Displaying 1 - 100 of 153
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Ameka, F. K. (2008). Aspect and modality in Ewe: A survey. In F. K. Ameka, & M. E. Kropp Dakubu (
Eds. ), Aspect and modality in Kwa languages (pp. 135-194). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Ameka, F. K. (2008). He died old dying to be dead right: Transitivity and semantic shifts of 'die' in Ewe in crosslinguistic perspective. In M. Bowerman, & P. Brown (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 231-254). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Abstract
This paper examines some of the claims of the Unaccusativity hypothesis.It shows that the supposedly unaccusative ‘die’ verb in Ewe (Kwa), kú can appear as both a one-place and a two-place predicate and has three senses which do not correlate with the number of surface arguments of the verb. For instance, the same sense is involved in both a one-place construction (e.g. she died) and a two-place cognate object construction (she died a wicked death). By contrast, different senses are expressed by formally identical two-place constructions, e.g. ‘the garment die dirt’ (= the garment is dead dirty; intensity) vs., ‘he died ear (to the matter)’ (=he does not want to hear; negative desiderative). The paper explores the learnability problems posed by the non-predictability of the different senses of Ewe ‘die’ from its syntactic frame and suggests that since the meanings are indirectly related to the properties of the event participants, such as animacy, a learner must pay close attention to the properties of the verb’s participants. The paper concludes by demonstrating that the meaning shifts observed in Ewe are also attested in other typologically and genetically unrelated languages such as Japanese, Arrernte (Australian), Oluta (Mixean), Dutch and English. -
Ameka, F. K., & Kropp Dakubu, M. E. (2008). Imperfective constructions: Progressive and prospective in Ewe and Dangme. In F. K. Ameka, & M. E. Kropp Dakubu (
Eds. ), Aspect and modality in Kwa languages (pp. 215-289). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Ameka, F. K., & Kropp Dakubu, M. E. (2008). Introduction. In F. K. Ameka, & M. E. Kropp Dakubu (
Eds. ), Aspect and modality in Kwa languages (pp. 1-7). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Aslin, R., Clayards, M., & Bardhan, N. P. (2008). Mechanisms of auditory reorganization during development: From sounds to words. In C. Nelson, & M. Luciana (
Eds. ), Handbook of developmental cognitive neuroscience (2nd, pp. 97-116). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. -
Behne, T., Carpenter, M., Gräfenhain, M., Liebal, K., Liszkowski, U., Moll, H., Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M., Warneken, F., & Wyman, E. (2008). Cultural learning and cultural creation. In U. Müller, J. Carpendale, N. Budwig, & B. Sokol (
Eds. ), Social life and social knowledge: Toward a process account of development (pp. 65-102). Hove: Psychology Press. -
Bercelli, F., Rossano, F., & Viaro, M. (2008). Clients' responses to therapists' reinterpretations. In A. Peräkylä, C. Antaki, S. Vehviläinen, & I. Leudar (
Eds. ), Conversation analysis and psychotherapy (pp. 43-61). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
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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Bohnemeyer, J. (2008). The pitfalls of getting from here to there. In M. Bowerman, & P. Brown (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure: Implications for Learnability (pp. 49-68). New York City, NY, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. -
Boroditsky, L., Gaby, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2008). Time in space. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 11 (pp. 52-76). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492932.Abstract
How do different languages and cultures conceptualise time? This question is part of a broader set of questions about how humans come to represent and reason about abstract entities – things we cannot see or touch. For example, how do we come to represent and reason about abstract domains like justice, ideas, kinship, morality, or politics? There are two aspects of this project: (1) Time arrangement tasks to assess the way people arrange time either as temporal progressions expressed in picture cards or done using small tokens or points in space. (2) A time & space language inventory to discover and document the linguistic coding of time and its relation to space, as well as the cultural knowledge structures related to time.Additional information
2008_Time_in_space_stimuli.zip -
Bowerman, M., & Croft, W. (2008). The acquisition of the English causative alternation. In M. Bowerman, & P. Brown (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 279-306). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. -
Bowerman, M., & Brown, P. (2008). Introduction. In M. Bowerman, & P. Brown (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 1-26). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Abstract
This chapter outlines two influential "bootstrapping" proposals that draw on presumed universals of argument structure to account for young children's acquisition of grammar (semantic bootstrapping) and verb meaning (syntactic bootstrapping), discusses controversial issues raised by these proposals, and summarizes the new insights contributed to the debate by each of the chapters in this volume. -
Brouwer, S., Cornips, L., & Hulk, A. (2008). Misrepresentation of Dutch neuter gender in older bilingual children? In B. Hazdenar, & E. Gavruseva (
