Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 252
  • Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. L., & Twomey, K. E. (2020). Introduction. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. E. Twomey (Eds.), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn (pp. 1-7). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.27.int.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2010). Information packaging constructions in Kwa: Micro-variation and typology. In E. O. Aboh, & J. Essegbey (Eds.), Topics in Kwa syntax (pp. 141-176). Dordrecht: Springer.

    Abstract

    Kwa languages such as Akye, Akan, Ewe, Ga, Likpe, Yoruba etc. are not prototypically “topic-prominent” like Chinese nor “focus-prominent” like Somali, yet they have dedicated structural positions in the clause, as well as morphological markers for signalling the information status of the component parts of information units. They could thus be seen as “discourse configurational languages” (Kiss 1995). In this chapter, I first argue for distinct positions in the left periphery of the clause in these languages for scene-setting topics, contrastive topics and focus. I then describe the morpho-syntactic properties of various information packaging constructions and the variations that we find across the languages in this domain.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2007). Grammatical borrowing in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé). In Y. Matras, & J. Sakel (Eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 107-122). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Ameka, F. K. (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.
  • Amora, K. K., Garcia, R., & Gagarina, N. (2020). Tagalog adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: History, process and preliminary results. In N. Gagarina, & J. Lindgren (Eds.), New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised (pp. 221-233).

    Abstract

    This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines,
    specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language.
    Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and
    adults (N=27) are presented. The results showed that Story Structure is similar across the
    two languages and that it develops significantly with age.
  • Baayen, R. H. (2007). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In G. Jarema, & G. Libben (Eds.), The mental lexicon: Core perspectives (pp. 81-104). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2020). Appositive compounds in dialectal and sociolinguistic varieties of French. In M. Maiden, & S. Wolfe (Eds.), Variation and change in Gallo-Romance (pp. 326-346). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2010). Fore-runners of Romance -mente adverbs in Latin prose and poetry. In E. Dickey, & A. Chahoud (Eds.), Colloquial and literary Latin (pp. 339-353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • 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…

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  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2007). The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category? In E. Stark, E. Leiss, & W. Abraham (Eds.), Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence (pp. 103-139). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Bickel, B. (1991). Der Hang zur Exzentrik - Annäherungen an das kognitive Modell der Relativkonstruktion. In W. Bisang, & P. Rinderknecht (Eds.), Von Europa bis Ozeanien - von der Antinomie zum Relativsatz (pp. 15-37). Zurich, Switzerland: Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft der Universität.
  • Blythe, J. (2010). From ethical datives to number markers in Murriny Patha. In R. Hendery, & J. Hendriks (Eds.), Grammatical change: Theory and description (pp. 157-187). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Blythe, J. (2010). Self-association in Murriny Patha talk-in-interaction. In I. Mushin, & R. Gardner (Eds.), Studies in Australian Indigenous Conversation [Special issue] (pp. 447-469). Australian Journal of Linguistics. doi:10.1080/07268602.2010.518555.

    Abstract

    When referring to persons in talk-in-interaction, interlocutors recruit the particular referential expressions that best satisfy both cultural and interactional contingencies, as well as the speaker’s own personal objectives. Regular referring practices reveal cultural preferences for choosing particular classes of reference forms for engaging in particular types of activities. When speakers of the northern Australian language Murriny Patha refer to each other, they display a clear preference for associating the referent to the current conversation’s participants. This preference for Association is normally achieved through the use of triangular reference forms such as kinterms. Triangulations are reference forms that link the person being spoken about to another specified person (e.g. Bill’s doctor). Triangulations are frequently used to associate the referent to the current speaker (e.g.my father), to an addressed recipient (your uncle) or co-present other (this bloke’s cousin). Murriny Patha speakers regularly associate key persons to themselves when making authoritative claims about items of business and important events. They frequently draw on kinship links when attempting to bolster their epistemic position. When speakers demonstrate their relatedness to the event’s protagonists, they ground their contribution to the discussion as being informed by appropriate genealogical connections (effectively, ‘I happen to know something about that. He was after all my own uncle’).
  • 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.
  • Boroditsky, L., Gaby, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Time in space. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field manual volume 10 (pp. 59-80). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468721.

    Abstract

    This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2008 version: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.492932

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  • 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).
  • Bosker, H. R., Briaire, J., Heeren, W., van Heuven, V. J., & Jongman, S. R. (2010). Whispered speech as input for cochlear implants. In J. Van Kampen, & R. Nouwen (Eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2010 (pp. 1-14).
  • Bottini, R., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Implicit spatial length modulates time estimates, but not vice versa. In C. Hölscher, T. F. Shipley, M. Olivetti Belardinelli, J. A. Bateman, & N. Newcombe (Eds.), Spatial Cognition VII. International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2010, Mt. Hood/Portland, OR, USA, August 15-19, 2010. Proceedings (pp. 152-162). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.

