Displaying 1 - 100 of 372
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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, 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. (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. (2001). Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe. In F. K. E. Voeltz, & C. Kilian-Hatz (
Eds. ), Ideophones (pp. 25-48). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Ameka, F. K. (2001). Ewe. In J. Garry, & C. Rubino (
Eds. ), Facts about the world’s languages: An encyclopedia of the world's major languages past and present (pp. 207-213). New York: H.W. Wilson Press. -
Ameka, F. K. (2013). Possessive constructions in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé). In A. Aikhenvald, & R. Dixon (
Eds. ), Possession and ownership: A crosslinguistic typology (pp. 224-242). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
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.Files private
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2013). Impersonal verbs. In G. K. Giannakis (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics Online (pp. 197-198). Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/2214-448X_eagll_SIM_00000481.Abstract
Impersonal verbs in Greek ‒ as in the other Indo-European languages ‒ exclusively feature 3rd person singular finite forms and convey one of three types of meaning: (a) meteorological conditions; (b) emotional and physical state/experience; (c) modality. In Greek, impersonal verbs predominantly convey meteorological conditions and modality.
Impersonal verbs in Greek, as in the other Indo-European languages, exclusively feature 3rd person singular finite forms and convey one of three types of me…Files private
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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.Files private
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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.Files private
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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. (2001). Motionland films version 2: Referential communication task with motionland stimulus. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 97-99). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874623.Abstract
How do languages express ideas of movement, and how do they package different components of moving, such as manner and path? This task supports detailed investigation of motion descriptions. The specific study goals are: (a) the coding of “via” grounds (i.e., ground objects which the figure moves along, over, around, through, past, etc.); (b) the coding of direction changes; (c) the spontaneous segmentation of complex motion scenarios; and (d) the gestural representation of motion paths. The stimulus set is 5 simple 3D animations (7-17 seconds long) that show a ball rolling through a landscape. The task is a director-matcher task for two participants. The director describes the path of the ball in each clip to the matcher, who is asked to trace the path with a pen in a 2D picture.Additional information
2001_Motionland_films_v2.zip -
Bohnemeyer, J., Eisenbeiss, S., & Narasimhan, B. (2001). Event triads. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 100-114). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874630.Abstract
Judgments we make about how similar or different events are to each other can reveal the features we find useful in classifying the world. This task is designed to investigate how speakers of different languages classify events, and to examine how linguistic and gestural encoding relates to non-linguistic classification. Specifically, the task investigates whether speakers judge two events to be similar on the basis of (a) the path versus manner of motion, (b) sub-events versus larger complex events, (c) participant identity versus event identity, and (d) different participant roles. In the task, participants are asked to make similarity judgments concerning sets of 2D animation clips. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). A questionnaire on event integration. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 177-184). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. -
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., Bowerman, M., & Brown, P. (2001). Cut and break clips. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 90-96). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874626.Abstract
How do different languages treat a particular semantic domain? It has already been established that languages have widely varied words for talking about “cutting” and “breaking” things: for example, English has a very general verb break, but K’iche’ Maya has many different ‘break’ verbs that are used for different kinds of objects (e.g., brittle, flexible, long). The aim of this task is to map out cross-linguistic lexicalisation patterns in the cutting/breaking domain. The stimuli comprise 61 short video clips that show one or two actors breaking various objects (sticks, carrots, pieces of cloth or string, etc.) using various instruments (a knife, a hammer, an axe, their hands, etc.), or situations in which various kinds of objects break spontaneously. The clips are used to elicit descriptions of actors’ actions and the state changes that the objects undergo.Additional information
2001_Cut_and_break_clips.zip -
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. (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.Additional information
http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2003-1/landscape-terms-and-place-names-quest… -
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., 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. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). Toponym questionnaire. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 55-61). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874620.Abstract