Eds. ), Current trends in child second language acquisition: A generative perspective (pp. 83-96). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Brown, P. (2008). Verb specificity and argument realization in Tzeltal child language. In M. Bowerman, & P. Brown (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability (pp. 167-189). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Abstract
How do children learn a language whose arguments are freely ellipsed? The Mayan language Tzeltal, spoken in southern Mexico, is such a language. The acquisition pattern for Tzeltal is distinctive, in at least two ways: verbs predominate even in children’s very early production vocabulary, and these verbs are often very specific in meaning. This runs counter to the patterns found in most Indo-European languages, where nouns tend to predominate in early vocabulary and children’s first verbs tend to be ‘light’ or semantically general. Here I explore the idea that noun ellipsis and ‘heavy’ verbs are related: the ‘heavy’ verbs restrict the nominal reference and so allow recovery of the ‘missing’ nouns. Using data drawn from videotaped interaction of four Tzeltal children and their caregivers, I examined transitive clauses in an adult input sample and in child speech, and tested the hypothesis that direct object arguments are less likely to be realized overtly with semantically specific verbs than with general verbs. This hypothesis was confirmed, both for the adult input and for the speech of the children (aged 3;4-3;9). It is therefore possible that argument ellipsis could provide a clue to verb semantics (specific vs. general) for the Tzeltal child. -
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. (2015). Language, culture, and spatial cognition. In F. Sharifian (
Ed. ), Routledge Handbook on Language and Culture (pp. 294-309). London: Routledge. -
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. (2015). Space: Linguistic expression of. In J. D. Wright (
Ed. ), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.) Vol. 23 (pp. 89-93). Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.57017-2. -
Brown, P. (2015). Politeness and language. In J. D. Wright (
Ed. ), The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (IESBS), (2nd ed.) (pp. 326-330). Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53072-4. -
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). -
Burkhardt, P. (2008). Dependency precedes independence: Online evidence from discourse processing. In A. Benz, & P. Kühnlein (
Eds. ), Constraints in discourse (pp. 141-158). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper investigates the integration of definite determiner phrases (DPs) as a function of their contextual salience, which is reflected in the degree of dependency on prior information. DPs depend on previously established discourse referents or introduce a new, independent discourse referent. This paper presents a formal model that explains how discourse referents are represented in the language system and what kind of mechanisms are implemented during DP interpretation. Experimental data from an event-related potential study are discussed that demonstrate how definite DPs are integrated in real-time processing. The data provide evidence for two distinct mechanisms – Specify R and Establish Independent File Card – and substantiate a model that includes various processes and constraints at the level of discourse representation. -
Casasanto, D. (2008). Who's afraid of the big bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic differences in temporal language and thought. In P. Indefrey, & M. Gullberg (
Eds. ), Time to speak: Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language (pp. 63-79). Oxford: Wiley.Abstract
The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet, experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time. In this article, I will first analyze an influential argument against the Whorfian hypothesis and show that its anti-Whorfian conclusion is in part an artifact of conflating two distinct questions: Do we think in language? and Does language shape thought? Next, I will discuss crosslinguistic differences in spatial metaphors for time and describe experiments that demonstrate corresponding differences in nonlinguistic mental representations. Finally, I will sketch a simple learning mechanism by which some linguistic relativity effects appear to arise. Although people may not think in language, speakers of different languages develop distinctive conceptual repertoires as a consequence of ordinary and presumably universal neural and cognitive processes. -
Chen, A. (2015). Children’s use of intonation in reference and the role of input. In L. Serratrice, & S. E. M. Allen (
Eds. ), The acquisition of reference (pp. 83-104). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
Studies on children’s use of intonation in reference are few in number but are diverse in terms of theoretical frameworks and intonational parameters. In the current review, I present a re-analysis of the referents in each study, using a three-dimension approach (i.e. referential givenness-newness, relational givenness-newness, contrast), discuss the use of intonation at two levels (phonetic, phonological), and compare findings from different studies within a single framework. The patterns stemming from these studies may be limited in generalisability but can serve as initial hypotheses for future work. Furthermore, I examine the role of input as available in infant direct speech in the acquisition of intonational encoding of referents. In addition, I discuss how future research can advance our knowledge.Files private
