Language Sciences最新文献

Hierarchy has been described as the backbone of a language system. However, how language evolves as a multi-level system has not been explored quantitatively based on authentic language materials. The Menzerath–Altmann law (MAL) is a statistical linguistic universal that can capture the complex relationships between language units at neighboring levels. Using the MAL, the present study explored the evolution of two regularly examined partial hierarchies in written Chinese, i.e., “clause-word-character” and “sentence-clause-word” across five periods of two millennia. The results indicate that the hierarchy in the Pre-Qin Period (Period 1) is quite different from the others since its linguistic units of character and word overlap to some extent. The two partial hierarchies show opposite evolutionary trends in the following four periods. The hierarchy fades at the “clause-word-character” levels. Nevertheless, it increases significantly at the “sentence-clause-word” levels. The evolutions are accompanied by a constant increase in word length and accelerated growth in clause length and sentence length/complexity. The findings are finally explained from the perspective of the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory.

An aspect of gaming culture among Yorùbá millennials is verbally interpreting certain musical motifs of the popular videogame called Super Mario Bros. The themes of the verbal interpretations are comparable to those of music texts at traditional Yorùbá competitions. Drawing on the Yorùbá music tradition, the account in this work is that, to the gamers, the background music of the videogame performs a similar function as the music at traditional Yorùbá competitions. Semantically, the choice of words in the linguistic interpretation is conditioned by the situational contexts or scenes where the music is heard in the videogame. The results of an acoustic analysis show that the pitch contours of the linguistic interpretations resemble the pitch trajectories of the corresponding music motifs. Thus, the sequence of words in each linguistic interpretation is determined by vocal imitation. This study suggests that the linguistic processing of music does not only involve phonetic iconicity but includes contextual inference and social expectation. The interpretive moves clearly point to strong parallels between sound-meaning mapping in spoken language and music.

Unlike all the failed attempts proposed to mitigate gender bias in English, the Chinese language—which has an epicene pronoun, ta—took an opposite path: changes were implemented to make the third person pronoun gender specific by inserting a feminine third person pronoun and a non-human third person pronoun in its writing system (which did not affect speech). As a result, written Chinese became a mirror image of English (having the equivalents of he, she, and it). In this empirical study on gender bias in the Chinese language, we find that this institutional effort has also failed despite a century's implementation in the educational system of the country: the language exhibits a dominating male-as-norm bias as well as bias based on stereotyping, regardless of participants' gender and age groups. Our study therefore contributes to the understanding of language change as well as gender bias in language.

In this paper an integrationist linguist (Peter E Jones) and an Ecological Psychologist (Catherine Read) open a dialogue on the possibility of a productive relationship between the integrationist approach to language and communication of Roy Harris and James Gibson's Ecological Psychology of perceiving/acting/knowing. Within their own disciplinary contexts, each position is one of profound critique and innovation in relation to established and pervasive ‘myths’. Specifically, Harris is concerned with the ‘language myth’—the explicit positions and implicit assumptions in the Western language tradition (including modern linguistics) about the nature of language and the relationship between language and communication. In sharp contrast to mainstream approaches, Harris rejects both coding and representational views of meaning and takes signs (including linguistic signs) to be the product, rather than the precondition, of communicational activity. Similarly, Gibson critiques assumptions about how perception takes place, especially in the case of vision, that have informed Western science at least since Descartes' Optics. In particular, Gibson rejects the passive ‘retinal image fallacy’ of seeing in favour of an activity based non-representational perspective of ‘direct perception’. The paper offers a critical dialogue over the key theoretical perspectives of both traditions, focusing particularly on the import and implications of each theorist's claims and assumptions about the other's field. Highlighting key areas of apparent common ground across the two approaches, we also argue that Gibson appears not to be entirely free of assumptions about language that belong to Harris's ‘language myth’, while Harris appears at times to assume the ‘image’ based model of perception that Gibson rejected. In the context of current interest in a possible reconciliation or combination of integrational linguistics and Ecological Psychology, the paper, therefore, raises fundamental questions around the extent to which these independently developed programmes of demythologization are compatible or possibly synergistic.

Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia was ambiguous on a central point: whether the styles or socio-ideological languages that constituted it were creations of novelistic discourse itself or were already established in everyday speech and incorporated into the novel. The sociolinguistic and anthropological literature on indexicality has greatly enriched our understanding of heteroglossia, but, it, too, leaves this question up in the air. After a brief review of writing on indexicality, we show that the idea of ‘n + 1’, higher-order, indexicality, first mooted by Silverstein, intersects with debates in analytic philosophy of language about the relative roles of inference and semiosis in linguistic understanding. Higher-order indexicality, crucially, depends upon inferential processes, ranging from simple analogy to complex argument, and this has consequences for where indexical values are established.

Language is intrinsically multimodal. Speakers use gestures, prosody, gaze, and facial expressions as cues that complement and expand the meaning expressed in their words. These varied signals operate in remarkably flexible coordination, constantly adapting to the conversational partners and topics as they change over time. We argue that an ecological approach to multimodal behavior offers a promising account of natural conversation as it takes place both in experimental contexts, and in natural ones outside the lab. After reviewing major historical themes in the study of language and communication, we describe how this ecological perspective situates future work, especially work that seeks to quantify these processes. We describe a quantitative hypothesis that multimodal signals are projected on manifolds of lower dimension that can be described in terms of dynamical systems. We refer to these lower dimensional patterns as “pragmatic modes,” and compare this idea to a number of prior theoretical proposals. We describe how the notion of pragmatic mode frames a quantitative basis to supplement and extend prior research with explicitly quantitative goals. The paper concludes with an outline to link quantitative descriptions of multimodality with more abstract, qualitative theories of the past few decades, and describe how future research might explore pragmatic modes, how they change over the course of conversation, and relate to our understanding of human communication.

This article investigates the nature of zero copula in Japanese from variationist sociolinguistic and historical perspectives. The corpus-based surveys revealed that zero copula has existed for a long period of time and used to be the default form in the relevant linguistic environments in the past, which currently undergoes a change toward an increase in the use of the overt copula. The questionnaire survey confirmed that the overt copula is considered the correct form as the norm of Japanese, and that zero copula is not linked to the casualness of speech unlike the case of copula omission. The discrepancy between the norm and the historical trajectory suggests that the change involves two stages: a change in grammar followed by a change from above. Regarding the change in grammar, a hypothesis was proposed as to how the change has progressed by drawing attention to the reanalysis of the structure with the particle to and subject markers related to the ECM construction.

We apply information theoretic notions to model intensifiers in German. We show that information theory can explain that despite their common referential meaning, some intensifiers are extremely frequent (so), while others are uncommon (arsch ‘butt’), and seem to induce a stronger intensifying effect. We introduce two notions to model the expressivity of an intensifier in a given message: the local (paradigmatic) information content of an intensifier (surprisal), and the transitional information, based on Markov transition probabilities. Based on a large corpus of intensified predicative adjective phrases from German Twitter data, we confirm that (1) local information and transitional information are strongly anti-correlated: The more common an intensifier is, the lower its expressive value in communication and the less it constrains following adjectival heads; and (2) “stackings” of multiple intensifiers are frequent and are used to frame and strengthen the expressiveness of the intensification. We further confirm that stackings tend to occur in incremental surprisal rank order, following the Uniform Information Density hypothesis. Our analyses show that information theory is not limited to the domain of referential semantics and morphosyntactic patterns of reduction, but offers a framework to capture the expressive function of German intensifiers.

Studies within evolutionary musicology and ontogenetic development propose an intimate relation between the quality of the human voice, the rhythm of interactional patterns (e.g. the alternation between repetition and improvisation), the origins of aesthetics, and the characteristics of performances within the temporal arts. Focusing on the role of auditory perception in children's development of narrative skills, this article similarly proposes an intimate relation between children's voices in interaction, their imitative use of formulaic and genre-specific language, and their creative and aesthetically attuned written compositions. The notion of voice opens up a productive and coherent approach to investigating how children interactionally and imitatively come to develop a command and reflexive understanding of spoken and written genres. The discussion is based on a full ethnography of children's acquisition of written language during their second school year.