    Abstract

    How are space and time represented in the human mind? Here we evaluate two theoretical proposals, one suggesting a symmetric relationship between space and time (ATOM theory) and the other an asymmetric relationship (metaphor theory). In Experiment 1, Dutch-speakers saw 7-letter nouns that named concrete objects of various spatial lengths (tr. pencil, bench, footpath) and estimated how much time they remained on the screen. In Experiment 2, participants saw nouns naming temporal events of various durations (tr. blink, party, season) and estimated the words’ spatial length. Nouns that named short objects were judged to remain on the screen for a shorter time, and nouns that named longer objects to remain for a longer time. By contrast, variations in the duration of the event nouns’ referents had no effect on judgments of the words’ spatial length. This asymmetric pattern of cross-dimensional interference supports metaphor theory and challenges ATOM.
  • Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition [Reprint]. In V. Evans, B. K. Bergen, & J. Zinken (Eds.), The cognitive linguistic reader (pp. 849-879). London: Equinox Publishing.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 387-427). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (2007). Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing topological spatial categories in first language acquisition. In M. Aurnague, M. Hickmann, & L. Vieu (Eds.), The categorization of spatial entities in language and cognition (pp. 177-203). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Among children’s earliest spatial words are topological forms like ‘in’ and ‘on’. Although these forms name spatial relationships, they also presuppose a classification of ground objects into entities such as “containers” and “surfaces”; hence their relevance for a volume on “spatial entities”. Traditionally, researchers have assumed that semantic categories of space are universal, reflecting a human way of nonlinguistically perceiving and cognizing space. But, as this chapter discusses, spatial categories in fact differ strikingly across languages, and children begin to home in on language-specific classifications extremely early, before age two. Learners do not, it seems, draw only on purely nonlinguistic spatial concepts; they can also actively construct spatial categories on the basis of the linguistic input. Evidence is drawn primarily from research on children learning Korean vs. English.
  • Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Kształtowanie znaczeń dla języka: Zjawiska uniwersalne i charakterystyczne dla danego języka w przyswajaniu kategorii semantycznych odnoszących się do przestrzeni [Reprint]. In B. Bokus, & G. W. Shugar (Eds.), Psychologia języka dziecka (pp. 386-424). Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In M. Bowerman & S.L. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Braun, B., & Tagliapietra, L. (2010). The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives. In D. G. Watson, M. Wagner, & E. Gibson (Eds.), Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody (pp. 1024-1043). Hove: Psychology Press.

    Abstract

    Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.
  • Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). Predicting the dative alternation. In G. Bouma, I. Kraemer, & J. Zwarts (Eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation (pp. 69-94). Amsterdam: KNAW.

    Abstract

    Theoretical linguists have traditionally relied on linguistic intuitions such as grammaticality judgments for their data. But the massive growth of computer-readable texts and recordings, the availability of cheaper, more powerful computers and software, and the development of new probabilistic models for language have now made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alternative source of data. Surprisingly, many linguists believe that such ‘usage data’ are irrelevant to the theory of grammar. Four problems are repeatedly brought up in the critiques of usage data— 1. correlated factors seeming to support reductive theories, 2. pooled data invalidating grammatical inference, 3. syntactic choices reducing to lexical biases, and 4. cross-corpus differences undermining corpus studies. Presenting a case study of work on the English dative alternation, we show first,that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed and seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility, and second, that the four problems in the critique of usage data are empirical issues that can be resolved by using modern statistical theory and modelling strategies widely used in other fields. The new models allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science.
  • Brown, P. (2007). Principles of person reference in Tzeltal conversation. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 172-202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    This paper focuses on ‘minimality’ in initial references to persons in the Mayan language Tzeltal, spoken in southern Mexico. Inspection of initial person-referring expressions in 25 Tzeltal videotaped conversations reveals that, in this language, if speaker and/or recipient are related through ‘kinship’ to the referent, a kin term (or other relational term like ‘namesake’) is the default option for initial reference to persons. Additionally, further specification via names and/or geographical location (of home base) is also often used to home in on the referent (e.g. ‘your-cousin Alonzo’, ‘our mother’s brother behind the mountain’). And often (~ 70 cases in the data examined) initial references to persons combine more than one referring expression, for example: ‘this old man my brother-in-law old man Antonio here in the pines’, or ‘the father of that brother-in-law of yours the father-in-law of your elder-sister Xmaruch’. Seen in the light of Schegloff’s (1979, 1996) two basic preferences for referring to persons in conversation: (i.) for a recognitional form and (ii.) for a minimal form, these Tzeltal person-referring expressions seem to be relatively elaborated. This paper examines the sequential contexts where such combinations appear, and proposes a third preference operative in Tzeltal (and possibly in other kinship-term-based systems) for associating the referent as closely as possible to the participants.
  • Brown, 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. (2010). Cognitive anthropology. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 43-46). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    This is an encyclopedia entry surveying anthropological approaches to cognition and culture.
  • Brown, P. (2007). Culture-specific influences on semantic development Acquiring the Tzeltal 'benefactive' construction. In B. Pfeiler (Ed.), Learning indigenous languages: Child language acquisition in Mesoamerica (pp. 119-154). Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.