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Collins, J. (2015). ‘Give’ and semantic maps. In B. Nolan, G. Rawoens, & E. Diedrichsen (
Eds. ), Causation, permission, and transfer: Argument realisation in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs (pp. 129-146). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. -
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. (1983). Lexical complexity and sentence processing. In G. B. Flores d'Arcais, & R. J. Jarvella (
Eds. ), The process of language understanding (pp. 43-79). Chichester, Sussex: Wiley. -
Cutler, A. (2015). Lexical stress in English pronunciation. In M. Reed, & J. M. Levis (
Eds. ), The Handbook of English Pronunciation (pp. 106-124). Chichester: Wiley. -
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. (1983). Speakers’ conceptions of the functions of prosody. In A. Cutler, & D. R. Ladd (
Eds. ), Prosody: Models and measurements (pp. 79-91). Heidelberg: Springer. -
Dimroth, C. (2008). Perspectives on second language acquisition at different ages. In J. Philp, R. Oliver, & A. Mackey (
Eds. ), Second language acquisition and the younger learner: Child's play? (pp. 53-79). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
Empirical studies addressing the age factor in second language acquisition have mainly been concerned with a comparison of end state data (from learners before and after the closure of a putative Critical Period for language acquisition) to the native speaker norm. Based on longitudinal corpus data, this paper investigates the affect of age on end state, rate and the process of acquisition and addresses the question of whether different grammatical domains are equally affected. To this end, the paper presents summarized findings from the acquisition of word order and inflectional morphology in L2 German by Russian learners of different ages and discusses theoretical implications that can be drawn from this evidence. -
Dimroth, C., & Haberzettl, S. (2008). Je älter desto besser: Der Erwerb der Verbflexion in Kindesalter. In B. Ahrenholz, U. Bredel, W. Klein, M. Rost-Roth, & R. Skiba (
Eds. ), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung: Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, Gesprochene-Sprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar (pp. 227-238). Frankfurt am Main: Lang. -
Dimroth, C. (2008). Kleine Unterschiede in den Lernvoraussetzungen beim ungesteuerten Zweitspracherwerb: Welche Bereiche der Zielsprache Deutsch sind besonders betroffen? In B. Ahrenholz (
Ed. ), Kinder und Migrationshintergrund: Spracherwerb und Fördermöglichkeiten (pp. 117-133). Freiburg: Fillibach. -
Dingemanse, M., Hill, C., Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2008). Ethnography of the senses. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 11 (pp. 18-28). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492935.Abstract
This entry provides some orientation and task suggestions on how to explore the perceptual world of your field site and the interaction between the cultural world and the sensory lexicon in your community. The material consists of procedural texts; soundscapes; other documentary and observational tasks. The goal of this task is to explore the perceptual world of your field site and the interaction between the cultural world and the sensory lexicon in your community. -
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In J. Essegbey, B. Henderson, & F. Mc Laughlin (
Eds. ), Language documentation and endangerment in Africa (pp. 215-238). Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/clu.17.09din.Abstract
Informal paraphrases by native speaker consultants are crucial tools in linguistic fieldwork. When recorded, archived, and analysed, they offer rich data that can be mined for many purposes, from lexicography to semantic typology and from ethnography to the investigation of gesture and speech. This paper describes a procedure for the collection and analysis of folk definitions that are native (in the language under study rather than the language of analysis), informal (spoken rather than written), and multi-modal (preserving the integrity of gesture-speech composite utterances). The value of folk definitions is demonstrated using the case of ideophones, words that are notoriously hard to study using traditional elicitation methods. Three explanatory strategies used in a set of folk definitions of ideophones are examined: the offering of everyday contexts of use, the use of depictive gestures, and the use of sense relations as semantic anchoring points. Folk definitions help elucidate word meanings that are hard to capture, bring to light cultural background knowledge that often remains implicit, and take seriously the crucial involvement of native speaker consultants in linguistic fieldwork. They provide useful data for language documentation and are an essential element of any toolkit for linguistic and ethnographic field research. -
Drude, S. (2008). Die Personenpräfixe des Guaraní und ihre lexikographische Behandlung. In W. Dietrich, & H. Symeonidis (
Eds. ), Geschichte und Aktualität der deutschsprachigen Guaraní-Philologie: Akten der Guaraní-Tagung in Kiel und Berlin 25.-27. Mai 2000 (pp. 198-234). Berlin: Lit Verlag.Abstract
