Language Sciences最新文献

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.

This study analyzes how an instructor's accommodation tactic, in response to a student using a swear word, affects students' perceptions of the instructor's similarity and credibility, and how perceptions of similarity and credibility affect students' intrinsic motivation to learn. Sex of the instructor was also manipulated in this study based on literature indicating that an instructor's sex may affect students' perceptions of the instructor's similarity, credibility, and students' intrinsic motivation to learn course material. Participants (N = 396) were randomly assigned to read hypothetical scenarios where either a male or female instructor converged or diverged in response to a student who used the swear word suck or damn. Results revealed that instructors who diverged, regardless of the swear word used, were perceived as more similar to the student than instructors who converged. Also, findings showed that when an instructor converges their communication in response to a student who swears their credibility was diminished. Perceptions of similarity and credibility were positively associated with a student's intrinsic motivation to learn course material, and mediation models revealed that instructors' perceived similarity and credibility mediated the relationship between accommodation tactic and a student's intrinsic motivation to learn. Finally, results indicated that participants reported higher ratings of intrinsic motivation to learn with female instructors than with male instructors.

Mode adoption is a term used primarily in pragmatics and linguistics which refers to responses to verbal irony that: a.) converge with (or ‘adopt’) the humor frame and, b.) add a similar element of ironic humor. This paper argues that mode adoption is a form of high-level accommodation. In order to mode adopt, respondents must converge with the speaker's verbal content, their humorous intent, as well as the form this intent is taking. Respondents can, therefore, display convergence/divergence along each of these dimensions with each response to verbal irony falling along a scale of humor convergence. Scholars have suggested that differences in mode adoption may be based on familiarity between the speakers, however, this hypothesis has not been tested experimentally, and CAT has not been directly applied in this context. Over two studies, (N = 430) participants were asked to think of a specific person from their life and type exactly how they would respond to instances of ironic overstatement from this person in a hypothetical text message interaction. Regression analyses revealed that perceived relational closeness predicted humor convergence in study two but not study one. Awareness of the irony was significant predictor of convergence in study one, a finding not replicated in study two. In line with previous CAT research, liking and relative power were also found to predict convergence in humor. These studies provide support for CAT within the domain of humor in texting, clarify important predictors for humor convergence, and argue that definitions of accommodation should explicitly include both behavioral and cognitive elements of communication.

Textisms refer to unconventional digital cues used to convey nonverbal information in text communication. However, little is known about how these cues operate and what theoretical underpinnings help us understand when users choose to integrate textisms into their personal and professional online interactions. One theory that explains this phenomenon is communication accommodation theory (CAT), which describes how people adapt their behaviors in interpersonal and intergroup contexts using verbal and nonverbal strategies to accommodate a conversational partner. Using CAT as a lens, this study examined a dataset of 635 naturally occurring text message screenshots to identify how many times senders and receivers converged in using specific types of textisms. Through examining the degree of convergence that occurred in 15 different types of textisms, it was found that three textisms generated a high degree of convergence or matching behaviors (phrase-shorteners, emojis, and word-#substitutions) and five textisms showed a moderate degree of convergence (cases-upper, markers-missing, lexical-surrogates, word-expansions, and cases-lower). From the textisms that resulted in high to moderate convergence, three were found to be statistically significant (phrase-shorteners, emojis, and markers-missing). Through the examination of text messaging and adaptation behaviors, scholars can better understand the contexts in which users intentionally integrate textisms in our evolving era of mediated interpersonal interactions.

Over the past decades, public health policy and initiatives have shifted away from individual interventions to focus more broadly on community-based and social determinants of health. Community-based health initiatives are health programs developed to be implemented at the community level, especially amongst poor rural populations and urban slums that may be excluded from traditional healthcare models. However, evidence regarding the success of community-based health initiatives remains mixed, perhaps due to lack of research focused on the social identity and communication experiences of community members and healthcare workers. Mobilizing communication accommodation theory, the current study analyzes healthcare discourses in the context of Ghana's Community-Based Health Planning and Service initiative. Critical discourse analysis of forty-four focus group interviews revealed significant tensions regarding patient-practitioner roles and expectations, organizational role constraints experienced by healthcare workers, and ethnolinguistic group boundaries. As a result, community members frequently express feelings of nonaccommodation from healthcare workers, leading to poor evaluations of healthcare workers' communication accommodation competence. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.