Language Sciences最新文献

By defining comforting with reference to van Leeuwen's legitimation, this study aims to show how comforters achieve effective comforting through strategies oriented towards alliance, evaluation, and solution, respectively in the Chinese context. Results demonstrate that comforters discursively legitimate the comfortees’ actions and feelings through moral evaluation, rationalization, mythopoesis, authority, and various sub-strategies with Chinese characteristics, such as establishing an alliance with expressions of unavailability and moral tales, delivering positive evaluation through denial of negative self-evaluation, and offering solutions by rationalization and naturalization. We also argue that Chinese comforting strategies can be further explained in the cultural veins of Five Constant Virtues, so as to facilitate the understanding of comforting in the Chinese context.

In spoken colloquial Persian, there exists the particle ‘e’, which can be suffixed to the bare nominals (as in pesar-e: boy-e), nominals with some definite markers like demonstratives (as in in pesar-e: this boy-e) and some nominals with indefinite markers (as in ye pesar-e: a boy-e) (Nikravan, 2014; Heusinger and Sadeghpoor, 2020). This particle, termed as ‘enclitic -e’, has been insufficiently described in the literature and even this insufficient description predominantly draws on constructed sentences. The empirical investigation that underlies the present study revisits the ‘e’-marked nominal formulations in the context of making references to nouns in naturally occurring conversations to identify its multifaceted functions. It is demonstrated throughout the paper that the enclitic e marks a noun or a nominal group to denote both the speaker and recipient's (assumed) equal epistemic access to the referent, although the speaker may need some interactional work with the recipient to share his epistemic access with them. Furthermore, through this marked way of reference formulations, the speakers do more than simply referring by orienting to some measure of relational separation with the referent. Overall, the analyses reveal delicate moments of interactional work in terms of epistemic and relational functions of the e-marked formulations of the referents, and as such contribute to the research on the pragmatic and interactional view of definiteness in light of epistemics and relating theories.

There is a notable typological contrast between psych verbs in Japanese and Spanish. Japanese derives Experiencer-Object verbs (e.g. yorokob-ase-ru ‘to please’) from specific Experiencer-Subject verbs (e.g. yorokobu ‘to become pleased’) via a morphological causativization. Spanish, on the other hand, presents so-called reflexive psych verbs (e.g. alegrarse ‘to feel happy’), most of which can be analyzed as outputs of an anticausativization from certain Experiencer-Accusative verbs (e.g. alegrar ‘to make happy’). Simply put, these languages derive psych verbs with procedures that reversely mirror each other. This paper will elucidate the characteristics of the causativization used to produce Japanese Experiencer-Object causatives and the anticausativization associated with Spanish Reflexive Psych Verbs and demonstrate that the typological contrast between Japanese and Spanish psych verbs results in semantic variation, e.g. differences in the entailment relation, absence/presence of ambiguity in negation, aspectual diversity. Semantic differences between psych verbs in these languages are ascribed to specific features of the (anti)causative operations employed to generate the predicates.

In this paper we argue that key, often sensational and misleading, claims regarding linguistic capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are based on at least two unfounded assumptions: the assumption of language completeness and the assumption of data completeness. Language completeness assumes that a distinct and complete thing such as “a natural language” exists, the essential characteristics of which can be effectively and comprehensively modelled by an LLM. The assumption of data completeness relies on the belief that a language can be quantified and wholly captured by data. Work within the enactive approach to cognitive science makes clear that, rather than a distinct and complete thing, language is a means or way of acting. Languaging is not the kind of thing that can admit of a complete or comprehensive modelling. From an enactive perspective we identify three key characteristics of enacted language; embodiment, participation, and precariousness, that are absent in LLMs, and likely incompatible in principle with current architectures. We argue that these absences imply that LLMs are not now and cannot in their present form be linguistic agents the way humans are. We illustrate the point in particular through the phenomenon of “algospeak”, a recently described pattern of high-stakes human language activity in heavily controlled online environments. On the basis of these points, we conclude that sensational and misleading claims about LLM agency and capabilities emerge from a deep misconception of both what human language is and what LLMs are.