Place-names (toponyms) are at the intersection of spatial language, culture, and cognition. This questionnaire prepares the researcher to answer three overarching questions: how to formally identify place-names in the research language (i.e. according to morphological and syntactic criteria); what places place-names are employed to refer to (e.g. human settlements, landscape sites); and how places are semantically construed for this purpose. The questionnaire can in principle be answered using an existing database. However, additional elicitation with language consultants is recommended. -
Bosker, H. R. (2013). Juncture (prosodic). In G. Khan (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (pp. 432-434). Leiden: Brill.Abstract
Prosodic juncture concerns the compartmentalization and partitioning of syntactic entities in spoken discourse by means of prosody. It has been argued that the Intonation Unit, defined by internal criteria and prosodic boundary phenomena (e.g., final lengthening, pitch reset, pauses), encapsulates the basic structural unit of spoken Modern Hebrew. -
Bosker, H. R. (2013). Sibilant consonants. In G. Khan (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (pp. 557-561). Leiden: Brill.Abstract
Fricative consonants in Hebrew can be divided into bgdkpt and sibilants (ז, ס, צ, שׁ, שׂ). Hebrew sibilants have been argued to stem from Proto-Semitic affricates, laterals, interdentals and /s/. In standard Israeli Hebrew the sibilants are pronounced as [s] (ס and שׂ), [ʃ] (שׁ), [z] (ז), [ʦ] (צ). -
Botelho da Silva, T., & Cutler, A. (1993). Ill-formedness and transformability in Portuguese idioms. In C. Cacciari, & P. Tabossi (
Eds. ), Idioms: Processing, structure and interpretation (pp. 129-143). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. -
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., & 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., & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language-specific in the acquisition of semantic categories. In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levinson (
Eds. ), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
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. (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. (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. (1993). Gender, politeness and confrontation in Tenejapa [reprint]. In D. Tannen (
Ed. ), Gender and conversational interaction (pp. 144-164). New York: Oxford University Press.Abstract
This is a reprint of Brown 1990. -
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.Additional information
http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2003-1/multimodal-multiperson-interaction-in… -
Brown, P. (2013). La estructura conversacional y la adquisición del lenguaje: El papel de la repetición en el habla de los adultos y niños tzeltales. In L. de León Pasquel (
Ed. ), Nuevos senderos en el studio de la adquisición de lenguas mesoamericanas: Estructura, narrativa y socialización (pp. 35-82). Mexico: CIESAS-UNAM.Abstract
This is a translation of the Brown 1998 article in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 'Conversational structure and language acquisition: The role of repetition in Tzeltal adult and child speech'.Files private
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Brown, P. (2001). Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: Is there a language-specific bias for verb learning? In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levinson (
Eds. ), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 512-543). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
The spatial vocabulary of the Mayan language Tzeltal is dominated by an Absolute system of spatial reckoning, whereby an "uphill/downhill" coordinate abstracted from the lay of the land is used to reckon spatial relationships on the horizontal in both small-scale and long distance space. This system is used in lieu of a Front/Back/Left/Right system which does not exist in this language. The spatial vocabulary dedicated to this system (which I refer to in general as the UP/DOWN vocabulary) includes intransitive motion verbs (roughly translatable as "ascend"/"descend"), their transitivized counterparts ("make it ascend/descend"), directional adverbs ("uphillwards"/"downhillwards"), and possessed relational nouns ("uphill/downhill in relation to it"). This same vocabulary applies to spatial relations on the vertical axis. Two seemingly contradictory observations about children's early meanings for the spatial verbs dedicated to this system motivate the proposal put forward in this paper. On the one hand, Tzeltal children's UP/DOWN vocabulary shows very early sensitivity to the semantic structure of the language they are learning: the meanings for these verbs are from the first usages attached to the slope of the land, and to particular places; there is no evidence of an initial preference for the vertical meaning. On the other hand, children's meanings remain for a long time too specific, and errors of interpretation/production (using the verbs to mean 'local slope of land' rather than 'overall N/S slope of land direction) are evident in verbal productions of some children as late as age 7 or 8. The proposal is made that the highly specific nature of Tzeltal verbs at the basic level influences the children's hypotheses about what kinds of meanings verbs can have. -
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. (2001). Repetition. In K. Duranti (
Ed. ), Key terms in language and culture (pp. 219-222). Oxford: Blackwell.Abstract
This is a reprint of the Brown 1999 article. -
Brown, P., Pfeiler, B., de León, L., & Pye, C. (2013). The acquisition of agreement in four Mayan languages. In E. Bavin, & S. Stoll (
