Language Sciences最新文献

Maximizers represent a subclass of degree modifiers that convey the highest degree to which a property can be carried out. This paper studies five Croatian near-synonymous maximizers (all meaning “completely, totally”), viz. posve, potpuno, sasvim, skroz, and totalno, as a part of <maximizer + adjective> construction. It is assumed here that analysed pairings act as (semi)-prefabricated units with maximizers that impose particular modes of construal. To analyse the subtle semantic differences of examined maximizers, we shall turn to the distributional hypothesis and examine contexts in which maximizers occur. Using a combination of analytical statistics (collostructional analysis) and multifactorial methods (hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis and correspondence analysis), we aim to examine similarities (proximities) and differences (distances) between analysed constructions in order to understand intricate relationships among maximizers, fostering valuable insights into their semantics. The findings of this study provide insight into the interplay of the Croatian maximizers and adjectives.

Recent psycholinguistic studies have revealed an important distinction in narrative discourse between bounded and unbounded language use. Bounded language use is typical of Germanic languages other than English and involves the holistic presentation of situations, with clauses construed as self-contained units attaining a point of completion. Unbounded language use, in turn, groups events into larger complexes of roughly simultaneous events, each event of which is still open when the next one begins. This contrast between English and the other Germanic languages has been accounted for by the claim that English began its history as a bounded language, but shifted to unbounded following the decline, from the fifteenth century onwards, of the Verb-second (V2) constraint on word order. According to this hypothesis, the loss of V2 made possible the grammaticalization of the be progressive, a device that encourages unboundedness. The present article expands on this line of research and examines seven constructions which developed at around the same time and which together are taking English in the direction of unbounded construal; it is argued that the drift in English from a bounded to an unbounded system may have been instigated by the contact situation between Old English speakers and Old Norse speakers in the Danelaw area.

The present study proposes a linguistic habitat that may evoke people's first language (L1) to support a better understanding of current environmental catastrophes and address one pathway to support solution finding. A purposive participant sample consisted of 25 undergraduate students majoring in linguistics was selected to provide input regarding how their first language (Balochi, Balti, Pashto, Punjabi, and Sindhi) might approach ecological problems and consider its role in promoting ecosolidarity. While considering the epistemological perspectives offered by ecolinguistics, the qualitative data were analyzed to determine linguistic resources (words and structures) employed by the participants to describe aspects of the environmental crisis. As an element of the analysis, findings were also explored through quantitative percentages of representation. Findings revealed that while describing the natural environment in Urdu and English, the two official, and dominant languages of Pakistan, the participants often borrowed words and used structures that did not connect directly to first language terminology. This situation not only may result in misunderstandings and misinterpretation of subsequent actions for change, but it also suggests that multiple world voices as native speaker tongues may not have played an integral role in messaging to a broad population of speakers across Pakistan. The study suggests that purposeful, ecological language planning and the application of ecological content to local languages should be part of the ecological dialogue because they have the potential to promote deeper understanding at individual and collective societal levels.

In this study an integrational linguistic approach to metaphor is used in the context of an ecological psychology study of novel metaphor creation by adults in a structured conversation setting. This paper forms an example of the proposed complementarity of integrational linguistics (Harris, 1981) and ecological psychology (Gibson, 1979; Jones and Read, 2023) by providing a study of novel metaphor that eschews the traditional “coded carrier of message” assumptions about language, as well as the traditional “knowledge is mental representation” assumptions of representationalist cognitive psychology. Instead, novel metaphor is presented as the sine qua non of the creation of signs in the process of communication, and that creation is proposed to be founded on the perception of invariants across different naturally occurring kinds of objects and events (cf., Read & Szokolszky, 2016). The practice of metaphor is taken as a special case of perceptually guided kinematic semiology. This study describes the practice of metaphor by adults in a structured experimental situation designed to present metaphoric resemblance and to encourage the practice of metaphor with guiding verbal instructions. Such a study allows explication of the integrational method as applied to structured conversational settings. Although the conversation and context were designed to draw attention to metaphoric resemblance and to encourage verbal metaphor, not everyone practiced metaphor, showing that the practice is not determined by context. When metaphor was created, the form often mirrored the perceptual invariants available to the perceiver, i.e., motion or stationary resemblances. No one created exactly the same metaphor even in this consistent context, which emphasizes the creative aspect of metaphor as a prototype of sign creation, with its core properties of novelty, enhanced interest and noticeableness. I make the following central points: communicating by creating and integrating signs is the foundation of language; metaphor is the prototype of the creation of signs, the creation of novel metaphor in conversation is a practice that enhances communication, even in structured experimental settings; and conversation can be studied as the ongoing process of sign integration, that is, as perceptually guided kinematic semiology. The current study shows that metaphor as a practice in conversation is closely coordinated with the perception of metaphoric resemblance and the request to talk about objects and events that are alike metaphorically. Finally, it is argued that direct perception is the best approach on which to found an account of metaphor in communication.

