Language Sciences最新文献

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.

The article argues for a necessity to increase human awareness of language as functional biological behavior rather than simply a tool in the service of communication, by emphasizing the difference between talk and text as ontologically different semiotic phenomena characteristic of the human cognitive domain. The established tradition to view written words as linguistic signs leads the studies of natural language astray, effectively hiding its nature as biologically functional orientational behavior in a consensual domain that evolved with the evolution of our species and was not a cultural invention. Because of the identification of text with talk in linguistic semiotics, the empirical validity of the core semiotic concept of natural linguistic sign, based on the so-called semiotic triangle, is undermined. While talk is a dynamic fact of nature, text is a static artifact; it is argued, therefore, that the analytical approach to linguistic signs as objects in the world is inadequate, and the notions of first- and second-order semiotics are introduced. It is concluded that awareness of the cognitive-semiotic difference between talk and text and their respective roles in the evolution of humans may facilitate further research into the nature and origin of humanness.

This paper investigates the concept of skills or abilities using the distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how', as put forward by Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind. The assertion of two forms of knowledge suggests the possibility that skills can be represented in propositional language. However, in the analysis of activities it is frequently shown that skills cannot be described ‘in words', but at best can be indicated. On the other hand, speaking is itself a skill. If we accept Karl Bühler’s (1934) use of the concept of context we see that he describes representative language above all as a skill. The paper closes with a consideration of whether and, if so, to what extent it is possible to square these two conceptions of language.

The present study aims to investigate how self-repetition is used to serve communicative purposes in Mandarin mother–child interaction, focusing particularly on mothers’ child-directed speech. The participants of this study consisted of 12 Mandarin-speaking children (4 two-year-olds, 4 three-year-olds, and 4 four-year-olds) and their mothers. Natural conversation from each mother–child dyad was collected for a total of 12 h. The occurrences of self-repetition in the data were analyzed in terms of their forms and functions. The results showed that the mothers of younger children tended to use self-repetition more frequently than the mothers of older children. The predominant form of self-repetition was expanded repetition, and the major functions were soliciting responses and emphasis. Detailed analyses showed how the mothers used the different forms of self-repetition to express various functions. It was concluded that self-repetition in child-directed speech plays an important role in facilitating mother–child interaction and that it may also reflect mothers’ sensitivity to the developing linguistic, cognitive, and communicative abilities of their children.

This study examines diachronic changes in number use in written American English from 1923 to 2008 in TIME magazine, analyzing a 170-million-token corpus. We investigate the effects of magnitudes, roundness, and representational formats on number frequency, along with the evolution of culturally salient numbers reflecting societal shifts. Utilizing Bayesian negative binomial regression for in-depth corpus analysis, our findings demonstrate a consistent influence of magnitudes and roundness, with smaller magnitudes and rounder numbers appearing more frequently. We observe a significant standardization in portraying large numbers, marked by a shift from numerical to mixed forms (e.g., “6,000,000,000” to “6 billion”) around 1940s. This reflects changes in both formal writing conventions and editorial practices of numerical representation. Our research further identifies distinct culturally significant numbers for each decade, linked to social, economic, and technological trends, underscoring the role of numerical analysis in media to decode complex cultural and societal patterns. This study contributes significantly to understanding the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and media in the context of numerical representations.