Language Sciences最新文献

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