquisition of final voiced stops. In J. A. Fishman (
Ed. ), The Fergusonian impact: in honor of Charles A. Ferguson on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Volume 1: From phonology to society (pp. 51-68). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
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. -
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.Additional information
http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/1795/the-metaphorical-brain -
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. -
Crasborn, O., & Windhouwer, M. (2012). ISOcat data categories for signed language resources. In E. Efthimiou, G. Kouroupetroglou, & S.-E. Fotinea (
Eds. ), Gesture and sign language in human-computer interaction and embodied communication: 9th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2011, Athens, Greece, May 25-27, 2011, revised selected papers (pp. 118-128). Heidelberg: Springer.Abstract
As the creation of signed language resources is gaining speed world-wide, the need for standards in this field becomes more acute. This paper discusses the state of the field of signed language resources, their metadata descriptions, and annotations that are typically made. It then describes the role that ISOcat may play in this process and how it can stimulate standardisation without imposing standards. Finally, it makes some initial proposals for the thematic domain ‘sign language’ that was introduced in 2011. -
Cronin, K. A. (2012). Cognitive aspects of prosocial behavior in nonhuman primates. In N. M. Seel (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. Part 3 (2nd ed., pp. 581-583). Berlin: Springer.Abstract
Definition Prosocial behavior is any behavior performed by one individual that results in a benefit for another individual. Prosocial motivations, prosocial preferences, or other-regarding preferences refer to the psychological predisposition to behave in the best interest of another individual. A behavior need not be costly to the actor to be considered prosocial, thus the concept is distinct from altruistic behavior which requires that the actor incurs some cost when providing a benefit to another. -
Cutfield, S. (2012). Principles of Dalabon plant and animal names and classification. In D. Bordulk, N. Dalak, M. Tukumba, L. Bennett, R. Bordro Tingey, M. Katherine, S. Cutfield, M. Pamkal, & G. Wightman (
Eds. ), Dalabon plants and animals: Aboriginal biocultural knowledge from Southern Arnhem Land, North Australia (pp. 11-12). Palmerston, NT, Australia: Department of Land and Resource Management, Northern Territory. -
Cutler, A. (2012). Eentaalpsychologie is geen taalpsychologie: Part II. [Valedictory lecture Radboud University]. Nijmegen: Radboud University.
Abstract
Rede uitgesproken bij het afscheid als hoogleraar Vergelijkende taalpsychologie aan de Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op donderdag 20 september 2012 -
Cutler, A. (2012). Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Abstract
Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field. -
Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (
Ed. ), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer. -
Cutler, A. (1982). Prosody and sentence perception in English. In J. Mehler, E. C. Walker, & M. Garrett (
Eds. ), Perspectives on mental representation: Experimental and theoretical studies of cognitive processes and capacities (pp. 201-216). Hillsdale, N.J: Erlbaum. -
Cutler, A. (
Ed. ). (1982). Slips of the tongue and language production. The Hague: Mouton. -
Cutler, A. (1982). Speech errors: A classified bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
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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., & Narasimhan, B. (2012). The acquisition of information structure. In M. Krifka, & R. Musan (
Eds. ), The expression of information structure (pp. 319-362). Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin. -
Dimroth, C., & Haberzettl, S. (2012). The older the better, or more is more: Language acquisition in childhood. In M. Watorek, S. Benazzo, & M. Hickmann (
Eds. ), Comparative perspectives on language acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue (pp. 324-349). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. -
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. (2012). Kleurt taal je wereldbeeld? Over de relatie tussen taal en denken. In M. Boogaard, & M. Jansen (
Eds. ), Alles wat je altijd al had willen weten over taal: De taalcanon (pp. 209-211). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.Abstract
Mensen groeien op in verschillende omgevingen, met verschillende ervaringen en verschillende talen. Betekent dat ook dat ze verschillend denken? En als er invloed is van taal op denken, hoe ver reikt die dan? Wordt ons denken begrensd door woorden, of is de invloed meer gematigd en kunnen we er soms zelfs aan ontkomen? -
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. -
Drude, S. (2012). Prospects for e-grammars and endangered languages corpora. In F. Seifart, G. Haig, N. P. Himmelmann, D. Jung, A. Margetts, & P. Trilsbeek (
Eds. ), Potentials of language documentation: Methods, analyses, and utilization (pp. 7-16). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.Abstract
This contribution explores the potentials of combining corpora of language use data with language description in e-grammars (or digital grammars). We present three directions of ongoing research and discuss the advantages of combining these and similar approaches, arguing that the technological possibilities have barely begun to be explored. -
Ehrich, V., & Levelt, W. J. M. (
Eds. ). (1982). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.3 1982. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics. -
