Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 432
  • Adam, R., Orfanidou, E., McQueen, J. M., & Morgan, G. (2011). Sign language comprehension: Insights from misperceptions of different phonological parameters. In R. Channon, & H. Van der Hulst (Eds.), Formational units in sign languages (pp. 87-106). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter and Ishara Press.
  • Allen, G. L., & Haun, D. B. M. (2004). Proximity and precision in spatial memory. In G. Allen (Ed.), Human spatial memory: Remembering where (pp. 41-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Allen, S., Ozyurek, A., Kita, S., Brown, A., Turanli, R., & Ishizuka, T. (2003). Early speech about manner and path in Turkish and English: Universal or language-specific? In B. Beachley, A. Brown, & F. Conlin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 63-72). Somerville (MA): Cascadilla Press.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2003). Prepositions and postpositions in Ewe: Empirical and theoretical considerations. In A. Zibri-Hetz, & P. Sauzet (Eds.), Typologie des langues d'Afrique et universaux de la grammaire (pp. 43-66). Paris: L'Harmattan.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2009). Access rituals in West Africa: An ethnopragmatic perspective. In G. Senft, & E. B. Basso (Eds.), Ritual communication (pp. 127-151). Oxford: Berg.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2003). 'Today is far: Situational anaphors in overlapping clause constructions in Ewe. In M. E. K. Dakubu, & E. K. Osam (Eds.), In Studies in the Languages of the Volta Baisin 1. Proceedings of the Legon-Trondheim Linguistics Project, December 4-6, 2002 (pp. 9-22). Legon: Department of Linguistics University of Ghana.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2009). Likpe. In G. J. Dimmendaal (Ed.), Coding participant marking: Construction types in twelve African languages (pp. 239-280). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Baayen, R. H. (2003). Probabilistic approaches to morphology. In R. Bod, J. Hay, & S. Jannedy (Eds.), Probabilistic linguistics (pp. 229-287). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  • Baayen, R. H., Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Wurm, L., & Schreuder, R. (2003). When word frequencies do not regress towards the mean. In R. Baayen, & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological structure in language processing (pp. 463-484). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Baayen, R. H., McQueen, J. M., Dijkstra, T., & Schreuder, R. (2003). Frequency effects in regular inflectional morphology: Revisiting Dutch plurals. In R. H. Baayen, & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological structure in language processing (pp. 355-390). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Baayen, R. H., McQueen, J. M., Dijkstra, T., & Schreuder, R. (2003). Frequency effects in regular inflectional morphology: Revisiting Dutch plurals. In R. H. Baayen, & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological Structure in Language Processing (pp. 355-390). Berlin, Germany: Mouton De Gruyter.
  • Basso, E. B., & Senft, G. (2009). Introduction. In G. Senft, & E. B. Basso (Eds.), Ritual communication (pp. 1-19). Oxford: Berg.
  • Bauer, B. L. M., & Pinault, G.-J. (2003). Introduction: Werner Winter, ad multos annos. In B. L. M. Bauer, & G.-J. Pinault (Eds.), Language in time and space: A festschrift for Werner Winter on the occasion of his 80th birthday (pp. xxiii-xxv). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Residues as an aid in internal reconstruction. In J. E. Rasmussen, & T. Olander (Eds.), Internal reconstruction in Indo-European: Methods, results, and problems (pp. 17-31). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Strategies of definiteness in Latin: Implications for early Indo-European. In V. Bubenik, J. Hewson, & S. Rose (Eds.), Grammatical change in Indo-European languages: Papers presented at the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the XVIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 2007 (pp. 71-87). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2011). Word formation. In M. Maiden, J. C. Smith, & A. Ledgeway (Eds.), The Cambridge history of the Romance languages. Vol. I. structures (pp. 532-563). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Word order. In P. Baldi, & P. Cuzzolin (Eds.), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax: Vol 1: Syntax of the Sentence (pp. 241-316). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Blumstein, S., & Cutler, A. (2003). Speech perception: Phonetic aspects. In W. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of linguistics (pp. 151-154). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Blythe, J. (2011). Laughter is the best medicine: Roles for prosody in a Murriny Patha conversational narrative. In B. Baker, I. Mushin, M. Harvey, & R. Gardner (Eds.), Indigenous Language and Social Identity: Papers in Honour of Michael Walsh (pp. 223-236). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2003). The unique vector constraint: The impact of direction changes on the linguistic segmentation of motion events. In E. v. d. Zee, & J. Slack (Eds.), Axes and vectors in language and space (pp. 86-110). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N. J., Essegbey, J., Majid, A., & van Staden, M. (2011). Configuraciones temáticas atípicas y el uso de predicados complejos en perspectiva tipológica [Atypical thematic configurations and the use of complex predicates in typological perspective]. In A. L. Munguía (Ed.), Colección Estudios Lingüísticos. Vol. I: Fonología, morfología, y tipología semántico-sintáctica [Collection Linguistic Studies. Vol 1: Phonology, morphology, and semantico-syntactic typology] (pp. 173-194). Hermosillo, Mexico: Universidad de Sonora.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2003). Fictive motion questionnaire. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 81-85). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877601.