    Abstract

    Three-place predicates are an important locus for examining how children acquire argument structure and how this process is influenced by the typology of the language they are learning as well as by culturally-specific semantic categories. From a typological perspective, there is reason to expect children to have some trouble expressing three-participant events, given the considerable variation across languages in how these are linguistically coded. Verbs of transfer (‘give’, ‘receive’, etc.) are often considered to be the verbs which canonically appear with three arguments (e.g., Slobin 1985, Gleitman 1990). Yet in the Mayan language Tzeltal, verbs other than transfer verbs appear routinely in the ditransitive construction. Although the three participants are rarely all overtly expressed as NPs, this construction ensures that the ‘recipient’ or or ‘affectee’ participant is overtly marked on the verb. Tzeltal children’s early acquisition of this construction (well before the age of 3;0) shows that they are sensitive to its abstract constructional meaning of ‘affected’ third participant: they do not go initially for ‘transfer’ meanings but are attuned to benefactive or malefactive uses despite the predominance of the verb ‘give’ in the input with this construction. This poses a challenge to acquisition theories (Goldberg 2001, Ninio 1999) that see construction meaning arising from the meaning of the verb most frequently used in a construction.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Gesichtsbedrohende Akte [reprint: Face-threatening acts, 1987]. In S. K. Herrmann, S. Kraemer, & H. Kuch (Eds.), Verletzende Worte: Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung (pp. 59-88). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

    Abstract

    This article is a reprint of parts of chapters 2 and 3 from Brown and Levinson (1987) discussing the concept of 'Face Threatening Acts'.
  • Brown, P. (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'.

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  • 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., 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.

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  • Brown, P. (1991). Sind Frauen höflicher? Befunde aus einer Maya-Gemeinde. In S. Günther, & H. Kotthoff (Eds.), Von fremden Stimmen: Weibliches und männliches Sprechen im Kulturvergleich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

    Abstract

    This is a German translation of Brown 1980, How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community.
  • 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. (2010). Todo el mundo tiene que mentir en Tzeltal: Amenazas y mentiras en la socialización de los niños tzeltales de Tenejapa, Chiapas. In L. de León Pasquel (Ed.), Socialización, lenguajes y culturas infantiles: Estudios interdisciplinarios (pp. 231-271). Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS).

    Abstract

    This is a Spanish translation of Brown 2002, 'Everyone has to lie in Tzeltal'. Translated by B. E. Alvaraz Klein
  • Wu, D. H., & Bulut, T. (2020). The contribution of statistical learning to language and literacy acquisition. In K. D. Federmeier, & H. W. Huang (Eds.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 283-318). doi:10.1016/bs.plm.2020.02.001.

    Abstract

    Acquisition and processing of written and spoken language is an impressive cognitive accomplishment considering the complexity of the tasks. While only humans seem to have evolved to the fullest extent the capacity that underpins these remarkable feats of development and civilization, the exact nature of such capacity has been subject to ongoing research. In this chapter, we focus on language competence and what makes it unique among the communication systems of different species. We then elaborate on the classical debate between nativist and environmentalist accounts of language acquisition, with reference to evidence for and against the critical period hypothesis. After introducing the regularity embedded in different languages and particularly in drastically different orthographies, we present behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the sensitivity to systematic mapping between orthography and phonology. Because learning to read is to master such mapping, we assume that the ability to use statistical learning to appreciate the dependency among items would contribute to literacy acquisition. Empirical results from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments conducted in our and other laboratories provide support for the close link between statistical learning and literacy acquisition in native and foreign language. Such findings highlight the significance of domain-general statistical learning to domain-specific language acquisition, and point to an important direction for theories and practices of language education.

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  • Burenhult, N. (2020). Foraging and the history of languages in the Malay Peninsula. In T. Güldemann, P. McConvell, & R. Rhodes (Eds.), The language of Hunter-Gatherers (pp. 164-197). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Burenhult, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). Semplates: A guide to identification and elicitation. In E. Norcliffe, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Field manual volume 13 (pp. 17-23). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Carota, F. (2007). Collaborative use of contrastive markers Contextual and co-textual implications. In A. Fetzer (Ed.), Context and Appropriateness: Micro meets macro (pp. 235-260). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    The study presented in this paper examines the context-dependence and
    dialogue functions of the contrastive markers of Italian ma (but),
    invece (instead), mentre (while) and per (nevertheless) within
    task-oriented dialogues.
    Corpus data evidence their sensitivity to a acognitive interpersonal
    context, conceived as a common ground. Such a cognitive state - shared
    by co-participants through the coordinative process of grounding -
    interacts with the global dialogue structure, which is cognitively
    shaped by ``meta-negotiating{''} and grounding the dialogue topic.
    Locally, the relation between the current dialogue structural units and
    the global dialogue topic is said to be specified by information
    structure, in particular intra-utterance themes.
    It is argued that contrastive markers re-orient the co-participants'
    cognitive states towards grounding ungrounded topical aspects to be
    meta-negotiated. They offer a collaborative context-updating strategy,
    tracking the status of common ground during dialogue topic management.
  • Carota, F., Desmurget, M., & Sirigu, A. (2010). Forward Modeling Mediates Motor Awareness. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong, & L. Nadel (Eds.), Conscious Will and Responsibility - A Tribute to Benjamin Libet (pp. 97-108). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Abstract

    This chapter focuses on the issue of motor awareness. It addresses three main questions: What exactly are we aware of when making a movement? What is the contribution of afferent and efferent signals to motor awareness? What are the neural bases of motor awareness? It reviews evidence that the motor system is mainly aware of its intention. As long as the goal is achieved, nothing reaches awareness about the kinematic details of the ongoing movements, even when substantial corrections have to be implemented to attain the intended state. The chapter also shows that motor awareness relies mainly on the central predictive computations carried out within the posterior parietal cortex. The outcome of these computations is contrasted with the peripheral reafferent input to build a veridical motor awareness. Some evidence exists that this process involves the premotor areas.
  • Casasanto, D., & Bottini, R. (2010). Can mirror-reading reverse the flow of time? In C. Hölscher, T. F. Shipley, M. Olivetti Belardinelli, J. A. Bateman, & N. S. Newcombe (Eds.), Spatial Cognition VII. International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2010, Mt. Hood/Portland, OR, USA, August 15-19, 2010. Proceedings (pp. 335-345). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.