In our consideration of how to decentre an anthropocentric view in linguistics, we will address the following research question: how do dairy cows and humans imbue their interspecies interaction as a semiotic resource with meaning that makes sense for both species under specific social conditions (Jørgensen, 2008:167). We address the question by using a social-interactional approach informed by conversation analysis (CA) (Goodwin, 2017, Mondada, 2016, 2018; Mondémé, 2021), which enables us to examine what the dairy cow makes relevant in the sequential organisation when interacting with a human.

We show that the dairy cows make gaze important in their interaction. Gaze alone is sufficient to mobilize human interlocutor response, and gaze withdrawal by the human should take place for a successful communication (case-study 1 versus study 2). The case-studies of dairy cow–human interactions show that these interactions include much more than (human) sounds and (human) signs only: language is taken as languaging, as a social practice, embedded in a multimodal interactional exchange (Levinson and Holler 2014) that includes nonhuman animals as well. This also implies that linguists should therefore look beyond ‘sound’ and ‘sign’.

Mackenzie (2020) is a defense of the position adopted by the architects of the standard model of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG): namely that the model cannot (and even could never) be considered a ‘grammar of discourse’. The article examines the arguments given for rejecting the ‘discourse’ dimension from the FDG model, proposes an independent account of discourse, and suggests a means of dovetailing it within a model of the wider utterance context. On the one hand, the author's arguments are in the main valid: for ‘discourse’, as characterized in section 3, is not a formal, clearly delineated object amenable to systematic treatment within a grammatical model of a given language. Yet on the other, it is arguable that even the presence of the term ‘discourse’ in the model's name is not in fine justified. Notwithstanding, in order to include the ‘discourse dimension’ (section 3), it is argued that the Core FDG model could be integrated with a broader model of the utterance context involved. This would enable it to account more adequately, for example, for the ways in which indexical reference, the lexicon and adjectival modification operate in actual texts. In turn, it would influence certain of the other characterizations independently assigned within the Core model.

This study is an attempt to investigate the psychological reality and cognitive priority of three layers of linguistic meaning—what is said, impliciture, and implicature. According to the literal-first serial processing model, what is said is psychologically real and is required to draw an impliciture and/or implicature. By contrast, the impliciture-by-default processing model argues that there is psychological reality for impliciture and implicature but not for what is said, and that impliciture has cognitive priority over the other two levels. Finally, the parallel processing model does not make a strong assumption about the temporal order of interpretation. A mouse-tracking experiment in a listening comprehension task was designed to test the predictions of the three accounts. It examined how participants grasp the three levels of meaning in two tests, one in which a preferred interpretation of an utterance (either with what is said, impliciture or implicature) is confirmed and another where this interpretation is negated. Results show that participants were consciously aware of each of the three meanings in both tests. Their comprehension was more accurate and faster when they were prompted for what is said and implicitures compared to implicatures in the confirmation test. But they were delayed in processing time for implicitures in the negation test. Furthermore, they exhibited different comprehension patterns across different impliciture and implicature types. Thus, the current study provides mixed evidence for the existing theories of linguistic meaning by failing to find strong support for any of them. By showing how to integrate the three traditional models, this study suggests a way forward that what is said has psychological reality and impliciture has a special cognitive status depending on the context and yet that pragmatic inferences may vary in degree across utterance types.

The ecological perspective of language has gained prominence in linguistics over the past two decades. Since its anti-representationalist and anti-cognitivist stance, the ecological approach faces a challenge in reconciling with modern linguistic theories: While the ecological approach focuses on the dynamic aspects of language, it has been criticized for needing help to account for stable linguistic meaning. To address this issue, Cognitive Linguistics is the best candidate for giving an ecological account of static meaning. Also, I introduce the concept of design to establish the ecological model of language and demonstrate how this model can describe linguistic meaning within an ecological framework. Cognitive Linguistics develops into the ecological theory of meaning through these steps, namely ecological semantics.

Generative linguistics is often claimed by Chomsky to have a 'Galilean style', which is intended to position linguistics as a science continuous with standard practise in the natural sciences. These claims, however, are more suggestive than explanatory. The paper will, first, explain just what a Galilean style is. It will then be argued that its application to two key notions in generative linguistics - the competence/performance distinction (with reference to centre-embedding) and the notion of computation - demands a departure from what we might expect of a Galilean style. In this sense, the epithet is misleading. It will also be shown, however, that the 'Galilean' label is appropriate once we factor in the difference between a science concerned with kinematics (the relations between objects in space and time) and one concerned with language.

We consider chanting, or joint speech, which is ubiquitous, but not evenly distributed, in human activity. Taking an observational stance motivated by embodied cognitive science, we approach this topic without assumptions of the structure of persons, social formations, culture, or nature. This restrictive starting point motivates the use of a simple empirical definition of joint speech (the utterance by multiple persons of the same sounds at the same time) to allow us to induce four distinguished domains of assembly and communion among persons. These may be loosely indicated by the familiar terms of ritual, sports, protest and primary education. We use our empirical definition to induce these domains, and then consider how they might be regarded jointly. We are not aware of any social or psychological theory that would generate these four domains, and we suggest that our restricted mode of observation may be of use in the collective consideration of human patterning, without the common assumptions of cognitivism.