    Abstract

    Fictive Motion is the metaphoric use of path relators in the expression of spatial relations or configurations that are static, or at any rate do not in any obvious way involve physical entities moving in real space. The goal is to study the expression of such relations or configurations in the target language, with an eye particularly on whether these expressions exclusively/preferably/possibly involve motion verbs and/or path relators, i.e., Fictive Motion. Section 2 gives Talmy’s (2000: ch. 2) phenomenology of Fictive Motion construals. The researcher’s task is to “distill” the intended spatial relations/configurations from Talmy’s description of the particular Fictive Motion metaphors and elicit as many different examples of the relations/configurations as (s)he deems necessary to obtain a basic sense of whether and how much Fictive Motion the target language offers or prescribes for the encoding of the particular type of relation/configuration. As a first stab, the researcher may try to elicit natural translations of culturally appropriate adaptations of the examples Talmy provides with each type of Fictive Motion metaphor.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Burenhult, N., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Landscape terms and place names elicitation guide. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 75-79). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492904.

    Abstract

    Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The landscape subproject is concerned with the interrelation between language, cognition and geography. Specifically, it investigates issues relating to how landforms are categorised cross-linguistically as well as the characteristics of place naming.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Burenhult, N., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). Landscape terms and place names questionnaire. In K. Kendrick, & A. Majid (Eds.), Field manual volume 14 (pp. 19-23). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.1005606.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Burenhult, N., Levinson, S. C., & Enfield, N. J. (2003). Landscape terms and place names questionnaire. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 60-63). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877604.

    Abstract

    Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The landscape subproject is concerned with the interrelation between language, cognition and geography. Specifically, it investigates issues relating to how landforms are categorised cross-linguistically as well as the characteristics of place naming.
  • 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.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N. J., Essegbey, J., & Kita, S. (2011). The macro-event property: The segmentation of causal chains. In J. Bohnemeyer, & E. Pederson (Eds.), Event representation in language and cognition (pp. 43-67). New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • De Bot, K., Broersma, M., & Isurin, L. (2009). Sources of triggering in code-switching. In L. Isurin, D. Winford, & K. De Bot (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to code switching (pp. 103-128). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Bowerman, M. (2003). Rola predyspozycji kognitywnych w przyswajaniu systemu semantycznego [Reprint]. In E. Dabrowska, & W. Kubiński (Eds.), Akwizycja języka w świetle językoznawstwa kognitywnego [Language acquisition from a cognitive linguistic perspective]. Kraków: Uniwersitas.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from; Bowerman, M. (1989). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In M.L. Rice & R.L Schiefelbusch (Ed.), The teachability of language (pp. 133-169). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.
  • Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner, & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 387-427). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (2004). From universal to language-specific in early grammatical development [Reprint]. In K. Trott, S. Dobbinson, & P. Griffiths (Eds.), The child language reader (pp. 131-146). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Attempts to explain children's grammatical development often assume a close initial match between units of meaning and units of form; for example, agents are said to map to sentence-subjects and actions to verbs. The meanings themselves, according to this view, are not influenced by language, but reflect children's universal non-linguistic way of understanding the world. This paper argues that, contrary to this position, meaning as it is expressed in children's early sentences is, from the beginning, organized on the basis of experience with the grammar and lexicon of a particular language. As a case in point, children learning English and Korean are shown to express meanings having to do with directed motion according to language-specific principles of semantic and grammatical structuring from the earliest stages of word combination.
  • Bowerman, M. (1988). Inducing the latent structure of language. In F. Kessel (Ed.), The development of language and language researchers: Essays presented to Roger Brown (pp. 23-49). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Bowerman, M., & Majid, A. (2003). Kids’ cut & break. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 70-71). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877607.

    Abstract

    Kids’ Cut & Break is a task inspired by the original Cut & Break task (see MPI L&C Group Field Manual 2001), but designed for use with children as well as adults. There are fewer videoclips to be described (34 as opposed to 61), and they are “friendlier” and more interesting: the actors wear colorful clothes, smile, and act cheerfully. The first 2 items are warm-ups and 4 more items are fillers (interspersed with test items), so only 28 of the items are actually “test items”. In the original Cut & Break, each clip is in a separate file. In Kids’ Cut & Break, all 34 clips are edited into a single file, which plays the clips successively with 5 seconds of black screen between each clip.