Eds. ), The acquisition of ergativity (pp. 271-306). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verbal agreement inflections in children learning four different Mayan languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek. These languages have similar inflectional paradigms: they have a generally agglutinative morphology, with transitive verbs obligatorily marked with separate cross-referencing inflections for the two core arguments (‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive’). Verbs are also inflected for aspect and mood, and they carry a ‘status suffix’ which generally marks verb transitivity and mood. At a more detailed level, the four languages differ strikingly in the realization of cross-reference marking. For each language, we examined longitudinal language production data from two children at around 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6 years of age. We relate differences in the acquisition patterns of verbal morphology in the languages to 1) the placement of affixes, 2) phonological and prosodic prominence, 3) language-specific constraints on the various forms of the affixes, and 4) consistent vs. split ergativity, and conclude that prosodic salience accounts provide th ebest explanation for the acquisition patterns in these four languages.Files private
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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. (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. (2001). Politeness and language. In N. Smelser, & P. Baltes (
Eds. ), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 11620-11624). Oxford: Elsevier Sciences.Abstract
This is an encyclopedia entry surveying research and theoretical approaches to politeness phenomena in language usage. -
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. (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. -
Brown, P. (1993). The role of shape in the acquisition of Tzeltal (Mayan) locatives. In E. V. Clark (
Ed. ), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 211-220). Stanford, CA: CSLI/University of Chicago Press.Abstract
In a critique of the current state of theories of language acquisition, Bowerman (1985) has argued forcibly for the need to take crosslinguistic variation in semantic structure seriously, in order to understand children's acquisition of semantic categories in the process of learning their language. The semantics of locative expressions in the Mayan language Tzeltal exemplifies this point, for no existing theory of spatial expressions provides an adequate basis for capturing the semantic structure of spatial description in this Mayan language. In this paper I describe some of the characteristics of Tzeltal locative descriptions, as a contribution to the growing body of data on crosslinguistic variation in this domain and as a prod to ideas about acquisition processes, confining myself to the topological notions of 'on' and 'in', and asking whether, and how, these notions are involved in the semantic distinctions underlying Tzeltal locatives. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Clifton, C. J., Meyer, A. S., Wurm, L. H., & Treiman, R. (2013). Language comprehension and production. In A. F. Healy, & R. W. Proctor (
Eds. ), Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4, Experimental Psychology. 2nd Edition (pp. 523-547). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Abstract
In this chapter, we survey the processes of recognizing and producing words and of understanding and creating sentences. Theory and research on these topics have been shaped by debates about how various sources of information are integrated in these processes, and about the role of language structure, as analyzed in the discipline of linguistics. In this chapter, we describe current views of fluent language users' comprehension of spoken and written language and their production of spoken language. We review what we consider to be the most important findings and theories in psycholinguistics, returning again and again to the questions of modularity and the importance of linguistic knowledge. Although we acknowledge the importance of social factors in language use, our focus is on core processes such as parsing and word retrieval that are not necessarily affected by such factors. We do not have space to say much about the important fields of developmental psycholinguistics, which deals with the acquisition of language by children, or applied psycholinguistics, which encompasses such topics as language disorders and language teaching. Although we recognize that there is burgeoning interest in the measurement of brain activity during language processing and how language is represented in the brain, space permits only occasional pointers to work in neuropsychology and the cognitive neuroscience of language. For treatment of these topics, and others, the interested reader could begin with two recent handbooks of psycholinguistics (Gaskell, 2007; Traxler & Gemsbacher, 2006) and a handbook of cognitive neuroscience (Gazzaniga, 2004). -
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, 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. (2003). The perception of speech: Psycholinguistic aspects. In W. Frawley (
Ed. ), International encyclopaedia of linguistics (pp. 154-157). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Cutler, A. (2001). Entries on: Acquisition of language by non-human primates; bilingualism; compound (linguistic); development of language-specific phonology; gender (linguistic); grammar; infant speech perception; language; lexicon; morphology; motor theory of speech perception; perception of second languages; phoneme; phonological store; phonology; prosody; sign language; slips of the tongue; speech perception; speech production; stress (linguistic); syntax; word recognition; words. In P. Winn (
Ed. ), Dictionary of biological psychology. London: Routledge. -