Der vorliegende Beitrag zum Kieler Symposium1 stellt die Resultate eines Teilbereichs meiner Arbeit zum Guarani vor, nämlich einen Vorschlag zur Analyse der Personenpräfixe dieser Sprache und der mit ihnen verbundenen grammatischen Kategorien. Die im Titel angedeutete lexikographische Fragestellung bedarf einer näheren Erläuterung, die ich im Zusammenhang mit einer kurzen Darstellung der Motivation für meine Untersuchungen geben will -
Drude, S. (2008). Inflectional units and their effects: The case of verbal prefixes in Guaraní. In R. Sackmann (
Ed. ), Explorations in integrational linguistics: Four essays on German, French, and Guaraní (pp. 153-189). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
With the present essay I pursue a threefold aim as will be explained in the following paragraphs. Since I cannot expect my readers to be familiar with the language studied, Guaran´ı, more information about this language will be given in the next subsection. -
Drude, S. (2008). Tense, aspect and mood in Awetí verb paradigms: Analytic and synthetic forms. In K. D. Harrison, D. S. Rood, & A. Dwyer (
Eds. ), Lessons from documented endangered languages (pp. 67-110). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper describes the verbal Tense-Aspect-Mood system of Awetí (Tupian, Central Brazil) in a Word-and-Paradigm approach. One classification of Awetí verb forms contains clear aspect categories. A second set of independent classifications renders at least four moods and contains a third major TAM classification, factuality, that has one mainly temporal category Future, while others are partially or wholly modal. Structural categories reflect the formal composition of the forms. Some forms are synthetic, ‘marked’ only by means of affixes, but many are analytic, containing auxiliary particles. With selected sample forms we demonstrate in detail the interplay of structural and functional categories in Awetí verb paradigms. -
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., & Scott, S. K. (2008). Speech and auditory processing in the cortex: Evidence from functional neuroimaging. In A. Cacace, & D. McFarland (
Eds. ), Controversies in central auditory processing disorder. San Diego, Ca: Plural Publishing. -
Enfield, N. J. (2008). Verbs and multi-verb construction in Lao. In A. V. Diller, J. A. Edmondson, & Y. Luo (
Eds. ), The Tai-Kadai languages (pp. 83-183). London: Routledge. -
Enfield, N. J., & Majid, A. (2008). Constructions in 'language and perception'. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 11 (pp. 11-17). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492949.Abstract
This field guide is for eliciting information about grammatical resources used in describing perceptual events and perception-based properties and states. A list of leading questions outlines an underlying semantic space for events/states of perception, against which language-specific constructions may be defined. It should be used as an entry point into a flexible exploration of the structures and constraints which are specific to the language you are working on. The goal is to provide a cross-linguistically comparable description of the constructions of a language used in describing perceptual events and states. The core focus is to discover any sensory asymmetries, i.e., ways in which different sensory modalities are treated differently with respect to these constructions. -
Enfield, N. J. (2008). Common ground as a resource for social affiliation. In I. Kecskes, & J. L. Mey (
Eds. ), Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer (pp. 223-254). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Enfield, N. J. (2008). Lao linguistics in the 20th century and since. In Y. Goudineau, & M. Lorrillard (
Eds. ), Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos (pp. 435-452). Paris: EFEO. -
Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2008). Metalanguage for speech acts. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 11 (pp. 77-79). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492937.Abstract
People of all cultures have some degree of concern with categorizing types of communicative social action. All languages have words with meanings like speak, say, talk, complain, curse, promise, accuse, nod, wink, point and chant. But the exact distinctions they make will differ in both quantity and quality. How is communicative social action categorised across languages and cultures? The goal of this task is to establish a basis for cross-linguistic comparison of native metalanguages for social action.Additional information
http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2008/metalanguage-for-speech-acts-2/ -
Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., & Stivers, T. (2008). Social action formulation: A "10-minutes" task. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 11 (pp. 80-81). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492939.Abstract
This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2009 version: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.883564Files private
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Ernestus, M., & Giezenaar, G. (2015). Een goed verstaander heeft maar een half woord nodig. In B. Bossers (
Ed. ), Klassiek vakwerk II: Achtergronden van het NT2-onderwijs (pp. 143-155). Amsterdam: Boom. -
Fawcett, C., & Liszkowski, U. (2015). Social referencing during infancy and early childhood across cultures. In J. D. Wright (
Ed. ), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 556-562). doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.23169-3. -