    Abstract

    Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit time representations independent of other cultural and linguistic factors? Native Dutch speakers performed a space-time congruity task with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard Dutch or mirror-reversed Dutch. Participants in the Standard Dutch condition were fastest to judge past-oriented phrases by pressing the left button and future-oriented phrases by pressing the right button. Participants in the Mirror-Reversed Dutch condition showed the opposite pattern of reaction times, consistent with results found previously in native Arabic and Hebrew speakers. These results demonstrate a causal role for writing direction in shaping implicit mental representations of time.
  • Casasanto, D. (2010). En qué casos una metáfora lingüística constituye una metáfora conceptual? In D. Pérez, S. Español, L. Skidelsky, & R. Minervino (Eds.), Conceptos: Debates contemporáneos en filosofía y psicología. Buenos Airos: Catálogos.
  • Casasanto, D. (2010). Wie der Körper Sprache und Vorstellungsvermögen im Gehirn formt. In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Jahrbuch 2010. München: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Retrieved from http://www.mpg.de/jahrbuch/forschungsbericht?obj=454607.

    Abstract

    Wenn unsere geistigen Fähigkeiten zum Teil von der Struktur unserer Körper abhängen, dann sollten Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Körpertypen unterschiedlich denken. Um dies zu überprüfen, haben Wissenschaftler des MPI für Psycholinguistik neurale Korrelate von Sprachverstehen und motorischen Vorstellungen untersucht, die durch Aktionsverben hervorgerufen werden. Diese Verben bezeichnen Handlungen, die Menschen zumeist mit ihrer dominanten Hand ausführen (z. B. schreiben, werfen). Das Verstehen dieser Verben sowie die Vorstellung entsprechender motorischer Handlungen wurde in Gehirnen von Rechts- und Linkshändern unterschiedlich lateralisiert. Bilden Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Körpertypen verschiedene Konzepte und Wortbedeutungen? Gemäß der Körperspezifitätshypothese sollten sie das tun [1]. Weil geistige Fähigkeiten vom Körper abhängen, sollten Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Körpertypen auch unterschiedlich denken. Diese Annahme stellt die klassische Auffassung in Frage, dass Konzepte universal und Wortbedeutungen identisch sind für alle Sprecher einer Sprache. Untersuchungen im Projekt „Sprache in Aktion“ am MPI für Psycholinguistik zeigen, dass die Art und Weise, wie Sprecher ihre Körper nutzen, die Art und Weise beeinflusst, wie sie sich im Gehirn Handlungen vorstellen und wie sie Sprache, die solche Handlungen thematisiert, im Gehirn verarbeiten.
  • Casillas, M., & Hilbrink, E. (2020). Communicative act development. In K. P. Schneider, & E. Ifantidou (Eds.), Developmental and Clinical Pragmatics (pp. 61-88). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

    Abstract

    How do children learn to map linguistic forms onto their intended meanings? This chapter begins with an introduction to some theoretical and analytical tools used to study communicative acts. It then turns to communicative act development in spoken and signed language acquisition, including both the early scaffolding and production of communicative acts (both non-verbal and verbal) as well as their later links to linguistic development and Theory of Mind. The chapter wraps up by linking research on communicative act development to the acquisition of conversational skills, cross-linguistic and individual differences in communicative experience during development, and human evolution. Along the way, it also poses a few open questions for future research in this domain.
  • Chen, A. (2010). Ab wann nutzen Kinder die Intonation zum Ausdruck neuer Information? In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Jahrbuch 2010. München: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. Retrieved from http://www.mpg.de/jahrbuch/forschungsbericht?obj=447900.

    Abstract

    In einer Studie am Max-Planck-Institut in Nijmegen wurde untersucht, wie und wann Kinder die Regeln der Intonation in der niederländischen Sprache beherrschen. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass sie mehrere Entwicklungsstufen durchlaufen, bevor sie im Alter von sieben oder acht Jahren so intonieren wie die Erwachsenen, die einen Fokus (sprich: neue Information) mit einem fallenden Akzent markieren.
  • Chen, A. (2007). Language-specificity in the perception of continuation intonation. In C. Gussenhoven, & T. Riad (Eds.), Tones and tunes II: Phonetic and behavioural studies in word and sentence prosody (pp. 107-142). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Abstract