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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Eisner, F. (2012). Perceptual learning in speech. In N. M. Seel (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. Part 16 (2nd. ed., pp. 2583-2584). Berlin: Springer.Abstract
Definition Perceptual learning in speech describes a change in the mapping from acoustic cues in the speech signal to abstract linguistic representations. Learning leads to a lasting benefit to the listener by improving speech comprehension. The change can occur as a response to a specific feature (such as a talker- or accent idiosyncrasy) or to a global degradation of the signal (such as in synthesized or compressed speech). In perceptual learning, a top-down process is involved in causing the change, whereas purely bottom-up, signal-driven phenomena are considered to be adaptation. -
Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., & De Ruiter, J. (2012). Epistemic dimensions of polar questions: Sentence-final particles in comparative perspective. In J. P. De Ruiter (
Ed. ), Questions: Formal, functional and interactional perspectives (pp. 193-221). New York: 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. -
Ernestus, M. (2016). L'utilisation des corpus oraux pour la recherche en (psycho)linguistique. In M. Kilani-Schoch, C. Surcouf, & A. Xanthos (
Eds. ), Nouvelles technologies et standards méthodologiques en linguistique (pp. 65-93). Lausanne: Université de Lausanne. -
Ernestus, M. (2012). Segmental within-speaker variation. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. K. Huffman (
Eds. ), The Oxford handbook of laboratory phonology (pp. 93-102). New York: Oxford University Press. -
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. -
Fisher, S. E. (2016). A molecular genetic perspective on speech and language. In G. Hickok, & S. Small (
Eds. ), Neurobiology of Language (pp. 13-24). Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-407794-2.00002-X.Abstract
The rise of genomic technologies has yielded exciting new routes for studying the biological foundations of language. Researchers have begun to identify genes implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders that disrupt speech and language skills. This chapter illustrates how such work can provide powerful entry points into the critical neural pathways using FOXP2 as an example. Rare mutations of this gene cause problems with learning to sequence mouth movements during speech, accompanied by wide-ranging impairments in language production and comprehension. FOXP2 encodes a regulatory protein, a hub in a network of other genes, several of which have also been associated with language-related impairments. Versions of FOXP2 are found in similar form in many vertebrate species; indeed, studies of animals and birds suggest conserved roles in the development and plasticity of certain sets of neural circuits. Thus, the contributions of this gene to human speech and language involve modifications of evolutionarily ancient functions. -
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. (2016). Insubordination in Interaction: The Cha’palaa counter-assertive. In N. Evans, & H. Wananabe (
Eds. ), Dynamics of Insubordination (pp. 341-366). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Abstract
In the Cha’palaa language of Ecuador the main-clause use of the otherwise non-finite morpheme -ba can be accounted for by a specific interactive practice: the ‘counter-assertion’ of statement or implicature of a previous conversational turn. Attention to the ways in which different constructions are deployed in such recurrent conversational contexts reveals a plausible account for how this type of dependent clause has come to be one of the options for finite clauses. After giving some background on Cha’palaa and placing ba clauses within a larger ecology of insubordination constructions in the language, this chapter uses examples from a video corpus of informal conversation to illustrate how interactive data provides answers that may otherwise be elusive for understanding how the different grammatical options for Cha’palaa finite verb constructions have been structured by insubordination -
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. -
Floyd, S., & Norcliffe, E. (2016). Switch reference systems in the Barbacoan languages and their neighbors. In R. Van Gijn, & J. Hammond (
Eds. ), Switch Reference 2.0 (pp. 207-230). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This chapter surveys the available data on Barbacoan languages and their neighbors to explore a case study of switch reference within a single language family and in a situation of areal contact. To the extent possible given the available data, we weigh accounts appealing to common inheritance and areal convergence to ask what combination of factors led to the current state of these languages. We discuss the areal distribution of switch reference systems in the northwest Andean region, the different types of systems and degrees of complexity observed, and scenarios of contact and convergence, particularly in the case of Barbacoan and Ecuadorian Quechua. We then covers each of the Barbacoan languages’ systems (with the exception of Totoró, represented by its close relative Guambiano), identifying limited formal cognates, primarily between closely-related Tsafiki and Cha’palaa, as well as broader functional similarities, particularly in terms of interactions with topic/focus markers. n accounts for the current state of affairs with a complex scenario of areal prevalence of switch reference combined with deep structural family inheritance and formal re-structuring of the systems over time -