Filippi, P. (2015). Before Babel: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Language. In E. Velmezova, K. Kull, & S. J. Cowley (
Eds. ), Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics (pp. 191-204). Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20663-9_10.Abstract
The aim of the present work is to identify the evolutionary origins of the ability to speak and understand a natural language. I will adopt Botha’s “Windows Approach” (Language and Communication, 2006, 26, pp. 129–143) in order to justify the following two assumptions, which concern the evolutionary continuity between human language and animals’ communication systems: (a) despite the uniqueness of human language in sharing and conveying utterances with an open-ended structure, some isolated components of our linguistic competence are shared with non- human primates, grounding a line of evolutionary continuity; (b) the very first “linguistic” utterances were holistic, that is, whole bunches of sounds able to convey information despite their lack of modern syntax. I will address such suppositions through the comparative analysis of three constitutive features of human language: syntax, the semantic value of utterances, and the ability to attribute mental states to conspecifics, i.e. the theory of mind. -
Fisher, S. E. (2015). Translating the genome in human neuroscience. In G. Marcus, & J. Freeman (
Eds. ), The future of the brain: Essays by the world's leading neuroscientists (pp. 149-159). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. -
Le Guen, O., Senft, G., & Sicoli, M. A. (2008). Language of perception: Views from anthropology. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 11 (pp. 29-36). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.446079.Abstract
To understand the underlying principles of categorisation and classification of sensory input semantic analyses must be based on both language and culture. The senses are not only physiological phenomena, but they are also linguistic, cultural, and social. The goal of this task is to explore and describe sociocultural patterns relating language of perception, ideologies of perception, and perceptual practice in our speech communities. -
Gullberg, M. (2008). A helping hand? Gestures, L2 learners, and grammar. In S. G. McCafferty, & G. Stam (
Eds. ), Gesture: Second language acquisition and classroom research (pp. 185-210). New York: Routledge.Abstract
This chapter explores what L2 learners' gestures reveal about L2 grammar. The focus is on learners’ difficulties with maintaining reference in discourse caused by their incomplete mastery of pronouns. The study highlights the systematic parallels between properties of L2 speech and gesture, and the parallel effects of grammatical development in both modalities. The validity of a communicative account of interlanguage grammar in this domain is tested by taking the cohesive properties of the gesture-speech ensemble into account. Specifically, I investigate whether learners use gestures to compensate for and to license over-explicit reference in speech. The results rule out a communicative account for the spoken variety of maintained reference. In contrast, cohesive gestures are found to be multi-functional. While the presence of cohesive gestures is not communicatively motivated, their spatial realisation is. It is suggested that gestures are exploited as a grammatical communication strategy to disambiguate speech wherever possible, but that they may also be doing speaker-internal work. The methodological importance of considering L2 gestures when studying grammar is also discussed. -
Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2008). Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language: Any answers? In P. Indefrey, & M. Gullberg (
Eds. ), Time to speak: Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language (pp. 207-216). Oxford: Blackwell. -
Gullberg, M. (2008). Gestures and second language acquisition. In P. Robinson, & N. C. Ellis (
Eds. ), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 276-305). New York: Routledge.Abstract
Gestures, the symbolic movements speakers perform while they speak, are systematically related to speech and language at multiple levels, and reflect cognitive and linguistic activities in non-trivial ways. This chapter presents an overview of what gestures can tell us about the processes of second language acquisition. It focuses on two key aspects, (a) gestures and the developing language system and (b) gestures and learning, and discusses some implications of an expanded view of language acquisition that takes gestures into account. -
Hagoort, P., Ramsey, N. F., & Jensen, O. (2008). De gereedschapskist van de cognitieve neurowetenschap. In F. Wijnen, & F. Verstraten (
Eds. ), Het brein te kijk: Verkenning van de cognitieve neurowetenschap (pp. 41-75). Amsterdam: Harcourt Assessment. -
Hagoort, P. (2015). Het talige brein. In A. Aleman, & H. E. Hulshoff Pol (
Eds. ), Beeldvorming van het brein: Imaging voor psychiaters en psychologen (pp. 169-176). Utrecht: De Tijdstroom. -
Hagoort, P. (2015). Spiegelneuronen. In J. Brockmann (
Ed. ), Wetenschappelijk onkruid: 179 hardnekkige ideeën die vooruitgang blokkeren (pp. 455-457). Amsterdam: Maven Publishing. -
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. (2008). Über Broca, Gehirn und Bindung. In Jahrbuch 2008: Tätigkeitsberichte der Institute. München: Generalverwaltung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Retrieved from http://www.mpg.de/306524/forschungsSchwerpunkt1?c=166434.