    Additional information

    2003_1_Kids_cut_and_break_films.zip
  • Bowerman, M. (2011). Linguistic typology and first language acquisition. In J. J. Song (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology (pp. 591-617). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (2009). Introduction (Part IV: Language and cognition: Universals and typological comparisons). In J. Guo, E. Lieven, N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K. Nakamura, & S. Ozcaliskan (Eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 443-449).
  • Bowerman, M., Gullberg, M., Majid, A., & Narasimhan, B. (2004). Put project: The cross-linguistic encoding of placement events. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 10-24). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492916.

    Abstract

    How similar are the event concepts encoded by different languages? So far, few event domains have been investigated in any detail. The PUT project extends the systematic cross-linguistic exploration of event categorisation to a new domain, that of placement events (putting things in places and removing them from places). The goal of this task is to explore cross-linguistic universality and variability in the semantic categorisation of placement events (e.g., ‘putting a cup on the table’).

    Additional information

    2004_Put_project_video_stimuli.zip
  • Bowerman, M. (1988). The 'no negative evidence' problem: How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar? In J. Hawkins (Ed.), Explaining language universals (pp. 73-101). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
  • Bowerman, M. (1988). The child's expression of meaning: Expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax, and morphology [Reprint]. In M. B. Franklin, & S. S. Barten (Eds.), Child language: A reader (pp. 106-117). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. (1981). The child's expression of meaning: Expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax, and morphology. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (pp. 172 189). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
  • Broeder, D., Sloetjes, H., Trilsbeek, P., Van Uytvanck, D., Windhouwer, M., & Wittenburg, P. (2011). Evolving challenges in archiving and data infrastructures. In G. L. J. Haig, N. Nau, S. Schnell, & C. Wegener (Eds.), Documenting endangered languages: Achievements and perspectives (pp. 33-54). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    Abstract

    Introduction Increasingly often research in the humanities is based on data. This change in attitude and research practice is driven to a large extent by the availability of small and cheap yet high-quality recording equipment (video cameras, audio recorders) as well as advances in information technology (faster networks, larger data storage, larger computation power, suitable software). In some institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, already in the 90s a clear trend towards an all-digital domain could be identified, making use of state-of-the-art technology for research purposes. This change of habits was one of the reasons for the Volkswagen Foundation to establish the DoBeS program in 2000 with a clear focus on language documentation based on recordings as primary material.
  • Broersma, M., Isurin, L., Bultena, S., & De Bot, K. (2009). Triggered code-switching: Evidence from Dutch-English and Russian-English bilinguals. In L. Isurin, D. Winford, & K. De Bot (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to code switching (pp. 85-102). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Broersma, M. (2011). Triggered code-switching: Evidence from picture naming experiments. In M. S. Schmid, & W. Lowie (Eds.), Modeling bilingualism: From structure to chaos. In honor of Kees de Bot (pp. 37-58). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper presents experimental evidence that cognates can trigger codeswitching. In two picture naming experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals switched between Dutch and English. Crucial words followed either a cognate or a non-cognate. In Experiment 1, response language was indicated by a color cue, and crucial trials always required a switch. Crucial trials had shorter reaction times after a cognate than after a non-cognate. In Experiment 2, response language was not cued and participants switched freely between the languages. Words after cognates were switched more often than words after non-cognates, for switching from L1 to L2 only. Both experiments thus showed that cognates facilitated language switching of the following word. The results extend evidence for triggered codeswitching from natural speech analyses.
  • Brown, P. (2004). Position and motion in Tzeltal frog stories: The acquisition of narrative style. In S. Strömqvist, & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 37-57). Mahwah: Erlbaum.

    Abstract

    How are events framed in narrative? Speakers of English (a 'satellite-framed' language), when 'reading' Mercer Mayer's wordless picture book 'Frog, Where Are You?', find the story self-evident: a boy has a dog and a pet frog; the frog escapes and runs away; the boy and dog look for it across hill and dale, through woods and over a cliff, until they find it and return home with a baby frog child of the original pet frog. In Tzeltal, as spoken in a Mayan community in southern Mexico, the story is somewhat different, because the language structures event descriptions differently. Tzeltal is in part a 'verb-framed' language with a set of Path-encoding motion verbs, so that the bare bones of the Frog story can consist of verbs translating as 'go'/'pass by'/'ascend'/ 'descend'/ 'arrive'/'return'. But Tzeltal also has satellite-framing adverbials, grammaticized from the same set of motion verbs, which encode the direction of motion or the orientation of static arrays. Furthermore, motion is not generally encoded barebones, but vivid pictorial detail is provided by positional verbs which can describe the position of the Figure as an outcome of a motion event; motion and stasis are thereby combined in a single event description. (For example: jipot jawal "he has been thrown (by the deer) lying¬_face_upwards_spread-eagled". This paper compares the use of these three linguistic resources in frog narratives from 14 Tzeltal adults and 21 children, looks at their development in the narratives of children between the ages of 4-12, and considers the results in relation to those from Berman and Slobin's (1996) comparative study of adult and child Frog stories.
  • 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., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Frames of spatial reference and their acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal. In A. Assmann, U. Gaier, & G. Trommsdorff (Eds.), Zwischen Literatur und Anthropologie: Diskurse, Medien, Performanzen (pp. 285-314). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

    Abstract

    This is a reprint of the Brown and Levinson 2000 article.
  • Brown, P., Levinson, S. C., & Senft, G. (2004). Initial references to persons and places. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 37-44). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492929.