Gaby, A. (2012). The Thaayorre lexicon of putting and taking. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 233-252). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper investigates the lexical semantics and relative distributions of verbs describing putting and taking events in Kuuk Thaayorre, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York (Australia). Thaayorre put/take verbs can be subcategorised according to whether they may combine with an NP encoding a goal, an NP encoding a source, or both. Goal NPs are far more frequent in natural discourse: initial analysis shows 85% of goal-oriented verb tokens to be accompanied by a goal NP, while only 31% of source-oriented verb tokens were accompanied by a source. This finding adds weight to Ikegami’s (1987) assertion of the conceptual primacy of goals over sources, reflected in a cross-linguistic dissymmetry whereby goal-marking is less marked and more widely used than source-marking. -
Gordon, P. C., Lowder, M. W., & Hoedemaker, R. S. (2016). Reading in normally aging adults. In H. Wright (
Ed. ), Cognitive-Linguistic Processes and Aging (pp. 165-192). Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/z.200.07gor.Abstract
The activity of reading raises fundamental theoretical and practical questions about healthy cognitive aging. Reading relies greatly on knowledge of patterns of language and of meaning at the level of words and topics of text. Further, this knowledge must be rapidly accessed so that it can be coordinated with processes of perception, attention, memory and motor control that sustain skilled reading at rates of four-to-five words a second. As such, reading depends both on crystallized semantic intelligence which grows or is maintained through healthy aging, and on components of fluid intelligence which decline with age. Reading is important to older adults because it facilitates completion of everyday tasks that are essential to independent living. In addition, it entails the kind of active mental engagement that can preserve and deepen the cognitive reserve that may mitigate the negative consequences of age-related changes in the brain. This chapter reviews research on the front end of reading (word recognition) and on the back end of reading (text memory) because both of these abilities are surprisingly robust to declines associated with cognitive aging. For word recognition, that robustness is surprising because rapid processing of the sort found in reading is usually impaired by aging; for text memory, it is surprising because other types of episodic memory performance (e.g., paired associates) substantially decline in aging. These two otherwise quite different levels of reading comprehension remain robust because they draw on the knowledge of language that older adults gain through a life-time of experience with language. -
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. -
Gullberg, M. (1998). Gesture as a communication strategy in second language discourse: A study of learners of French and Swedish. Lund: Lund University Press.
Abstract
Gestures are often regarded as the most typical compensatory device used by language learners in communicative trouble. Yet gestural solutions to communicative problems have rarely been studied within any theory of second language use. The work presented in this volume aims to account for second language learners’ strategic use of speech-associated gestures by combining a process-oriented framework for communication strategies with a cognitive theory of gesture. Two empirical studies are presented. The production study investigates Swedish learners of French and French learners of Swedish and their use of strategic gestures. The results, which are based on analyses of both individual and group behaviour, contradict popular opinion as well as theoretical assumptions from both fields. Gestures are not primarily used to replace speech, nor are they chiefly mimetic. Instead, learners use gestures with speech, and although they do exploit mimetic gestures to solve lexical problems, they also use more abstract gestures to handle discourse-related difficulties and metalinguistic commentary. The influence of factors such as proficiency, task, culture, and strategic competence on gesture use is discussed, and the oral and gestural strategic modes are compared. In the evaluation study, native speakers’ assessments of learners’ gestures, and the potential effect of gestures on evaluations of proficiency are analysed and discussed in terms of individual communicative style. Compensatory gestures function at multiple communicative levels. This has implications for theories of communication strategies, and an expansion of the existing frameworks is discussed taking both cognitive and interactive aspects into account. -
Gullberg, M., & Burenhult, N. (2012). Probing the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 167-182). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper explores the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish. Drawing on elicited spoken data, it provides a unified approach to caused motion descriptions. The results show uniform syntactic behaviour of placement and removal descriptions and a consistent asymmetry between placement and removal in the semantic specificity of verbs. The results also reveal three further semantic patterns, pertaining to the nature of the relationship between Figure and Ground, that appear to account for how these event types are characterised, viz. whether the Ground is represented by a body part of the Agent; whether the Figure is contained within the Ground; or whether it is supported by the Ground. -
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. (2012). From ants to music and language [Preface]. In A. D. Patel, Music, language, and the brain [Chinese translation] (pp. 9-10). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press Ltd.