    This paper addressed the question of how British English, German and Dutch listeners differ in their perception of continuation intonation both at the phonological level (Experiment 1) and at the level of phonetic implementation (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, preference scores of pitch contours to signal continuation at the clause-boundary were obtained from these listener groups. It was found that among contours with H%, British English listeners had a strong preference for H*L H%, as predicted. Unexpectedly, British English listeners rated H* H% noticeably more favourably than L*H H%; Dutch listeners largely rated H* H% more favourably than H*L H% and L*H H%; German listeners rated these contours similarly and seemed to have a slight preference for H*L H%. In Experiment 2, the degree to which a final rise was perceived to express continuation was established for each listener group in a made-up language. It was found that although all listener groups associated a higher end pitch with a higher degree of continuation likelihood, the perceived meaning difference for a given interval of end pitch heights varied with the contour shape of the utterance final syllable. When it was comparable to H* H%, British English and Dutch listeners perceived a larger meaning difference than German listeners; when it was comparable to H*L H%, British English listeners perceived a larger difference than German and Dutch listeners. This shows that language-specificity in continuation intonation at the phonological level affects the perception of continuation intonation at the phonetic level.
  • 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).
  • Crago, M. B., & Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Acquiring Inuktitut. In O. L. Taylor, & L. Leonard (Eds.), Language Acquisition Across North America: Cross-Cultural And Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 245-279). San Diego, CA, USA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
  • Cutler, A., Eisner, F., McQueen, J. M., & Norris, D. (2010). How abstract phonemic categories are necessary for coping with speaker-related variation. In C. Fougeron, B. Kühnert, M. D'Imperio, & N. Vallée (Eds.), Laboratory phonology 10 (pp. 91-111). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A. (1991). Linguistic rhythm and speech segmentation. In J. Sundberg, L. Nord, & R. Carlson (Eds.), Music, language, speech and brain (pp. 157-166). London: Macmillan.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Dediu, D., 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.
  • Dediu, D. (2010). Linguistic and genetic diversity - how and why are they related? In M. Brüne, F. Salter, & W. McGrew (Eds.), Building bridges between anthropology, medicine and human ethology: Tributes to Wulf Schiefenhövel (pp. 169-178). Bochum: Europäischer Universitätsverlag.

    Abstract

    There are some 6000 languages spoken today, classfied in approximately 90 linguistic families and many isolates, and also differing across structural, typological, dimensions. Genetically, the human species is remarkably homogeneous, with the existant genetic diversity mostly explain by intra-population differences between individuals, but the remaining inter-population differences have a non-trivial structure. Populations splits and contacts influence both languages and genes, in principle allowing them to evolve in parallel ways. The farming/language co-dispersal hypothesis is a well-known such theory, whereby farmers spreading agriculture from its places of origin also spread their genes and languages. A different type of relationship was recently proposed, involving a genetic bias which influences the structural properties of language as it is transmitted across generations. Such a bias was proposed to explain the correlations between the distribution of tone languages and two brain development-related human genes and, if confirmed by experimental studies, it could represent a new factor explaining the distrbution of diversity. The present chapter overviews these related topics in the hope that a truly interdisciplinary approach could allow a better understanding of our complex (recent as well as evolutionary) history.
  • Dimroth, C. (2007). Zweitspracherwerb bei Kindern und Jugendlichen: Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede. In T. Anstatt (Ed.), Mehrsprachigkeit bei Kindern und Erwachsenen: Erwerb, Formen, Förderung (pp. 115-137). Tübingen: Attempto.

    Abstract

    This paper discusses the influence of age-related factors like stage of cognitive development, prior linguistic knowledge, and motivation and addresses the specific effects of these ‘age factors’ on second language acquisition as opposed to other learning tasks. Based on longitudinal corpus data from child and adolescent learners of L2 German (L1 = Russian), the paper studies the acquisition of word order (verb raising over negation, verb second) and inflectional morphology (subject-verb-agreement, tense, noun plural, and adjective-noun agreement). Whereas the child learner shows target-like production in all of these areas within the observation period (1½ years), the adolescent learner masters only some of them. The discussion addresses the question of what it is about clusters of grammatical features that make them particularly affected by age.
  • Dimroth, C. (2010). The acquisition of negation. In L. R. Horn (Ed.), The expression of negation (pp. 39-73). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • 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. (2010). Folk definitions of ideophones. In E. Norcliffe, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Field manual volume 13 (pp. 24-29). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.529151.

    Abstract

    Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory events, for example English hippety-hoppety ‘in a limping and hobbling manner’ or Siwu mukumuku ‘mouth movements of a toothless person eating’. They typically have special sound patterns and distinct grammatical properties. Ideophones are found in many languages of the world, suggesting a common fascination with detailed sensory depiction, but reliable data on their meaning and use is still very scarce. This task involves video-recording spontaneous, informal explanations (“folk definitions”) of individual ideophones by native speakers, in their own language. The approach facilitates collection of rich primary data in a planned context while ensuring a large amount of spontaneity and freedom.
  • Dingemanse, M. (2020). Recruiting assistance and collaboration: A West-African corpus study. In S. Floyd, G. Rossi, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments (pp. 369-241). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4018388.

    Abstract

    Doing things for and with others is one of the foundations of human social life. This chapter studies a systematic collection of 207 requests for assistance and collaboration from a video corpus of everyday conversations in Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. A range of social action formats and semiotic resources reveals how language is adapted to the interactional challenges posed by recruiting assistance. While many of the formats bear a language-specific signature, their sequential and interactional properties show important commonalities across languages. Two tentative findings are put forward for further cross-linguistic examination: a “rule of three” that may play a role in the organisation of successive response pursuits, and a striking commonality in animal-oriented recruitments across languages that may be explained by convergent cultural evolution. The Siwu recruitment system emerges as one instance of a sophisticated machinery for organising collaborative action that transcends language and culture.
  • Dugoujon, J.-M., Larrouy, G., Mazières, S., Brucato, N., Sevin, A., Cassar, O., & Gessain, A. (2010). Histoire et dynamique du peuplement humain en Amazonie: L’exemple de la Guyane. In A. Pavé, & G. Fornet (Eds.), Amazonie: Une aventure scientifique et humaine du CNRS (pp. 128-132). Paris: Galaade Éditions.
  • Dunn, M. (2007). Vernacular literacy in the Touo language of the Solomon Islands. In A. J. Liddicoat (Ed.), Language planning and policy: Issues in language planning and literacy (pp. 209-220). Clevedon: Multilingual matters.