    Abstract

    This task has two parts: (i) video-taped elicitation of the range of possibilities for referring to persons and places, and (ii) observations of (first) references to persons and places in video-taped natural interaction. The goal of this task is to establish the repertoires of referential terms (and other practices) used for referring to persons and to places in particular languages and cultures, and provide examples of situated use of these kinds of referential practices in natural conversation. This data will form the basis for cross-language comparison, and for formulating hypotheses about general principles underlying the deployment of such referential terms in natural language usage.
  • Brown, P., Gaskins, S., Lieven, E., Striano, T., & Liszkowski, U. (2004). Multimodal multiperson interaction with infants aged 9 to 15 months. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 56-63). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492925.

    Abstract

    Interaction, for all that it has an ethological base, is culturally constituted, and how new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society is of critical interest to our understanding of interaction – how much is learned, how variable is it across cultures – as well as to our understanding of the role of culture in children’s social-cognitive development. The goal of this task is to document the nature of caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, especially during the critical age of 9-15 months when children come to have an understanding of others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction; it does not require specialist knowledge of children.
  • Brown, P. (2003). Multimodal multiperson interaction with infants aged 9 to 15 months. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 22-24). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877610.

    Abstract

    Interaction, for all that it has an ethological base, is culturally constituted, and how new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society is of critical interest to our understanding of interaction – how much is learned, how variable is it across cultures – as well as to our understanding of the role of culture in children’s social-cognitive development. The goal of this task is to document the nature of caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, especially during the critical age of 9-15 months when children come to have an understanding of others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction; it does not require specialist knowledge of children.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Language as mind tools: Learning how to think through speaking. In J. Guo, E. V. Lieven, N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K. Nakamura, & S. Ozcaliskan (Eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the traditions of Dan Slobin (pp. 451-464). New York: Psychology Press.

    Abstract

    Speakers of the Mayan language Tzeltal use two frames of reference for spatial reckoning: an absolute system (based on the south/north axis abstracted from the overall slope of the land) and an intrinsic system utilizing spatial axes of the reference object to establish body parts. This paper examines the use of absolute, intrinsic, and landmark cues in descriptions of spatial relations by 22 pairs of Tzeltal children aged between 5 and 17. The data are drawn from interactive space games, where a Director describes a spatial layout in a photo and the Matcher reproduces it with toys. The paper distinguishes use of ad hoc landmarks ('Red Cliffs', 'the electricity post') from genuine absolute reference points ('uphill'/'downhill'/’across’), and shows that adults in this task use absolute ('cow uphill of horse'), intrinsic ('at the tree's side') and landmark ('cow facing Red Cliffs') descriptions to communicate the spatial relations depicted. The youngest children, however, do not use landmark cues at all but rely instead on deictics and on the absolute 'uphill/downhill' terms; landmark terms are still rare at age 8-10. Despite arguments that landmarks are a simpler, more natural, basis for spatial reckoning than absolute terms, there is no evidence for a developmental progression from landmark-based to absolute-based strategies. We relate these observations to Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’ argument.
  • 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. (2011). Everyone has to lie in Tzeltal [Reprint]. In B. B. Schieffelin, & P. B. Garrett (Eds.), Anthropological linguistics: Critical concepts in language studies. Volume III Talking about language (pp. 59-87). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Reprint of Brown, P. (2002). Everyone has to lie in Tzeltal. In S. Blum-Kulka, & C. E. Snow (Eds.), Talking to adults: The contribution of multiparty discourse to language acquisition (pp. 241-275). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. In a famous paper Harvey Sacks (1974) argued that the sequential properties of greeting conventions, as well as those governing the flow of information, mean that 'everyone has to lie'. In this paper I show this dictum to be equally true in the Tzeltal Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, but for somewhat different reasons. The phenomenon of interest is the practice of routine fearsome threats to small children. Based on a longitudinal corpus of videotaped and tape-recorded naturally-occurring interaction between caregivers and children in five Tzeltal families, the study examines sequences of Tzeltal caregivers' speech aimed at controlling the children's behaviour and analyzes the children's developing pragmatic skills in handling such controlling utterances, from prelinguistic infants to age five and over. Infants in this society are considered to be vulnerable, easily scared or shocked into losing their 'souls', and therefore at all costs to be protected and hidden from outsiders and other dangers. Nonetheless, the chief form of control (aside from physically removing a child from danger) is to threaten, saying things like "Don't do that, or I'll take you to the clinic for an injection," These overt scare-threats - rarely actually realized - lead Tzeltal children by the age of 2;6 to 3;0 to the understanding that speech does not necessarily convey true propositions, and to a sensitivity to the underlying motivations for utterances distinct from their literal meaning. By age 4;0 children perform the same role to their younger siblings;they also begin to use more subtle non-true (e.g. ironic) utterances. The caretaker practice described here is related to adult norms of social lying, to the sociocultural context of constraints on information flow, social control through gossip, and the different notion of 'truth' that arises in the context of non-verifiability characteristic of a small-scale nonliterate society.
  • Brown, P. (2011). The cultural organization of attention. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 29-55). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Abstract

