Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Typically, word learning accounts focus on how children strategically acquire words for entities (nouns) and events (verbs). Often underrepresented are word for properties (adjectives). While adjectives, like verbs, may trail behind many nouns in early production, and may not always be required to refer or express truth-conditional meaning, they are essential for distinguishing among entities and events in the world, and communicating clearly in disciplines such as language arts and science. Moreover, nearly every language has the grammatical category of adjectives. It is therefore critical to know what challenges children face in acquiring adjectives, and what supports their acquisition. Here, I outline three main aspects that, together, render the process of learning adjectives both vexing and linguistically intriguing. First, there is cross-linguistic variation in how languages around the world treat words for properties. Second, the syntactic position of adjectives varies across and within languages, and is often correlated with subtle differences in meaning. Third, within the category of adjectives, a wide range of meanings may be encoded. I review findings across these areas that document children's successes and challenges with these aspects of adjective distribution and meaning. To counter these challenges, I end by covering three effective and empirically documented strategies for adjective learning, which rely on attending to key information in both the linguistic and extralinguistic context. I close with a brief discussion of prospects for future research on this topic.

Psycholinguistic studies using the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique have found both N400 and P600 effects for gender stereotype violations. The finding of a P600 effect for this type of world knowledge violation is surprizing given that this component is traditionally associated with syntactic violations. In this paper, we set out to systematically analyse design- and task patterns of ERP studies investigating gender stereotype violations. Based on our review, we propose a scheme that predicts a P600 effect for gender stereotype violations for stimuli comprising entire sentences, and specifically when the gender stereotype serves to establish coherence in inferences (i.e., expecting a specific referent gender or a stereotype-appropriate behaviour of the sentence subject based on the gender stereotype information). We predict an N400 effect for gender stereotype information that does not serve to establish coherence in inferences, as well as in priming paradigms. By extension, our predictive scheme suggests that the N400 may reflect a hybrid process of semantic retrieval and integration, while the P600 may reflect a cognitive process of error monitoring, and mental revision. Our study can aid in the interpretation of previous findings and inform future studies investigating gender stereotyping.

This article examines culmination phenomena from a cross-linguistic perspective. It provides an overview of various (non-)culmination readings that sentences in different languages may receive in light of much prior literature on this topic, especially from the past 2 decades. An important goal is to showcase facts of defeasible versus entailed culmination and discuss how scholars have dealt with these facts in recent analyses. Although (non-)culmination phenomena are often approached from a semantic perspective in the literature, in the second part of the paper, I also address questions of syntactic representation regarding verbal predicates associated with maximal versus non-maximal event interpretations. This survey of the empirical landscape ultimately shows that, despite the plethora of works on event culmination, there are still numerous puzzles in need of explanation, especially when culmination is examined from a cross-linguistic angle.

Phonetic data are used in several ways outside of the core field of phonetics. This paper offers the perspective of one such field, sociophonetics, towards another, the study of acoustic cues to clinical depression. While sociophonetics is interested in how, when, and why phonetic variables cue information about the world, the study of acoustic cues to depression is focused on how phonetic variables can be used by medical professionals as tools to diagnosis. The latter is only interested in identifying phonetic cues to depression, while the former is interested in how phonetic variation cues anything at all. While the two fields fundamentally differ with respect to ontology, epistemology, and methodology, I argue that there are, nonetheless, possible avenues for future engagement, collaboration, and investigation. Ultimately, both fields need to engage with Crip Linguistics for any successful intervention on the relationship between speech and depression.

Deepfakes, particularly audio deepfakes, have become pervasive and pose unique, ever-changing threats to society. This paper reviews the current research landscape on audio deepfakes. We assert that limitations of existing approaches to deepfake detection and discernment are areas where (socio)linguists can directly contribute to helping address the societal challenge of audio deepfakes. In particular, incorporating expert knowledge and developing techniques that everyday listeners can use to avoid deception are promising pathways for (socio)linguistics. Further opportunities exist for developing benevolent applications of this technology through generative AI methods as well.

The focus of most variationist studies of linguistic change to date has been the emergence and increase of new forms. The opposing process—obsolescence, or the decline and loss of older variants—is less well understood. Addressing several calls for more attention to be paid to obsolescence and its properties, this article surveys case studies mostly from English and French and suggests generalisations. Obsolescence, for many reasons, is a very long process. While the linguistic factors influencing an obsolescent form often become unpredictable, the social meaning and/or pragmatic effects associated with it may strengthen rather than weaken. A special subset of obsolescent forms are abortive innovations—those that begin by increasing, but then disappear suddenly. The notion that an abortive innovation is always a subcomponent of a two-step innovation, otherwise successful, applies straightforwardly to several case studies identified in the variationist literature in recent years.

With a focus on the post-2015 period in the western and northern regions of Europe, the research examined here shows prominent media discourses of othering, threat and deservedness of migrants. This spatial and temporal frame lends itself to the study of how discourses reflect the impact of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in these regions of Europe. Since there was also continued immigration related to increased opportunities for work, education, quality of life and family togetherness which have long brought migrants to these European countries, examining the research in this period allows us to discover how these discourses might distinguish between different migrant experiences. There is some evidence for the differentiation of certain types of people of migration background in the media discourses, despite a strong tendency to stereotype and essentialise regardless of the actual background of migrants or their descendants. Another key aspect in the research to date is how professional versus participatory media can be compared in the discourses of migration they reproduce, and how these different types of media play a role in society. The article ends with a call for a more intersectional perspective on migration which incorporates critical perspectives on racialisation, and further examination of the voices of migrants in the media.

What do demonstratives, like this/that and here/there, encode about their referents? The traditional answer argues that the deictic content of demonstratives is mostly about distance from the speaker – that proximals like this encode that the referent is near the speaker, while distals like that mean it is far from them. This speaker-centered, distance-based view is intuitively appealing, but recent research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology has challenged it in many ways. I review three of the most active debates in this new literature, where recent authors – in contrast to the traditional view – have argued that (i) the spatial deictic content of demonstratives is about location relative to socially or perceptually defined perimeters, not distance; (ii) deictic content often concerns perception or attention, not space; and (iii) deictic content can relate the referent to the addressee or the speaker-addressee interactive dyad, as well as to the speaker. Under these new analyses, the deictic content of demonstratives is fundamentally social and interactive, not purely speaker-centered or distance-based.

Xitsonga, a southern Bantu language (S53) spoken in South Africa, possesses rich phonological patterns that have been underreported in the literature. This paper aims to provide an overview of the phonology of Xitsonga with a focus on segmental phonology, building up on existing literature. The consonants of Xitsonga show a four-way laryngeal system with phonation contrast in sonorants and several lateral consonants. These consonants display alternations of post-nasal hardening, affrication, and lateral-nasal alternation. Vowel raising and vowel coalescence are also examined. Data with variation from previous studies have been updated to reflect the status of lexical items in contemporary Xitsonga.

This paper gives an overview over two different kinds of protagonists' perspective taking in narrative texts, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) and Protagonist Projection (PP)/Viewpoint Shifting (VS), and the most important analyses of these phenomena that have been proposed within the framework of formal semantics and pragmatics. While FID is a special form of reporting self-reflexively conscious thoughts and utterances which in contrast to indirect and direct discourse is not overtly marked as such, PP/VS renders the content of protagonists' perceptions and beliefs. The paper discusses empirical differences between these two kinds of protagonists' perspective taking with respect to syntactic embeddability and the licencing of deictic expressions and considers various analytical options to capture these differences.