    Abstract

    The Touo language is a non-Austronesian language spoken on Rendova Island (Western Province, Solomon Islands). First language speakers of Touo are typically multilingual, and are likely to speak other (Austronesian) vernaculars, as well as Solomon Island Pijin and English. There is no institutional support of literacy in Touo: schools function in English, and church-based support for vernacular literacy focuses on the major Austronesian languages of the local area. Touo vernacular literacy exists in a restricted niche of the linguistic ecology, where it is utilised for symbolic rather than communicative goals. Competing vernacular orthographic traditions complicate the situation further.
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
  • Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., De Ruiter, J. P., & Stivers, T. (2007). Building a corpus of multimodal interaction in your field site. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 96-99). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468728.

    Abstract

    Research on video- and audio-recordings of spontaneous naturally-occurring conversation in English has shown that conversation is a rule-guided, practice-oriented domain that can be investigated for its underlying mechanics or structure. Systematic study could yield something like a grammar for conversation. The goal of this task is to acquire a corpus of video-data, for investigating the underlying structure(s) of interaction cross-linguistically and cross-culturally.
  • Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., De Ruiter, J. P., & Stivers, T. (2010). Building a corpus of multimodal interaction in your field site. In E. Norcliffe, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Field manual volume 13 (pp. 30-33). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • 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. (2013). A ‘Composite Utterances’ approach to meaning. In C. Müller, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig, A. Cienki, D. McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (Eds.), Handbook Body – Language – Communication. Volume 1 (pp. 689-706). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2007). Meanings of the unmarked: How 'default' person reference does more than just refer. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 97-120). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Enfield, N. J., Dingemanse, M., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Brown, P., Dirksmeyer, T., Drew, P., Floyd, S., Gipper, S., Gisladottir, R. S., Hoymann, G., Kendrick, K. H., Levinson, S. C., Magyari, L., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., San Roque, L., & Torreira, F. (2013). Huh? What? – A first survey in 21 languages. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational repair and human understanding (pp. 343-380). New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Introduction

    A comparison of conversation in twenty-one languages from around the world reveals commonalities and differences in the way that people do open-class other-initiation of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks, 1977; Drew, 1997). We find that speakers of all of the spoken languages in the sample make use of a primary interjection strategy (in English it is Huh?), where the phonetic form of the interjection is strikingly similar across the languages: a monosyllable featuring an open non-back vowel [a, æ, ə, ʌ], often nasalized, usually with rising intonation and sometimes an [h-] onset. We also find that most of the languages have another strategy for open-class other-initiation of repair, namely the use of a question word (usually “what”). Here we find significantly more variation across the languages. The phonetic form of the question word involved is completely different from language to language: e.g., English [wɑt] versus Cha'palaa [ti] versus Duna [aki]. Furthermore, the grammatical structure in which the repair-initiating question word can or must be expressed varies within and across languages. In this chapter we present data on these two strategies – primary interjections like Huh? and question words like What? – with discussion of possible reasons for the similarities and differences across the languages. We explore some implications for the notion of repair as a system, in the context of research on the typology of language use.

    The general outline of this chapter is as follows. We first discuss repair as a system across languages and then introduce the focus of the chapter: open-class other-initiation of repair. A discussion of the main findings follows, where we identify two alternative strategies in the data: an interjection strategy (Huh?) and a question word strategy (What?). Formal features and possible motivations are discussed for the interjection strategy and the question word strategy in order. A final section discusses bodily behavior including posture, eyebrow movements and eye gaze, both in spoken languages and in a sign language.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). Metalanguage for speech acts. In Field manual volume 13 (pp. 34-36). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    People of all cultures have some degree of concern with categorizing types of communicative social action. All languages have words with meanings like speak, say, talk, complain, curse, promise, accuse, nod, wink, point and chant. But the exact distinctions they make will differ in both quantity and quality. How is communicative social action categorised across languages and cultures? The goal of this task is to establish a basis for cross-linguistic comparison of native metalanguages for social action.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2013). Hippie, interrupted. In J. Barker, & J. Lindquist (Eds.), Figures of Southeast Asian modernity (pp. 101-103). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2013). Reference in conversation. In J. Sidnell, & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 433-454). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118325001.ch21.

    Abstract

    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Lexical Selection in Reference: Introductory Examples of Reference to Times Multiple “Preferences” Future Directions Conclusion
  • Enfield, N. J. (2007). Repair sequences in interaction. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 100-103). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468724.