    How new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society they grow up in is crucial to an understanding of social interaction, as well as to an understanding of the role of culture in children's social-cognitive development. Modern theories of infant development (e.g., Bruner 1982, Elman et al 1996, Tomasello 1999, Masataka 2003) emphasize the influence of particular interactional practices in the child's developing communicative skills. But interactional practices with infants - behaviors like prompting, pointing, turn-taking routines, and interacting over objects - are culturally shaped by beliefs about what infants need and what they can understand; these practices therefore vary across cultures in both quantity and quality. What effect does this variation have on children's communicative development? This article focuses on one aspect of cultural practice, the interactional organization of attention and how it is socialized in prelinguistic infants. It surveys the literature on the precursors to attention coordination in infancy, leading up to the crucial development of 'joint attention' and pointing behavior around the age of 12 months, and it reports what is known about cultural differences in related interactional practices of adults. It then considers the implications of such differences for infant-caregiver interaction prior to the period when infants begin to speak. I report on my own work on the integration of gaze and pointing in infant/caregiver interaction in two different cultures. One is a Mayan society in Mexico, where interaction with infants during their first year is relatively minimal; the other is on Rossel Island (Papua New Guinea), where interaction with infants is characterized by intensive face-to-face communicative behaviors from shortly after the child's birth. Examination of videotaped naturally-occurring interactions in both societies for episodes of index finger point following and production, and the integration of gaze and vocalization with pointing, reveals that despite the differences in interactional style with infants, pointing for joint attention emerges in infants in both cultures in the 9 -15 month period. However, a comparative perspective on cultural practices in caregiver-infant interactions allows us to refine our understanding of joint attention and its role in the process of learning to become a communicative partner.
  • 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. (2011). Politeness. In P. C. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences (pp. 635-636). New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    This is an encyclopedia entry surveying theoretical approaches to politeness phenomena in language usage.
  • 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).
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Politeness: Some universals in language usage [chapter 1, reprint]. In N. Coupland, & A. Jaworski (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: critical concepts [volume III: Interactional sociolinguistics] (pp. 311-323). London: Routledge.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). Politeness: Some universals in language use [Reprint]. In D. Archer, & P. Grundy (Eds.), The pragmatics reader (pp. 283-304). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press from: Brown, P. and Levinson, S. E. (1987) Politeness, (©) 1978, 1987, CUP.
  • Burenhult, N., Kruspe, N., & Dunn, M. (2011). Language history and culture groups among Austroasiatic-speaking foragers of the Malay Peninsula. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Dynamics of human diversity: The case of mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 257-277). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Burenhult, N. (2011). The coding of reciprocal events in Jahai. In N. Evans, A. Gaby, S. C. Levinson, & A. Majid (Eds.), Reciprocals and semantic typology (pp. 163-176). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This work explores the linguistic encoding of reciprocal events in Jahai (Aslian, Mon-Khmer, Malay Peninsula) on the basis of linguistic descriptions of the video stimuli of the ‘Reciprocal constructions and situation type’ task (Evans et al. 2004). Reciprocal situation types find expression in three different constructions: distributive verb forms, reciprocal verb forms, and adjunct phrases containing a body part noun. Distributives represent the dominant strategy, reciprocal forms and body part adjuncts being highly restricted across event types and consultants. The distributive and reciprocal morphemes manifest intricate morphological processes typical of Aslian languages. The paper also addresses some analytical problems raised by the data, such as structural ambiguity and restrictions on derivation, as well as individual variation.
  • Burenhult, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Semplates: A guide to identification and elicitation. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field manual volume 12 (pp. 44-50). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.883556.