Abstract
Beim Sprechen und beim Sprachverstehen findet man die Wortbedeutung im Gedächtnis auf und kombiniert sie zu größeren Einheiten (Unifikation). Solche Unifikations-Operationen laufen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen der Sprachverarbeitung ab. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Rahmen vorgeschlagen, in dem psycholinguistische Modelle mit neurobiologischer Sprachbetrachtung in Verbindung gebracht werden. Diesem Vorschlag zufolge spielt der linke inferiore frontale Gyrus (LIFG) eine bedeutende Rolle bei der Unifi kation -
Hall-Lew, L., Fairs, A., & Lew, A. D. (2015). Tourists' Attitudes towards Linguistic Variation in Scotland. In E. Togersen, S. Hårstad, B. Maehlum, & U. Røyneland (
Eds. ), Language Variation - European Perspectives V (pp. 99-110). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper joins studies of linguistic variation (e.g. Labov 1972; Dubois & Horvath 2000) and discourse (e.g. Jaworski & Lawson 2005; Jaworski & Pritchard 2005; Thurlow & Jaworski 2010) that consider the intersection between language and tourism. By examining the language attitudes that tourists hold toward linguistic variability in their host community, we find that attitudes differ by context and with respect to tourists’ travel motivations. We suggest that these results are particularly likely in a context like Edinburgh, Scotland, where linguistic variation has an iconic link to place authenticity. We propose that the joint commodification of ‘intelligibility’ and ‘authenticity’ explains this variability. The results raise questions about how the commodity value of travel motivation and the associated context of language use influence language attitudes. -
Hanique, I., Aalders, E., & Ernestus, M. (2015). How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension? In G. Jarema, & G. Libben (
Eds. ), Phonological and phonetic considerations of lexical processing (pp. 15-39). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed. -
Hanulikova, A., & Dietrich, R. (2008). Die variable Coda in der slowakisch-deutschen Interimsprache. In M. Tarvas (
Ed. ), Tradition und Geschichte im literarischen und sprachwissenschaftlichen Kontext (pp. 119-130). Bern: Peter Lang. -
Hintz, F., & Huettig, F. (2015). The complexity of the visual environment modulates language-mediated eye gaze. In R. Mishra, N. Srinivasan, & F. Huettig (
Eds. ), Attention and Vision in Language Processing (pp. 39-55). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3_3.Abstract
Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the impact of the complexity of the visual environment on the likelihood of word-object mapping taking place at phonological, semantic and visual levels of representation during language-mediated visual search. Dutch participants heard spoken target words while looking at four objects embedded in displays of different complexity and indicated the presence or absence of the target object. During filler trials the target objects were present, but during experimental trials they were absent and the display contained various competitor objects. For example, given the target word “beaker”, the display contained a phonological (a beaver, bever), a shape (a bobbin, klos), a semantic (a fork, vork) competitor, and an unrelated distractor (an umbrella, paraplu). When objects were presented in simple four-object displays (Experiment 2), there were clear attentional biases to all three types of competitors replicating earlier research (Huettig and McQueen, 2007). When the objects were embedded in complex scenes including four human-like characters or four meaningless visual shapes (Experiments 1, 3), there were biases in looks to visual and semantic but not to phonological competitors. In both experiments, however, we observed evidence for inhibition in looks to phonological competitors, which suggests that the phonological forms of the objects nevertheless had been retrieved. These findings suggest that phonological word-object mapping is contingent upon the nature of the visual environment and add to a growing body of evidence that the nature of our visual surroundings induces particular modes of processing during language-mediated visual search. -
Huettig, F., Srinivasan, N., & Mishra, R. (2015). Introduction to 'Attention and vision in language processing'. In R. Mishra, N. Srinivasan, & F. Huettig (
Eds. ), Attention and vision in language processing. (pp. V-IX). Berlin: Springer. -
Huettig, F. (2015). Literacy influences cognitive abilities far beyond the mastery of written language. In I. van de Craats, J. Kurvers, & R. van Hout (
Eds. ), Adult literacy, second language, and cognition. LESLLA Proceedings 2014. Nijmegen: Centre for Language Studies.Abstract
Recent experimental evidence from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience shows that reading acquisition has non-trivial consequences for cognitive processes other than reading per se. In the present chapter I present evidence from three areas of cognition: phonological processing, prediction in language processing, and visual search. These findings suggest that literacy on cognition influences are far-reaching. This implies that a good understanding of the dramatic impact of literacy acquisition on the human mind is an important prerequisite for successful education policy development and guidance of educational support. -
Jayez, J., Mongelli, V., Reboul, A., & Van der Henst, J.-B. (2015). Weak and strong triggers. In F. Schwarz (
Ed. ), Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions (pp. 173-194). Berlin: Springer.Abstract
The idea that presupposition triggers have different intrinsic properties has gradually made its way into the literature on presuppositions and become a current assumption in most approaches. The distinctions mentioned in the different works have been based on introspective data, which seem, indeed, very suggestive. In this paper, we take a different look at some of these distinctions by using a simple experimental approach based on judgment of naturalness about sentences in various contexts. We show that the alleged difference between weak (or soft) and strong (or hard) triggers is not as clear as one may wish and that the claim that they belong to different lexical classes of triggers is probably much too strong. -