    Abstract

    This sub-project is concerned with analysis and cross-linguistic comparison of the mechanisms of signaling and redressing ‘trouble’ during conversation. Speakers and listeners constantly face difficulties with many different aspects of speech production and comprehension during conversation. A speaker may mispronounce a word, or may be unable to find a word, or be unable to formulate in words an idea he or she has in mind. A listener may have troubling hearing (part of) what was said, may not know who a speaker is referring to, may not be sure of the current relevance of what is being said. There may be problems in the organisation of turns at talk, for instance, two speakers’ speech may be in overlap. The goal of this task is to investigate the range of practices that a language uses to address problems of speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation.
  • Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). Intraparadigmatic effects on the perception of voice. In J. van de Weijer, & E. J. van der Torre (Eds.), Voicing in Dutch: (De)voicing-phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics (pp. 153-173). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    In Dutch, all morpheme-final obstruents are voiceless in word-final position. As a consequence, the distinction between obstruents that are voiced before vowel-initial suffixes and those that are always voiceless is neutralized. This study adds to the existing evidence that the neutralization is incomplete: neutralized, alternating plosives tend to have shorter bursts than non-alternating plosives. Furthermore, in a rating study, listeners scored the alternating plosives as more voiced than the nonalternating plosives, showing sensitivity to the subtle subphonemic cues in the acoustic signal. Importantly, the participants who were presented with the complete words, instead of just the final rhymes, scored the alternating plosives as even more voiced. This shows that listeners’ perception of voice is affected by their knowledge of the obstruent’s realization in the word’s morphological paradigm. Apparently, subphonemic paradigmatic levelling is a characteristic of both production and perception. We explain the effects within an analogy-based approach.
  • Fisher, S. E. (2013). Building bridges between genes, brains and language. In J. J. Bolhuis, & M. Everaert (Eds.), Birdsong, speech and language: Exploring the evolution of mind and brain (pp. 425-454). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
  • Floyd, S. (2013). Semantic transparency and cultural calquing in the Northwest Amazon. In P. Epps, & K. Stenzel (Eds.), Upper Rio Negro: Cultural and linguistic interaction in northwestern Amazonia (pp. 271-308). Rio de Janiero: Museu do Indio. Retrieved from http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/ppgas/livros_ele.html.

    Abstract

    The ethnographic literature has sometimes described parts of the northwest Amazon as areas of shared culture across linguistic groups. This paper illustrates how a principle of semantic transparency across languages is a key means of establishing elements of a common regional culture through practices like the calquing of ethnonyms and toponyms so that they are semantically, but not phonologically, equivalent across languages. It places the upper Rio Negro area of the northwest Amazon in a general discussion of cross-linguistic naming practices in South America and considers the extent to which a preference for semantic transparency can be linked to cases of widespread cultural ‘calquing’, in which culturally-important meanings are kept similar across different linguistic systems. It also addresses the principle of semantic transparency beyond specific referential phrases and into larger discourse structures. It concludes that an attention to semiotic practices in multilingual settings can provide new and more complex ways of thinking about the idea of shared culture.
  • Folia, V., Uddén, J., De Vries, M., Forkstam, C., & Petersson, K. M. (2010). Artificial language learning in adults and children. In M. Gullberg, & P. Indefrey (Eds.), The earliest stages of language learning (pp. 188-220). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Fox, E. (2020). Literary Jerry and justice. In M. E. Poulsen (Ed.), The Jerome Bruner Library: From New York to Nijmegen. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Frank, S. L., Koppen, M., Noordman, L. G. M., & Vonk, W. (2007). Modeling multiple levels of text presentation. In F. Schmalhofer, & C. A. Perfetti (Eds.), Higher level language processes in the brain: Inference and comprehension processes (pp. 133-157). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Frost, R. L. A., & Monaghan, P. (2020). Insights from studying statistical learning. In C. F. Rowland, A. L. Theakston, B. Ambridge, & K. E. Twomey (Eds.), Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn (pp. 65-89). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.27.03fro.

    Abstract

    Acquiring language is notoriously complex, yet for the majority of children this feat is accomplished with remarkable ease. Usage-based accounts of language acquisition suggest that this success can be largely attributed to the wealth of experience with language that children accumulate over the course of language acquisition. One field of research that is heavily underpinned by this principle of experience is statistical learning, which posits that learners can perform powerful computations over the distribution of information in a given input, which can help them to discern precisely how that input is structured, and how it operates. A growing body of work brings this notion to bear in the field of language acquisition, due to a developing understanding of the richness of the statistical information contained in speech. In this chapter we discuss the role that statistical learning plays in language acquisition, emphasising the importance of both the distribution of information within language, and the situation in which language is being learnt. First, we address the types of statistical learning that apply to a range of language learning tasks, asking whether the statistical processes purported to support language learning are the same or distinct across different tasks in language acquisition. Second, we expand the perspective on what counts as environmental input, by determining how statistical learning operates over the situated learning environment, and not just sequences of sounds in utterances. Finally, we address the role of variability in children’s input, and examine how statistical learning can accommodate (and perhaps even exploit) this during language acquisition.
  • Furuyama, N., & Sekine, K. (2007). Forgetful or strategic? The mystery of the systematic avoidance of reference in the cartoon story nsarrative. In S. D. Duncan, J. Cassel, & E. T. Levy (Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language: Essays in honor of David McNeill (pp. 75-81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • Güldemann, T., & Hammarström, H. (2020). Geographical axis effects in large-scale linguistic distributions. In M. Crevels, & P. Muysken (Eds.), Language Dispersal, Diversification, and Contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Gullberg, M., Roberts, L., Dimroth, C., Veroude, K., & Indefrey, P. (2010). Adult language learning after minimal exposure to an unknown natural language. In M. Gullberg, & P. Indefrey (Eds.), The earliest stages of language learning (pp. 5-24). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Gullberg, M., De Bot, K., & Volterra, V. (2010). Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development. In M. Gullberg, & K. De Bot (Eds.), Gestures in language development (pp. 3-33). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Hagoort, P. (2007). The memory, unification, and control (MUC) model of language. In T. Sakamoto (Ed.), Communicating skills of intention (pp. 259-291). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
  • Hagoort, P. (2007). The memory, unification, and control (MUC) model of language. In A. S. Meyer, L. Wheeldon, & A. Krott (Eds.), Automaticity and control in language processing (pp. 243-270). Hove: Psychology Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2020). Taal. In O. Van den Heuvel, Y. Van der Werf, B. Schmand, & B. Sabbe (Eds.), Leerboek neurowetenschappen voor de klinische psychiatrie (pp. 234-239). Amsterdam: Boom Uitgevers.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meaning in patients with semantic impairments. In B. Stemmer, & H. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 235-248). New York: Academic Press.
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    Abstract