    Abstract

    Semplates are a new descriptive and theoretical concept in lexical semantics, borne out of recent L&C work in several domains. A semplate can be defined as a configuration consisting of distinct layers of lexemes, each layer drawn from a different form class, mapped onto the same abstract semantic template. Within such a lexical layer, the sense relations between the lexical items are inherited from the underlying template. Thus, the whole set of lexical layers and the underlying template form a cross-categorial configuration in the lexicon. The goal of this task is to find new kinds of macrostructure in the lexicon, with a view to cross-linguistic comparison.
  • Caramazza, A., Miozzo, M., Costa, A., Schiller, N. O., & Alario, F.-X. (2003). Etude comparee de la production des determinants dans differentes langues. In E. Dupoux (Ed.), Les Langages du cerveau: Textes en l'honneur de Jacques Mehler (pp. 213-229). Paris: Odile Jacob.
  • Casasanto, D. (2009). Space for thinking. In V. Evans, & P. Chilton (Eds.), Language, cognition and space: State of the art and new directions (pp. 453-478). London: Equinox Publishing.
  • Casasanto, D. (2009). When is a linguistic metaphor a conceptual metaphor? In V. Evans, & S. Pourcel (Eds.), New directions in cognitive linguistics (pp. 127-145). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • 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.

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  • Chen, A., & Lai, V. T. (2011). Comb or coat: The role of intonation in online reference resolution in a second language. In W. Zonneveld, & H. Quené (Eds.), Sound and Sounds. Studies presented to M.E.H. (Bert) Schouten on the occasion of his 65th birthday (pp. 57-68). Utrecht: UiL OTS.

    Abstract

    1 Introduction In spoken sentence processing, listeners do not wait till the end of a sentence to decipher what message is conveyed. Rather, they make predictions on the most plausible interpretation at every possible point in the auditory signal on the basis of all kinds of linguistic information (e.g., Eberhard et al. 1995; Alman and Kamide 1999, 2007). Intonation is one such kind of linguistic information that is efficiently used in spoken sentence processing. The evidence comes primarily from recent work on online reference resolution conducted in the visual-world eyetracking paradigm (e.g., Tanenhaus et al. 1995). In this paradigm, listeners are shown a visual scene containing a number of objects and listen to one or two short sentences about the scene. They are asked to either inspect the visual scene while listening or to carry out the action depicted in the sentence(s) (e.g., 'Touch the blue square'). Listeners' eye movements directed to each object in the scene are monitored and time-locked to pre-defined time points in the auditory stimulus. Their predictions on the upcoming referent and sources for the predictions in the auditory signal are examined by analysing fixations to the relevant objects in the visual scene before the acoustic information on the referent is available
  • Chen, A. (2011). The developmental path to phonological focus-marking in Dutch. In S. Frota, E. Gorka, & P. Prieto (Eds.), Prosodic categories: Production, perception and comprehension (pp. 93-109). Dordrecht: Springer.

    Abstract

    This paper gives an overview of recent studies on the use of phonological cues (accent placement and choice of accent type) to mark focus in Dutch-speaking children aged between 1;9 and 8;10. It is argued that learning to use phonological cues to mark focus is a gradual process. In the light of the findings in these studies, a first proposal is put forward on the developmental path to adult-like phonological focus-marking in Dutch.
  • Chen, A. (2009). The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch. In M. Vigário, S. Frota, & M. Freitas (Eds.), Phonetics and Phonology: Interactions and interrelations (pp. 91-106). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2011). Microgenesis of gestures during mental rotation tasks recapitulates ontogenesis. In G. Stam, & M. Ishino (Eds.), Integrating gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture (pp. 267-276). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    People spontaneously produce gestures when they solve problems or explain their solutions to a problem. In this chapter, we will review and discuss evidence on the role of representational gestures in problem solving. The focus will be on our recent experiments (Chu & Kita, 2008), in which we used Shepard-Metzler type of mental rotation tasks to investigate how spontaneous gestures revealed the development of problem solving strategy over the course of the experiment and what role gesture played in the development process. We found that when solving novel problems regarding the physical world, adults go through similar symbolic distancing (Werner & Kaplan, 1963) and internalization (Piaget, 1968) processes as those that occur during young children’s cognitive development and gesture facilitates such processes.
  • Cohen, E. (2011). “Out with ‘Religion’: A novel framing of the religion debate”. In W. Williams (Ed.), Religion and rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2008. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Cohen, E., & Barrett, J. L. (2011). In search of "Folk anthropology": The cognitive anthropology of the person. In J. W. Van Huysteen, & E. Wiebe (Eds.), In search of self: Interdisciplinary perspectives on personhood (pp. 104-124). Grand Rapids, CA: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
  • 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.
  • Collins, L. J., Schönfeld, B., & Chen, X. S. (2011). The epigenetics of non-coding RNA. In T. Tollefsbol (Ed.), Handbook of epigenetics: the new molecular and medical genetics (pp. 49-61). London: Academic.