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., Matsuo, A., & Perdue, C. (2008). Comparing the acquisition of finiteness: A cross-linguistic approach. In B. Ahrenholz, U. Bredel, W. Klein, M. Rost-Roth, & R. Skiba (
Eds. ), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung: Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, Gesprochene-Sprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar (pp. 261-276). Frankfurt am Main: Lang. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2008). Comparing linguistic judgments and corpus frequencies as windows on grammatical competence: A study of argument linearization in German clauses. In A. Steube (
Ed. ), The discourse potential of underspecified structures (pp. 179-192). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Abstract
We present an overview of several corpus studies we carried out into the frequencies of argument NP orderings in the midfield of subordinate and main clauses of German. Comparing the corpus frequencies with grammaticality ratings published by Keller’s (2000), we observe a “grammaticality–frequency gap”: Quite a few argument orderings with zero corpus frequency are nevertheless assigned medium–range grammaticality ratings. We propose an explanation in terms of a two-factor theory. First, we hypothesize that the grammatical induction component needs a sufficient number of exposures to a syntactic pattern to incorporate it into its repertoire of more or less stable rules of grammar. Moderately to highly frequent argument NP orderings are likely have attained this status, but not their zero-frequency counterparts. This is why the latter argument sequences cannot be produced by the grammatical encoder and are absent from the corpora. Secondly, we assumed that an extraneous (nonlinguistic) judgment process biases the ratings of moderately grammatical linear order patterns: Confronted with such structures, the informants produce their own “ideal delivery” variant of the to-be-rated target sentence and evaluate the similarity between the two versions. A high similarity score yielded by this judgment then exerts a positive bias on the grammaticality rating—a score that should not be mistaken for an authentic grammaticality rating. We conclude that, at least in the linearization domain studied here, the goal of gaining a clear view of the internal grammar of language users is best served by a combined strategy in which grammar rules are founded on structures that elicit moderate to high grammaticality ratings and attain at least moderate usage frequencies. -
Kempen, G. (1983). Het artificiële-intelligentieparadigma. Ervaringen met een nieuwe methodologie voor cognitief-psychologisch onderzoek. In J. Raaijmakers, P. Hudson, & A. Wertheim (
Eds. ), Metatheoretische aspekten van de psychonomie (pp. 85-98). Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus. -
Kempen, G. (1983). Natural language facilities in information systems: Asset or liability? In J. Van Apeldoorn (
Ed. ), Man and information technology: Towards friendlier systems (pp. 81-86). Delft University Press. -
Kempen, G. (1998). Sentence parsing. In A. D. Friederici (
Ed. ), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 213-228). Berlin: Springer. -
Klaas, G. (2008). Hints and recommendations concerning field equipment. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 11 (pp. vi-vii). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
Klein, W. (2008). Sprache innerhalb und ausserhalb der Schule. In Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (
Ed. ), Jahrbuch 2007 (pp. 140-150). Darmstadt: Wallstein Verlag. -
Klein, W. (2008). The topic situation. In B. Ahrenholz, U. Bredel, W. Klein, M. Rost-Roth, & R. Skiba (
Eds. ), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung: Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, Gesprochene-Sprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar (pp. 287-305). Frankfurt am Main: Lang. -
Klein, W. (2008). Time in language, language in time. In P. Indefrey, & M. Gullberg (
Eds. ), Time to speak: Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language (pp. 1-12). Oxford: Blackwell. -
Klein, W. (2015). Das Wörterbuch der Zukunft ist kein Wörterbuch. In L. Eichinger (
Ed. ), Sprachwissenschaft im Fokus (pp. 277-295). Berlin: De Gruyter.Abstract
Unter allen Disziplinen, die sich mit der Erforschung der Sprache befassen, ist die Lexikografie die älteste und die für die Allgemeinheit wichtigste. Die ältesten, noch sehr einfachen Wörterbücher finden sich auf 4000 Jahre alten Tontafeln, und wenn sich heute in einem Haushalt überhaupt ein Buch findet, dann ist es wahrscheinlich ein Wörterbuch. In den letzten zwanzig Jahren ist die kommerzielle wie die von öffentlich finanzierten Forschungsstätten betriebene Lexikografie jedoch in einer ernsthafte Krise geraten. Die großen Wörterbuchverlage haben die Arbeit an umfassenden Wörterbüchern weitestgehend eingestellt, weil sie kaum noch gekauft werden; die Akademien geraten mit ihren Langzeitvorhaben in massive Zeit- und Finanzprobleme. Wenn wir nicht auf die umfassende Beschreibung des deutschen Wortschatzes in all einer Vielfalt und seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung verzichten wollen, müssen ganz neue Wege gegangen werden: Wörterbücher im traditionellen Sinne müssen durch digitale lexikalische Systeme ersetzt werden, die das vorhandene lexikalische Wissen integrieren, es schrittweise systematisch ausbauen, eigene Recherchen in verlässlichen Corpora ermöglichen und von jedermann frei über das Internet nutzbar sind. -
Klein, W. (1983). Deixis and spatial orientation in route directions. In H. Pick, & L. Acredolo (