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Hagoort, P. (2016). MUC (Memory, Unification, Control): A Model on the Neurobiology of Language Beyond Single Word Processing. In G. Hickok, & S. Small (
Eds. ), Neurobiology of language (pp. 339-347). Amsterdam: Elsever. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-407794-2.00028-6.Abstract
A neurobiological model of language is discussed that overcomes the shortcomings of the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. It is based on a subdivision of language processing into three components: Memory, Unification, and Control. The functional components as well as the neurobiological underpinnings of the model are discussed. In addition, the need for extension beyond the classical core regions for language is shown. Attentional networks as well as networks for inferential processing are crucial to realize language comprehension beyond single word processing and beyond decoding propositional content. -
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. -
Hagoort, P. (2016). Zij zijn ons brein. In J. Brockman (
Ed. ), Machines die denken: Invloedrijke denkers over de komst van kunstmatige intelligentie (pp. 184-186). Amsterdam: Maven Publishing. -
Hallé, P., & Cristia, A. (2012). Global and detailed speech representations in early language acquisition. In S. Fuchs, M. Weirich, D. Pape, & P. Perrier (
Eds. ), Speech planning and dynamics (pp. 11-38). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Abstract
We review data and hypotheses dealing with the mental representations for perceived and produced speech that infants build and use over the course of learning a language. In the early stages of speech perception and vocal production, before the emergence of a receptive or a productive lexicon, the dominant picture emerging from the literature suggests rather non-analytic representations based on units of the size of the syllable: Young children seem to parse speech into syllable-sized units in spite of their ability to detect sound equivalence based on shared phonetic features. Once a productive lexicon has emerged, word form representations are initially rather underspecified phonetically but gradually become more specified with lexical growth, up to the phoneme level. The situation is different for the receptive lexicon, in which phonetic specification for consonants and vowels seem to follow different developmental paths. Consonants in stressed syllables are somewhat well specified already at the first signs of a receptive lexicon, and become even better specified with lexical growth. Vowels seem to follow a different developmental path, with increasing flexibility throughout lexical development. Thus, children come to exhibit a consonant vowel asymmetry in lexical representations, which is clear in adult representations. -
Hammarström, H. (2012). A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis. In S. Wichmann, & A. P. Grant (
Eds. ), Quantitative approaches to linguistic diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh (pp. 7-22). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010) One attempt at explaining why some language families are large (while others are small) is the hypothesis that the families that are now large became large because their ancestral speakers had a technological advantage, most often agriculture. Variants of this idea are referred to as the Language Farming Dispersal Hypothesis. Previously, detailed language family studies have uncovered various supporting examples and counterexamples to this idea. In the present paper I weigh the evidence from ALL attested language families. For each family, I use the number of member languages as a measure of cardinal size, member language coordinates to measure geospatial size and ethnographic evidence to assess subsistence status. This data shows that, although agricultural families tend to be larger in cardinal size, their size is hardly due to the simple presence of farming. If farming were responsible for language family expansions, we would expect a greater east-west geospatial spread of large families than is actually observed. The data, however, is compatible with weaker versions of the farming dispersal hypothesis as well with models where large families acquire farming because of their size, rather than the other way around. -
Hammarström, H., & Nordhoff, S. (2012). The languages of Melanesia: Quantifying the level of coverage. In N. Evans, & M. Klamer (
Eds. ), Melanesian languages on the edge of Asia: Challenges for the 21st Century (pp. 13-33). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4559.Additional information
hammarström_2012_appendix.pdf -
Heeschen, V., Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Grammer, K., Schiefenhövel, W., & Senft, G. (1986). Sprachliches Verhalten. In Generalverwaltung der MPG (
Ed. ), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Jahrbuch 1986 (pp. 394-396). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. -
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. -
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. -
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2012). Placement and removal events in Basque and Spanish. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 123-144). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper examines how placement and removal events are lexicalised and conceptualised in Basque and Peninsular Spanish. After a brief description of the main linguistic devices employed for the coding of these types of events, the paper discusses how speakers of the two languages choose to talk about these events. Finally, the paper focuses on two aspects that seem to be crucial in the description of these events (1) the role of force dynamics: both languages distinguish between different degrees of force, causality, and intentionality, and (2) the influence of the verb-framed lexicalisation pattern. Data come from six Basque and ten Peninsular Spanish native speakers. -
Indefrey, P. (2012). Hemodynamic studies of syntactic processing. In M. Faust (
Ed. ), Handbook of the neuropsychology of language. Volume 1: Language processing in the brain: Basic science (pp. 209-228). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. -