    Abstract

    Summary Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been implicated in the epigenetic marking of many genes. Short regulatory ncRNAs, including miRNAs, siRNAs, piRNAs and snoRNAs as well as long ncRNAs such as Xist and Air are discussed in light of recent research of mechanisms regulating chromatin marking and RNA editing. The topic is expanding rapidly so we will concentrate on examples to highlight the main mechanisms, including simple mechanisms where complementary binding affect methylation or RNA sites. However, other examples especially with the long ncRNAs highlight very complex regulatory systems with multiple layers of ncRNA control.
  • 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.
  • Cristia, A., Seidl, A., & Francis, A. L. (2011). Phonological features in infancy. In G. N. Clements, & R. Ridouane (Eds.), Where do phonological contrasts come from? Cognitive, physical and developmental bases of phonological features (pp. 303-326). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Features serve two main functions in the phonology of languages: they encode the distinction between pairs of contrastive phonemes (distinctive function); and they delimit sets of sounds that participate in phonological processes and patterns (classificatory function). We summarize evidence from a variety of experimental paradigms bearing on the functional relevance of phonological features. This research shows that while young infants may use abstract phonological features to learn sound patterns, this ability becomes more constrained with development and experience. Furthermore, given the lack of overlap between the ability to learn a pair of words differing in a single feature and the ability to learn sound patterns based on features, we argue for the separation of the distinctive and the classificatory function.
  • Cristia, A., & Seidl, A. (2011). Sensitivity to prosody at 6 months predicts vocabulary at 24 months. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), BUCLD 35: Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 145-156). Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (2003). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. In J. Field (Ed.), Psycholinguistics: A resource book for students. (pp. 185-189). London: Routledge.
  • Cutler, A. (2004). Segmentation of spoken language by normal adult listeners. In R. Kent (Ed.), MIT encyclopedia of communication sciences and disorders (pp. 392-395). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A. (2003). The perception of speech: Psycholinguistic aspects. In W. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of linguistics (pp. 154-157). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Henton, C. G. (2004). There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. In H. Quené, & V. Van Heuven (Eds.), On speech and Language: Studies for Sieb G. Nooteboom (pp. 37-45). Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.

    Abstract

    The retiring academic may look back upon, inter alia, years of conference attendance. Speech error researchers are uniquely fortunate because they can collect data in any situation involving communication; accordingly, the retiring speech error researcher will have collected data at those conferences. We here address the issue of whether error data collected in situations involving conviviality (such as at conferences) is representative of error data in general. Our approach involved a comparison, across three levels of linguistic processing, between a specially constructed Conviviality Sample and the largest existing source of speech error data, the newly available Fromkin Speech Error Database. The results indicate that there are grounds for regarding the data in the Conviviality Sample as a better than average reflection of the true population of all errors committed. These findings encourage us to recommend further data collection in collaboration with like-minded colleagues.
  • Cutler, A. (2004). Twee regels voor academische vorming. In H. Procee (Ed.), Bij die wereld wil ik horen! Zesendertig columns en drie essays over de vorming tot academicus. (pp. 42-45). Amsterdam: Boom.
  • Cutler, A., Mister, E., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). La perception de la parole en espagnol: Un cas particulier? In L. Ferrand, & J. Grainger (Eds.), Psycholinguistique cognitive: Essais en l'honneur de Juan Segui (pp. 57-74). Brussels: De Boeck.
  • 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. (2009). Psycholinguistics in our time. In P. Rabbitt (Ed.), Inside psychology: A science over 50 years (pp. 91-101). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1988). The perfect speech error. In L. Hyman, & C. Li (Eds.), Language, speech and mind: Studies in honor of Victoria A. Fromkin (pp. 209-223). London: Croom Helm.
  • Daly, T., Chen, X. S., & Penny, D. (2011). How old are RNA networks? In L. J. Collins (Ed.), RNA infrastructure and networks (pp. 255-273). New York: Springer Science + Business Media and Landes Bioscience.