Eds. ), Spatial orientation theory: Research, and application (pp. 283-311). New York: Plenum. -
Klein, W. (1983). Der Ausdruck der Temporalität im ungesteuerten Spracherwerb. In G. Rauh (
Ed. ), Essays on Deixis (pp. 149-168). Tübingen: Narr. -
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. (2008). Mündliche Textproduktion: Informationsorganisation in Texten. In N. Janich (
Ed. ), Textlinguistik: 15 Einführungen (pp. 217-235). Tübingen: Narr Verlag. -
Klein, W. (2015). Lexicology and lexicography. In J. D. Wright (
Ed. ), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.) Vol. 13 (pp. 938-942). Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53059-1. -
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. -
Kooijman, V., Johnson, E. K., & Cutler, A. (2008). Reflections on reflections of infant word recognition. In A. D. Friederici, & G. Thierry (
Eds. ), Early language development: Bridging brain and behaviour (pp. 91-114). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Kruspe, N., Burenhult, N., & Wnuk, E. (2015). Northern Aslian. In P. Sidwell, & M. Jenny (
Eds. ), Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages (pp. 419-474). Leiden: Brill. -
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. -
Ladd, D. R., & Cutler, A. (1983). Models and measurements in the study of prosody. In A. Cutler, & D. R. Ladd (
Eds. ), Prosody: Models and measurements (pp. 1-10). Heidelberg: Springer. -
Lai, V. T., & Narasimhan, B. (2015). Verb representation and thinking-for-speaking effects in Spanish-English bilinguals. In R. G. De Almeida, & C. Manouilidou (
Eds. ), Cognitive science perspectives on verb representation and processing (pp. 235-256). Cham: Springer.Abstract
Speakers of English habitually encode motion events using manner-of-motion verbs (e.g., spin, roll, slide) whereas Spanish speakers rely on path-of-motion verbs (e.g., enter, exit, approach). Here, we ask whether the language-specific verb representations used in encoding motion events induce different modes of “thinking-for-speaking” in Spanish–English bilinguals. That is, assuming that the verb encodes the most salient information in the clause, do bilinguals find the path of motion to be more salient than manner of motion if they had previously described the motion event using Spanish versus English? In our study, Spanish–English bilinguals described a set of target motion events in either English or Spanish and then participated in a nonlinguistic similarity judgment task in which they viewed the target motion events individually (e.g., a ball rolling into a cave) followed by two variants a “same-path” variant such as a ball sliding into a cave or a “same-manner” variant such as a ball rolling away from a cave). Participants had to select one of the two variants that they judged to be more similar to the target event: The event that shared the same path of motion as the target versus the one that shared the same manner of motion. Our findings show that bilingual speakers were more likely to classify two motion events as being similar if they shared the same path of motion and if they had previously described the target motion events in Spanish versus in English. Our study provides further evidence for the “thinking-for-speaking” hypothesis by demonstrating that bilingual speakers can flexibly shift between language-specific construals of the same event “on-the-fly.” -
Lehecka, T. (2015). Collocation and colligation. In J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (
Eds. ), Handbook of Pragmatics Online. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/hop.19.col2. -
Lev-Ari, S. (2015). Adjusting the manner of language processing to the social context: Attention allocation during interactions with non-native speakers. In R. K. Mishra, N. Srinivasan, & F. Huettig (
Eds. ), Attention and Vision in Language Processing (pp. 185-195). New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3_11. -
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. (2015). Levensbericht George Armitage Miller 1920 - 2012. In KNAW levensberichten en herdenkingen 2014 (pp. 38-42). Amsterdam: KNAW.
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Levelt, W. J. M. (2015). Sleeping Beauties. In I. Toivonen, P. Csúrii, & E. Van der Zee (
Eds. ), Structures in the Mind: Essays on Language, Music, and Cognition in Honor of Ray Jackendoff (pp. 235-255). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (2008). What has become of formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics? [Postscript]. In Formal Grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics (pp. 1-17). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Levinson, S. C. (1998). Deixis. In J. L. Mey (
Ed. ), Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp. 200-204). Amsterdam: Elsevier. -
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. (2008). Preface and priorities. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field manual volume 11 (pp. iii-iv). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
Levinson, S. C., Bohnemeyer, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2008). Time and space questionnaire. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 11 (pp. 42-49). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492955.Abstract
This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts, since it would take a long questionnaire to fully explore this; 2. A suggestion about how to collect gestural data that might show us to what extent the spatial and temporal domains, have a psychological continuity. This is really the goal − but you need to do the linguistic work first or in addition. The goal of this task is to explore the extent to which time is conceptualised on a spatial basis. -
Magyari, L. (2008). A mentális lexikon modelljei és a magyar nyelv (Models of mental lexicon and the Hungarian language). In J. Gervain, & C. Pléh (
Eds. ), A láthatatlan nyelv (Invisible Language). Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó.
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