Irizarri van Suchtelen, P. (2012). Dative constructions in the Spanish of heritage speakers in the Netherlands. In Z. Wąsik, & P. P. Chruszczewski (
Eds. ), Languages in contact 2011 (pp. 103-118). Wrocław: Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław Publishing.Abstract
Spanish can use dative as well as non-dative strategies to encode Possessors, Human Sources, Interestees (datives of interest) and Experiencers. In Dutch this optionality is virtually absent, restricting dative encoding mainly to the Recipient of a ditransitive. The present study examines whether this may lead to instability of the non-prototypical dative constructions in the Spanish of Dutch-Spanish bilinguals. Elicited data of 12 Chilean heritage informants from the Netherlands were analyzed. Whereas the evidence on the stability of dative Experiencers was not conclusive, the results indicate that the use of prototypical datives, dative External Possessors, dative Human Sources and datives of interest is fairly stable in bilinguals, except for those with limited childhood exposure to Spanish. It is argued that the consistent preference for non-dative strategies of this group was primarily attributable to instability of the dative clitic, which affected all constructions, even the encoding of prototypical indirect objects -
Ishibashi, M. (2012). The expression of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ events in Japanese: The asymmetry of Source and Goal revisited. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (
Eds. ), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 253-272). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This study explores the expression of Source and Goal in describing placement and removal events in adult Japanese. Although placement and removal events a priori represent symmetry regarding the orientation of motion, their (c)overt expressions actually exhibit multiple asymmetries at various structural levels. The results show that the expression of the Source is less frequent than the expression of the Goal, but, if expressed, morphosyntactically more complex, suggesting that ‘taking’ events are more complex than ‘putting’ events in their construal. It is stressed that finer linguistic analysis is necessary before explaining linguistic asymmetries in terms of non-linguistic foundations of spatial language. -
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. -
Jordens, P. (2012). Language acquisition and the functional category system. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Abstract
Research on spontaneous language acquisition both in children learning their mother tongue and in adults learning a second language has shown that language development proceeds in a stagewise manner. Learner utterances are accounted for in terms of so-called 'learner languages'. Learner languages of both children and adults are language systems that are initially rather simple. The present monograph shows how these learner languages develop both in child L1 and in adult L2 Dutch. At the initial stage of both L1 and L2 Dutch, learner systems are lexical systems. This means that utterance structure is determined by the lexical projection of a predicate-argument structure, while the functional properties of the target language are absent. At some point in acquisition, this lexical-semantic system develops into a target-like system. With this target-like system, learners have reached a stage at which their language system has the morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness and topicality. Evidence of this is word order variation and the use of linguistic elements such as auxiliaries, tense, and agreement markers and determiners. Looking at this process of language acquisition from a functional point of view, the author focuses on questions such as the following. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a functional-pragmatic one? What is the added value of linguistic features such as the morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word order variation, and definiteness? -
Kempen, G. (1986). Beyond word processing. In E. Cluff, & G. Bunting (
Eds. ), Information management yearbook 1986 (pp. 178-181). London: IDPM Publications. -
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. (1986). Kunstmatige intelligentie en gezond verstand. In P. Hagoort, & R. Maessen (
Eds. ), Geest, computer, kunst (pp. 118-123). Utrecht: Stichting Grafiet. -
Kempen, G., & Takens, R. (
Eds. ). (1986). Psychologie, informatica en informatisering. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. -
Kempen, G. (1998). Sentence parsing. In A. D. Friederici (
Ed. ), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 213-228). Berlin: Springer. -
Ketrez, F. N., Kuntay, A. C., Ozcaliskan, S., & Ozyurek, A. (
Eds. ). (2017). Social environment and cognition in language development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koc. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Abstract
Language development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe -
Kirschenbaum, A., Wittenburg, P., & Heyer, G. (2012). Unsupervised morphological analysis of small corpora: First experiments with Kilivila. In F. Seifart, G. Haig, N. P. Himmelmann, D. Jung, A. Margetts, & P. Trilsbeek (
Eds. ), Potentials of language documentation: Methods, analyses, and utilization (pp. 32-38). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.Abstract
Language documentation involves linguistic analysis of the collected material, which is typically done manually. Automatic methods for language processing usually require large corpora. The method presented in this paper uses techniques from bioinformatics and contextual information to morphologically analyze raw text corpora. This paper presents initial results of the method when applied on a small Kilivila corpus. -
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. (2012). Auf dem Markt der Wissenschaften oder: Weniger wäre mehr. In K. Sonntag (
Ed. ), Heidelberger Profile. Herausragende Persönlichkeiten berichten über ihre Begegnung mit Heidelberg. (pp. 61-84). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
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