    This chapter sketches in very general terms the cognitive architecture of both language comprehension and production, as well as the neurobiological infrastructure that makes the human brain ready for language. Focus is on spoken language, since that compares most directly to processing music. It is worth bearing in mind that humans can also interface with language as a cognitive system using sign and text (visual) as well as Braille (tactile); that is to say, the system can connect with input/output processes in any sensory modality. Language processing consists of a complex and nested set of subroutines to get from sound to meaning (in comprehension) or meaning to sound (in production), with remarkable speed and accuracy. The fi rst section outlines a selection of the major constituent operations, from fractionating the input into manageable units to combining and unifying information in the construction of meaning. The next section addresses the neurobiological infrastructure hypothesized to form the basis for language processing. Principal insights are summarized by building on the notion of “brain networks” for speech–sound processing, syntactic processing, and the construction of meaning, bearing in mind that such a neat three-way subdivision overlooks important overlap and shared mechanisms in the neural architecture subserving language processing. Finally, in keeping with the spirit of the volume, some possible relations are highlighted between language and music that arise from the infrastructure developed here. Our characterization of language and its neurobiological foundations is necessarily selective and brief. Our aim is to identify for the reader critical questions that require an answer to have a plausible cognitive neuroscience of language processing.
  • Hamans, C., & Seuren, P. A. M. (2010). Chomsky in search of a pedigree. In D. A. Kibbee (Ed.), Chomskyan (R)evolutions (pp. 377-394). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper follows the changing fortunes of Chomsky’s search for a pedigree in the history of Western thought during the late 1960s. Having achieved a unique position of supremacy in the theory of syntax and having exploited that position far beyond the narrow circles of professional syntacticians, he felt the need to shore up his theory with the authority of history. It is shown that this attempt, resulting mainly in his Cartesian Linguistics of 1966, was widely, and rightly, judged to be a radical failure, even though it led to a sudden revival of interest in the history of linguistics. Ironically, the very upswing in historical studies caused by Cartesian Linguistics ended up showing that the real pedigree belongs to Generative Semantics, developed by the same ‘angry young men’ Chomsky was so bent on destroying.
  • Hammarström, H., & O'Connor, L. (2013). Dependency sensitive typological distance. In L. Borin, & A. Saxena (Eds.), Approaches to measuring linguistic differences (pp. 337-360). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Hammarström, H. (2013). Noun class parallels in Kordofanian and Niger-Congo: Evidence of genealogical inheritance? In T. C. Schadeberg, & R. M. Blench (Eds.), Nuba Mountain Language Studies (pp. 549-570). Köln: Köppe.
  • Hammarström, H. (2010). Rarities in numeral systems. In J. Wohlgemuth, & M. Cysouw (Eds.), Rethinking universals. How rarities affect linguistic theory (pp. 11-60). Berlin: De Gruyter.
  • Haun, D. B. M., & Over, H. (2013). Like me: A homophily-based account of human culture. In P. J. Richerson, & M. H. Christiansen (Eds.), Cultural Evolution: Society, technology, language, and religion (pp. 75-85). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hayano, K. (2013). Question design in conversation. In J. Sidnell, & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 395-414). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118325001.ch19.

    Abstract

    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Questions Questioning and the Epistemic Gradient Presuppositions, Agenda Setting and Preferences Social Actions Implemented by Questions Questions as Building Blocks of Institutional Activities Future Directions
  • Hill, C. (2010). Emergency language documentation teams: The Cape York Peninsula experience. In J. Hobson, K. Lowe, S. Poetsch, & M. Walsh (Eds.), Re-awakening languages: Theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous languages (pp. 418-432). Sydney: Sydney University Press.
  • Hofmeister, P., & Norcliffe, E. (2013). Does resumption facilitate sentence comprehension? In P. Hofmeister, & E. Norcliffe (Eds.), The core and the periphery: Data-driven perspectives on syntax inspired by Ivan A. Sag (pp. 225-246). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Holler, J. (2010). Speakers’ use of interactive gestures to mark common ground. In S. Kopp, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Gesture in embodied communication and human-computer interaction. 8th International Gesture Workshop, Bielefeld, Germany, 2009; Selected Revised Papers (pp. 11-22). Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
  • Huettig, F. (2013). Young children’s use of color information during language-vision mapping. In B. R. Kar (Ed.), Cognition and brain development: Converging evidence from various methodologies (pp. 368-391). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.
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