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.

In this study, we examine how family members expressed sympathy when visiting patients in mid-eighteenth-century China, by studying a corpus of patient visits drawn from the renowned Chinese novel Hongloumeng 红楼梦 (Dream of the Red Chamber). The study of such visits is methodologically challenging because these visits were less scripted than many other ritual interactions, operating with many seemingly ad hoc elements. We approach patient visits in our data as interaction rituals which – similar to any ritual – operate with a frame and a related cluster of conventionalized patterns of language use. We argue that the pragmatic dynamics of many interactional ritual phenomena such as patient visits can be reliably captured by bringing together ritual, speech acts and interaction.

Building upon recent studies of historical reading practices and their insights into the bodily and cognitive nature of reading, this article explores the impact of silent and voiced reading on the diverse bodily, cognitive, and emotional engagements with a text. Our starting point is that language is not merely a tool for translating mental content but emerges from and shapes embodied ways of interacting with the world, in this case, a reading-world. First, we present a phonetic analysis based on a pilot study of university students' voiced and silent reading. The overall cognitive act of articulating phonemes based on perception of graphemes is portrayed as an embodied process, particularly evident in instances where readers modify their pronunciation of unfamiliar words or grapheme clusters. Moreover, we observe how readers embody emotions and differentiate between narrators or voices in the text by creatively and dynamically modulating their oral cavity to produce subtle, yet cognitively significant changes in speech sounds. Second, drawing on interview data from the same study, we explore how the two reading conditions influence experiential factors, including perceptions of time, qualities of imagery, and the multiplicity of voices enacted by the reader. Together, these aspects provide insights into the function and value of readers' practices of reading silently and aloud. While, in our study, reading aloud helps modulating local sensitivity to prosodic features that are important for e.g. emotion regulation and comprehension, readers more easily orient themselves in a text when reading silently, strengthening the in-depth experience of settings, characters, and narrators. While the attributes of silent and voiced reading may vary based on expertise, norms, and personal preferences, each mode appears to offer distinctive advantages. We thus conclude by proposing that readers could benefit from alternating between both reading modes, adapting to the specific task at hand. This approach allows for the full realisation of the embodied potential in alignment with the requirements of the task. Additionally, historical practices of reading aloud can inform the study of reading modes, providing a repertoire of possibilities absent in today's reading ecologies dominated by silent reading.

This article provides an overview of the relevance of deixis in dementia from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy with an inter- and transdisciplinary scope. A key objective is to integrate existing approaches and develop hypotheses for future research. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deixis to enhance interaction and communication in the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer's disease. The paper prepares the ground for three sub-goals: (1) Developing a general taxonomy of deixis, differentiating between verbal deixis (e.g., pronouns), corporeal deixis (e.g., pointing gestures), and medial deixis (e.g., arrows). (2) Investigating the diagnostic, therapeutic and care applications of deixis in Alzheimer's disease in the face of the progressive loss of higher cognitive skills. (3) Pinpointing the desiderata emerging from the relation between deixis and dementia at both conceptual and empirical levels. This paper argues for viewing deixis not solely as a deficit-indicator but also as a resource-indicator. Deixis in dementia can serve on two interconnected yet distinct levels: one for diagnosis, and another for therapy and care. On the one hand, verbal indexicals have a deficit-indicating function for the loss of higher cognitive skills, such as language, orientation and memory. This function is relevant for linguistically shaped dementia diagnosis and a holistic interpretation of key symptoms. On the other hand, all three kinds of deixis, the verbal, the corporeal, and the medial, do have a resource-indicating function. The threefold deixis helps us to advance orientation, communication and interaction in both private and institutional living environments. For example, the corporeal deixis is an important communicative resource, which helps to navigate and maintain attention, intention, and emotion. Finally, the paper proposes an index-ability scale to identify personalized communication resources for individuals with dementia.

First, Pāṇini's grammar the Aṣṭādhyāyī (= ‘Eight Chapters’) is introduced to the reader with the aid of a few representative quotations. After a brief overall characterization of the grammar, its last rule (= “a a”), known to be the shortest grammatical rule in the world, is shown to convey the following message: “Now that the descriptive work is done, language is given back to its speakers.” In philosophy of logic Gentzen's natural deduction is generally preferred over Frege's and Russell's axiomatic approach, but Pāṇini is shown to offer a partial caveat. Finally, his unique role in the annals of scientific thought is justified by the fact that he is both the oldest and the best in his own field.

This paper is concerned with practical skills as a resource and as an object of deictic procedures in interaction and communication. It is well known that, as a rule, practical skills are not based on knowledge that is formulated—or that can be formulated—in language, nor that practical skills can be described completely and explicitly in language for purposes of learning and teaching. If we examine the activity of speaking, we see that it constitutes itself a practical skill, constrained by the same limits that apply to other practical skills: on the one hand, speaking serves the practical purpose of orienting participants in a discourse, drawing attention to and focussing on what it is used to refer to in the speaking situation, and, on the other hand, its representational function is based on the sub-skills of phonetic, grammatical and semantic articulation, the workings of which cannot be described completely and explicitly by the average speaker. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a broadly conceived notion of deixis and indexicality allows us, in accordance with the multiple reflexivity of language, to begin to make language tractable as a practical skill.

On the one side of the language studies, we have linguists who support the practical and theoretical autonomy of language and linguistics and argue that “linguistics must attempt to grasp language, not as a conglomerate of non-linguistic (e.g., physical, physio-logical, psychological, logical, sociological) phenomena, but as a self-sufficient totality, a structure sui generis” (Hjelmslev, 1961, 5–6). On the other side, there are researchers who declare that ‘‘linguistics does not need to postulate the existence of languages as part of its theoretical apparatus’’ (Harris, 2003, 46) or “if you want to learn about language, forget about language!” (Steffensen, 2011, 204). By resorting to the methodology of fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets, ideas of Greek and Eastern philosophy, the research suggests moving away from theoretical binarisation and exploring gradients between extreme positions (autonomous vs heteronomous, universal vs situated, real vs constructed). First of all, the article extends further the ideas of Harris and Steffensen and introduces a new thesis: ‘if you want to lose the language, study it!’. Secondly, the research demonstrates the need for the practical and aesthetical acknowledgment of the reality of language (e.g., in education). To prove the first statement, the emptiness of theoretical efforts to find the entity of language, the research brings into play the ideas of fuzzy logic and critically revises realism, conceptualism and nominalism in language studies. The work provides evidences that neither ‘language’ nor ‘dialects’ or ‘idiolects’ can be found in practice due to the inherent fuzziness of the linguistic facts (systems) ‘described’ by these clear-cut categories. It is argued that theories and concepts designed for the description of the language-related phenomena are theoretical constructions that do not fully capture the stochastic and dynamic reality of language. Instead, they merely construct or declare it, similar to how we create star constellations (Steffensen and Fill, 2014). It resonates with the idea that can be found in Zen Buddhism and Taoism: “name it and you will lose it”. The research also holds that even if ‘language’ is an “ensemble of idiolects, sociolects, dialects and so on – rather than an entity per se” (Hazan, 2015, 11), we cannot find a token of its existence in either the entity or in the elements (ensemble) constituting that hypothetical entity. The article concludes that those researchers who focus on the particular nature of language lose its complexity; conversely, those who embrace all aspects (e.g., integrational approaches) lose its entity. However, if we are not able to grasp theoretically the reality of language does it mean it has no reality whatsoever and researchers and learners cannot have any positive knowledge about the language? The article offers some analogies in favour of the reality of language (comparison with music, r