Language Sciences最新文献

The background of this article is an interest in institutional communication. The context in which this has been studied concerns how diversity (in social background, ethnicity, school success etc.) is, and has been, interpreted in schooling, historically as well as in contemporary society. Through history, a range of categories allegedly accounting for school failure has been suggested, and the categories invoked reflect the position of schooling as a meso-structure in society. The categories adopted in public discourse and politics, and reproduced in media, create identities, and serve as arbiters of opportunity for children. It is argued that the dialogical perspective outlined by Linell, and focusing the contingencies between macro-, meso- and micro-structures in social interaction, represents an important step in defining an empirical strategy for analysing the interrelationships between situated action, situation-transcending practices and the sociogenesis of categorizing practices.

The paper discusses the ‘psychological reality’ of human languaging. Basing on the dialogical and distributed arguments, the point of departure is in observations of the actualities of languaging in different modalities and environments. Arguing against the psychological reality of ‘mental grammars’ as storages of internal rules and representations, the concept of decontextual and amodal language knowledge is replaced by a know-how that is associated both with the modality and indexicality of usages. Further, instead of a ‘grammar’, the reservoir of agentive knowledge is approached as a personal repertoire that is discussed, using the concept of timescales, as an assemblage that develops during the agent's personal trajectory, but that at the same time is made possible by developments over cultural-historical and evolutionary timescales. The discussion is associated particularly with the field of applied linguistics, and aims at offering new theoretical arguments for the research on language learning and teaching.

The aim of the present article is to investigate spatial frames of reference in Dholuo, a language from the Nilotic family. Spatial descriptions were elicited by implementing a novel task, the New Man and Tree Task, which is a photo-object referential task (as opposed to the more traditional photo–photo referential tasks). The New Man and Tree Task fully crosses the categories of featured vs. unfeatured, thus addressing potential shortcomings of various previous referential tasks. Testing a total of 40 native speakers of Dholuo, it was found that the decision of a participant to use a spatial frame of reference largely depended on the complex nature of the spatial scene, while the type of spatial frame of reference chosen partly depended on whether the stimuli was featured or unfeatured, and potentially how salient that specific frame of reference was in the mind of the speaker. Overall, both the relative and the object-centred spatial frames were the most preferred across all three feature categories which correspond to findings from an earlier study showing both as used in solving everyday tasks in Dholuo.

New names are created on daily bases but old names never change in form. Thus, names offer a window where the archaic linguistics structure of a language can be traced. This study explores the grammatical structure of personal names in Kusaal by focusing on their phonology, morphonology and syntax. Phonologically, the paper explores the phonotactics of personal names; morphologically, it discusses the various morphemes that constitute this category of names, and syntactically, it analyses the rules that underlie the construction of personal names that are phrases, clauses and sentences. The meaning of personal names in Kusaal have been discussed extensively in previous studies for which reason minimal attention is dedicated to it in the current work. The findings show that personal names in Kusaal conform to almost all the structural rules of the language. They occupy specific positions in the noun phrase and in the sentence; they are neutral to syntactic features such as definiteness and plurality. Personal names also take prefixes and affixes and can be compound words. There are instances where insertions and deletions are observed in the compound formation of personal names in the language. The study uses the Basic Linguistics Theory for its descriptive analysis of personal names. Both primary and secondary data are used in this study.

This study examines syntactic complexity in Translated English (TE) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), drawing comparisons with Native English (NE). The objective is to explore the unique syntactic features of these constrained languages, which we hypothesize are influenced by inherent cognitive and social constraints. We operationalize syntactic complexity using five constructs, namely length of production units, sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and specific structures. The data reveals differential syntactic patterns across the language varieties studied. In our analysis, we observed that TE and EFL display a tendency for extended sentence structures, as indicated by higher mean lengths of clauses (MLC) and T-units (MLT) compared to NE. We propose that this inclination might stem from first-language interference in the writing and translation. The study also underscores a decrease in sentence complexity and subordination in constrained languages, a pattern which potentially mirrors the simplification phenomenon often reported in second language acquisition and translation research. Conversely, coordination measures exhibit an increase in TE and EFL, suggesting a syntax preference possibly informed by the linguistic structures of the speaker's or translator's first language. Our findings resonate with the idea of “constrained communication”, illuminating shared syntactic tendencies between second languages (L2s) and translated languages, which may be attributable to similar processing constraints. This investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on complexity and simplification in constrained languages, and encourages a merger of the traditionally separate fields of second language acquisition and translation studies.

This article presents a cognitive model of event structure that can be used to explain several features of the semantics of verbs. The model consists of four basic components: agent, patient, force vector and result vector. Each component is described in terms of the theory of conceptual spaces. The force vector is the cause of the result vector. Unlike other event models both the cause and the effect are included in the representation of a single event.

The model is used for two central topics. Firstly, to provide a force dynamic representation of causation. Secondly, to give a unified analysis of Aktionsart in terms of different forms of vectors, using force diagrams that are extensions of those used by Croft and others. It is then shown that the event model can be used to derive a variety of semantic features of verbs. In particular, I analyze manner-result complementarity, the ambiguity of the passive participle, and the role of goals (telicity).

Somatic practices frequently use imagery, typically via verbal instructions, to scaffold sensorimotor organization and experience, a phenomenon we term “introjection”. We argue that introjection is an imagery practice in which sensorimotor and conceptual aspects are co-orchestrated, suggesting the necessity of crosstalk between somatics, phenomenology, psychology, embodied-enactive cognition, and linguistic research on embodied simulation. We presently focus on the scarcely addressed details of the process necessary to enact instructions of a literal or metaphoric nature through the body. Based on vignettes from dance, Feldenkrais, and Taichi practice, we describe introjection as a complex form of processual sense-making, in which context-interpretive, mental, attentional and physical sub-processes recursively braid. Our analysis focuses on how mental and body-related processes progressively align, inform and augment each other. This dialectic requires emphasis on the active body, which implies that uni-directional models (concept ⇒ body) are inadequate and should be replaced by interactionist alternatives (concept ⇔ body). Furthermore, we emphasize that both the source image itself and the body are specifically conceptualized for the context through constructive operations, and both evolve through their interplay. At this level introjection employs representational operations that are embedded in enactive dynamics of a fully situated person.

Linguists recognize that sign languages are highly complex linguistic systems which meet all the criteria used to define a ‘language’. My ongoing language documentation with the Kere community in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and their local languages, Kere, and Sinasina Sign Language (SSSL), suggests that the English word ‘language’ is not a direct correlate of the Tok Pisin words tok or tok ples, as the current literature suggests. Drawing on interviews and collaboration with Kere people, I explore the culturally specific concepts and functions embedded in Tok Pisin metalanguage, focusing on differences between tok, tok ples, aksen, and ‘language’. Unlike spoken Kere, SSSL is aksen, not tok or tok ples because sociocultural functions are core to the meaning of tok, which only refers to spoken languages, unlike ‘language’. Understanding these differences is essential for translation and for further research with sign languages in PNG. This analysis of tok, tok ples, aksen, and ‘language’ also highlights the reality that ‘language’ is not a universal concept and there is a need for more research to unpack what ‘language’ means across languages and cultures.