    Abstract

    Some major classes of RNAs (such as mRNA, rRNA, tRNA and RNase P) are ubiquitous in all living systems so are inferred to have arisen early during the origin of life. However, the situation is not so clear for the system of RNA regulatory networks that continue to be uncovered, especially in eukaryotes. It is increasingly being recognised that networks of small RNAs are important for regulation in all cells, but it is not certain whether the origin of these networks are as old as rRNAs and tRNA. Another group of ncRNAs, including snoRNAs, occurs mainly in archaea and eukaryotes and their ultimate origin is less certain, although perhaps the simplest hypothesis is that they were present in earlier stages of life and were lost from bacteria. Some RNA networks may trace back to an early stage when there was just RNA and proteins, the RNP‑world; before DNA.
  • Danielsen, S., Dunn, M., & Muysken, P. (2011). The spread of the Arawakan languages: A view from structural phylogenetics. In A. Hornborg, & J. D. Hill (Eds.), Ethnicity in ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing past identities from archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory (pp. 173-196). Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
  • Den Os, E., & Boves, L. (2004). Natural multimodal interaction for design applications. In P. Cunningham (Ed.), Adoption and the knowledge economy (pp. 1403-1410). Amsterdam: IOS Press.
  • Dietrich, W., & Drude, S. (Eds.). (2015). Variation in Tupi languages: Genealogy, language change, and typology [Special Issue]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi:Ciencias Humanas, 10(2).
  • Dimroth, C., Gretsch, P., Jordens, P., Perdue, C., & Starren, M. (2003). Finiteness in Germanic languages: A stage-model for first and second language development. In C. Dimroth, & M. Starren (Eds.), Information structure and the dynamics of language acquisition (pp. 65-94). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Dimroth, C., & Starren, M. (2003). Introduction. In C. Dimroth, & M. Starren (Eds.), Information structure and the dynamics of language acquisition (pp. 1-14). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Dimroth, C. (2009). Stepping stones and stumbling blocks: Why negation accelerates and additive particles delay the acquisition of finiteness in German. In C. Dimroth, & P. Jordens (Eds.), Functional Categories in Learner Language (pp. 137-170). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Dingemanse, M., Van Leeuwen, T., & Majid, A. (2011). Mapping across senses: Two cross-modal association tasks. In K. Kendrick, & A. Majid (Eds.), Field manual volume 14 (pp. 11-15). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.1005579.
  • Dingemanse, M. (2011). Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and iconicity in Siwu. In P. Michelucci, O. Fischer, & C. Ljungberg (Eds.), Semblance and Signification (pp. 39-54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    The Mawu people of eastern Ghana make common use of ideophones: marked words that depict sensory imagery. Ideophones have been described as “poetry in ordinary language,” yet the shadow of Lévy-Bruhl, who assigned such words to the realm of primitivity, has loomed large over linguistics and literary theory alike. The poet Ezra Pound is a case in point: while his fascination with Chinese characters spawned the ideogrammic method, the mimicry and gestures of the “primitive languages in Africa” were never more than a mere curiosity to him. This paper imagines Pound transposed into the linguaculture of the Mawu. What would have struck him about their ways of ‘charging language’ with imagery? I juxtapose Pound’s views of the poetic image with an analysis of how different layers of iconicity in ideophones combine to depict sensory imagery. This exercise illuminates aspects of what one might call ‘the ideophonic
  • 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. (2011). Awetí in relation with Kamayurá: The two Tupian languages of the Upper Xingu. In B. Franchetto (Ed.), Alto Xingu. Uma sociedade multilíngüe (pp. 155-192). Rio de Janeiro: Museu do Indio - FUNAI.

    Abstract

    The article analyzes the relation between Aweti and Kamayurá on different levels. Both languages belong to different branches of the subfamily “Maweti-Guarani” within the large Tupi ‘stock’. Both peoples have arrived rather late to the complex Upper Xinguan society, but probably independently and from different directions. Both resulted from mergers of different groups and suffered a dramatic demographic decline in the first half of last century. There is no concrete evidence that these groups spoke varieties of more than 2 different languages (Pre-Aweti and Pre-Kamayurá). Today, many Aweti are at least passive bilinguals with Kamayurá, their most important allies, but the opposite does not hold. The article also discusses the relations between the languages on the main structural levels. In phonology, the phoneme inventories are compared and the sound changes are listed that occurred from the hypothetical proto-language “Proto-Maweti-Guarani” to Aweti, on the one hand, and to Proto-Tupi-Guarani and further to Kamayurá, on the other. In morpho-syntax, the article offers a comparison of the person systems and of affixes in general, treating in particular the so-called ‘relational prefixes’, which do not exist in Aweti. The most important syntactic shared properties are also listed. There seem to be very little mutual lexical borrowing. In the appendix, a list of more than 60 cognates with reconstructed proto-forms is given. Key-words: Aweti; Kamayurá; Sociolinguistics; History; Phonology.
  • Drude, S. (2011). Comparando línguas alto‐xinguanas: Metodologia e bases de dados comparativos. In B. Franchetto (Ed.), Alto Xingu. Uma sociedade multilíngüe (pp. 39-56). Rio de Janeiro: Museu do Indio - FUNAI.

    Abstract

    A key for understanding the Upper Xingu system is the comparison of the different languages which are part of that multilingual society. This article discusses the notion ‘comparing languages’ and delineates a research program in accordance to which a fruitful comparison can be done on four levels: 1) structural (phonological and morphosyntactic), 2) lexical (semantic structure of the lexica and individual lexical items), 3) discourse (figures of speech and thought), 4) content (in particular, narratives). The language data of the project gathered so far (focusing on level 2 and 4) is described in detail: 10 comparative word lists from different semantic domains, and a core of 5 analogous texts of different genera. Finally, some general considerations are offered about how to analyze both similarities and divergence found among the compared material.
  • Drude, S. (2011). 'Derivational verbs' and other multi-verb constructions in Aweti and Tupi-Guarani. In A. Y. Aikhenvald, & P. C. Muysken (Eds.), Multi-verb constructions: A view from the Americas (pp. 213-254). Leiden: Brill.

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