Cutler, A. (1990). From performance to phonology: Comments on Beckman and Edwards's paper. In J. Kingston, & M. Beckman (
Eds. ), Papers in laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and physics of speech (pp. 208-214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Cutler, A. (1993). Language-specific processing: Does the evidence converge? In G. T. Altmann, & R. C. Shillcock (
Eds. ), Cognitive models of speech processing: The Sperlonga Meeting II (pp. 115-123). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. -
Cutler, A. (1990). Exploiting prosodic probabilities in speech segmentation. In G. Altmann (
Ed. ), Cognitive models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives (pp. 105-121). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. -
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., McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Somejuan, A. (2001). The roll of the silly ball. In E. Dupoux (
Ed. ), Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jacques Mehler (pp. 181-194). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. -
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. -
Danziger, E., & Gaskins, S. (1993). Exploring the Intrinsic Frame of Reference. In S. C. Levinson (
Ed. ), Cognition and space kit 1.0 (pp. 53-64). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.3513136.Abstract
We can describe the position of one item with respect to another using a number of different ‘frames of reference’. For example, I can use a ‘deictic’ frame that involves the speaker’s viewpoint (The chair is on the far side of the room), or an ‘intrinsic’ frame that involves a feature of one of the items (The chair is at the back of the room). Where more than one frame of reference is available in a language, what motivates the speaker’s choice? This elicitation task is designed to explore when and why people select intrinsic frames of reference, and how these choices interact with non-linguistic problem-solving strategies. -
Dediu, D., Cysouw, M., Levinson, S. C., Baronchelli, A., Christiansen, M. H., Croft, W., Evans, N., Garrod, S., Gray, R., Kandler, A., & Lieven, E. (2013). Cultural evolution of language. In P. J. Richerson, & M. H. Christiansen (
Eds. ), Cultural evolution: Society, technology, language, and religion. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 12 (pp. 303-332). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Abstract
This chapter argues that an evolutionary cultural approach to language not only has already proven fruitful, but it probably holds the key to understand many puzzling aspects of language, its change and origins. The chapter begins by highlighting several still common misconceptions about language that might seem to call into question a cultural evolutionary approach. It explores the antiquity of language and sketches a general evolutionary approach discussing the aspects of function, fi tness, replication, and selection, as well the relevant units of linguistic evolution. In this context, the chapter looks at some fundamental aspects of linguistic diversity such as the nature of the design space, the mechanisms generating it, and the shape and fabric of language. Given that biology is another evolutionary system, its complex coevolution with language needs to be understood in order to have a proper theory of language. Throughout the chapter, various challenges are identifi ed and discussed, sketching promising directions for future research. The chapter ends by listing the necessary data, methods, and theoretical developments required for a grounded evolutionary approach to language. -
Dediu, D. (2013). Genes: Interactions with language on three levels — Inter-individual variation, historical correlations and genetic biasing. In P.-M. Binder, & K. Smith (
Eds. ), The language phenomenon: Human communication from milliseconds to millennia (pp. 139-161). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-36086-2_7.Abstract
The complex inter-relationships between genetics and linguistics encompass all four scales highlighted by the contributions to this book and, together with cultural transmission, the genetics of language holds the promise to offer a unitary understanding of this fascinating phenomenon. There are inter-individual differences in genetic makeup which contribute to the obvious fact that we are not identical in the way we understand and use language and, by studying them, we will be able to both better treat and enhance ourselves. There are correlations between the genetic configuration of human groups and their languages, reflecting the historical processes shaping them, and there also seem to exist genes which can influence some characteristics of language, biasing it towards or against certain states by altering the way language is transmitted across generations. Besides the joys of pure knowledge, the understanding of these three aspects of genetics relevant to language will potentially trigger advances in medicine, linguistics, psychology or the understanding of our own past and, last but not least, a profound change in the way we regard one of the emblems of being human: our capacity for language. -
Dietrich, R., Klein, W., & Noyau, C. (1993). The acquisition of temporality. In C. Perdue (
Ed. ), Adult language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives: Vol. 2 The results (pp. 73-118). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
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. -
Dingemanse, M. (2013). Wie wir mit Sprache malen - How to paint with language. Forschungsbericht 2013 - Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik. In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Jahrbuch 2013. München: Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved from http://www.mpg.de/6683977/Psycholinguistik_JB_2013.
Abstract
Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these Lautbilder enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has for the first time been studied in detail. It turns out that we can paint with language, and that the onomatopoeia we sometimes classify as childish might be a subset of a much richer toolkit for depiction in speech, available to us all. -
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 -
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. -
Edwards, J., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1993). The control group study. In C. Perdue (
Ed. ), Adult language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives. Vol. I Field methods (pp. 173-185). Cambridge University Press. -
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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Ellert, M., Roberts, L., & Järvikivi, J. (2011). Verarbeitung und Disambiguierung pronominaler Referenz in der Fremdsprache Deutsch: Eine psycholinguistische Studie. In A. Krafft, & C. Spiegel (
Eds. ), Sprachliche Förderung und Weiterbildung-Transdisziplinär (pp. 51-68). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. -
Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. (2001). Recognitional deixis. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 78-81). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874641.Abstract
“Recognitional” words and constructions enshrine our systematic reliance on shared knowledge in dedicated morphological forms and usage patterns. For example, English has a large range of terms for use when a speaker cannot locate the word or name for something or someone (e.g., whatsit, what’s-his-name), but thinks that the interlocutor knows, or can easily work out, what the speaker is talking about. This task aims to identify and investigate these kinds of expressions in the research language, including their grammaticalised status, meaning, distribution, and productivity. The task consists of a questionnaire with examples of relevant hypothetical scenarios that can be used in eliciting the relevant terms. The researcher is then encouraged to pursue further questions in regard to these items. -
Enfield, N. J. (2001). Body. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (
Eds. ), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 62-77). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874633.Abstract
This task investigates the extensional meaning of body part terms, in particular the terms for the upper and lower limbs. Two questions are addressed, namely (i) are the boundaries of these body parts universal, guided by proposed universals of object recognition? (ii) How can we compare the extensional meanings of body part terms within and across different systems of nomenclature? Consultants receive booklets with line drawings of a body and are asked to colour in specific parts of the body.Additional information
http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/volumes/2001/body/ -
Enfield, N. J., Kendrick, K. H., De Ruiter, J. P., Stivers, T., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). Building a corpus of spontaneous interaction. In Field manual volume 14 (pp. 29-32). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.1005610.
Abstract
This revised version supersedes all previous versions (e.g., Field Manual 2010). -
Enfield, N. J. (2011). Description of reciprocal situations in Lao. In N. Evans, A. Gaby, S. C. Levinson, & A. Majid (
Eds. ), Reciprocals and semantic typology (pp. 129-149). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This article describes the grammatical resources available to speakers of Lao for describing situations that can be described broadly as ‘reciprocal’. The analysis is based on complementary methods: elicitation by means of non-linguistic stimuli, exploratory consultation with native speakers, and investigation of corpora of spontaneous language use. Typically, reciprocal situations are described using a semantically general ‘collaborative’ marker on an action verb. The resultant meaning is that some set of people participate in a situation ‘together’, broadly construed. The collaborative marker is found in two distinct syntactic constructions, which differ in terms of their information structural contexts of use. The paper first explores in detail the semantic range of the collaborative marker as it occurs in the more common ‘Type 1’ construction, and then discusses a special pragmatic context for the ‘Type 2’ construction. There is some methodological discussion concerning the results of elicitation via video stimuli. The chapter also discusses two specialised constructions dedicated to the expression of strict reciprocity. -
Enfield, N. J. (2013). Doing fieldwork on the body, language, and communication. In C. Müller, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig, A. Cienki, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (
Eds. ), Handbook Body – Language – Communication. Volume 1 (pp. 974-981). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Enfield, N. J. (2011). Dynamics of human diversity in mainland Southeast Asia: Introduction. In N. J. Enfield (
Ed. ), Dynamics of human diversity: The case of mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 1-8). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. -
Enfield, N. J. (2011). Elements of formulation. In J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, & C. LeBaron (
Eds. ), Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world (pp. 59-66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
(from the chapter) Recognizing others' goals in the flow of interaction is complex, not only for analysts but for participants too. This chapter explores a semiotic approach, with the utterance-in-context as a basic-level unit, and where the interpreter, not the producer, is the driving force in how utterances come to have meaning. We first want to know how people extract meaning from others' communicative behavior. We then ask what are the elements of producers' formulation of communicative actions in anticipation of how others will interpret that behavior. -
Enfield, N. J. (2003). “Fish traps” task. In N. J. Enfield (
Ed. ), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 31). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877616.Abstract
This task is designed to elicit virtual 3D ‘models’ created in gesture space using iconic and other representational gestures. This task has been piloted with Lao speakers, where two speakers were asked to explain the meaning of terms referring to different kinds of fish trap mechanisms. The task elicited complex performances involving a range of iconic gestures, and with especially interesting use of (a) the ‘model/diagram’ in gesture space as a virtual object, (b) the non-dominant hand as a prosodic/semiotic anchor, (c) a range of different techniques (indexical and iconic) for evoking meaning with the hand, and (d) the use of nearby objects and parts of the body as semiotic ‘props’.
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