The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11‐dimensional (...) representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

In this article we examine how Qumran Hebrew can contribute to our knowledge of historical Hebrew linguistics. The premise of this paper is that Qumran Hebrew reflects a distinct stage in the development of Hebrew which sets it apart from Biblical Hebrew. It is further assumed that these unique features are able to assist us to understand the nature of the development of Biblical Hebrew in a more precise way. Evidence from the syntax of participial negation at (...) Qumran as opposed to Biblical Hebrew provides evidence for this claim. (shrink)

Up until today, the term linguistics has never figured in the title of any chair in the Collège de France. However, those having a rapport with language have not been lacking, among them those of “language and literature,” “history and philology” of various cultures, philology, although it does not study language itself, having recourse to it. There are four personalities to be kept in mind in the twentieth century: Abbé Rousselot, whose teaching of phonetics, although briefly, left a permanent (...) mark on his listeners; Mario Roques, who gave a course in the “Histoire du vocabulaire français” from 1937 to 1946; Roland Barthes, who rendered “Sémiologie littéraire” illustrious from 1976 to 1980; and M. Zemb, who two years ago was the first linguist in the modern sense to enter the Collège, with a chair of “Grammaire et pensée allemandes.”. (shrink)

Drawing on Brown and Fraser’s (in: Giles, Scherer (eds) Social markers in speech, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 33–62, 1979) framework for the analysis of communicative situations and Fuentes Rodríguez’s (Lingüística pragmática y Análisis del discurso, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2000; in Estudios de Lingüística: Investigaciones lingüísticas en el siglo XXI, 2009. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2009.Anexo3.04 ) model of pragmatic analysis, this paper examines three home-made recordings featuring some of the members of the terrorist cell responsible for the 2017 vehicle-ramming attacks in Barcelona and (...) Cambrils weighted as evidence during the trial held between November 2020 and May 2021 in the Spanish National High Court. The aim of this qualitative analysis is to test whether the linguistic evidence available supports the allegation that the participation in these recordings by one of the accused, Mohamed Houli Chemlal, had been planned by his interlocutors. Results show, first, that the exchanges analyzed present features indicative of both spontaneity and (limited) planification. Second, that Houli makes key contributions to the unfolding of the interactions shown in the recordings and that he does so in a cooperative and apparently relaxed manner, which could at best provide only partial support to his allegations. It is claimed that forensic linguistic analysis can generate valuable insights within terrorism-related legal proceedings. (shrink)

Deep learning techniques have revolutionised artificial systems’ performance on myriad tasks, from playing Go to medical diagnosis. Recent developments have extended such successes to natural language processing, an area once deemed beyond such systems’ reach. Despite their different goals, these successes have suggested that such systems may be pertinent to theoretical linguistics. The competence/performance distinction presents a fundamental barrier to such inferences. While DL systems are trained on linguistic performance, linguistic theories are aimed at competence. Such a barrier (...) has traditionally been sidestepped by assuming a fairly close correspondence: performance as competence plus noise. I argue this assumption is unmotivated. Competence and performance can differ arbitrarily. Thus, we should not expect DL models to illuminate linguistic theory. (shrink)

Resumen: Chile, a pesar de su historia migratoria, no ha generado programas educativos sustentados por políticas gubernamentales que propicien la adquisición de la variedad lingüística de la comunidad de acogida, por parte de la inmigración no hispanoparlante, integrando los referentes culturales de ambos colectivos. Se propone una alternativa a este olvido histórico y nos planteamos lo siguiente: ¿Qué elementos debiesen integrar un programa de adquisición de la variedad lingüística de la comunidad de acogida dirigido a inmigrantes haitianos propiciando el conocimiento (...) cultural? Se presenta el diseño e implementación de un programa que adopta la Hipótesis de Interdependencia Lingüística, en un aula dinámica donde se trabaja de forma colaborativa y situada. Se concluye que es posible educar en una segunda lengua a partir de la incorporación de elementos que propicien la interrelación de los aprendices en igualdad de conocimientos, y el uso de los códigos lingüísticos de los participantes como manifestación de respeto e interés por lo que cada uno pueda aportar a partir de su L1, develando su cultura de origen.: Chile, despite having a migration history, has not generated educational programs supported by government policies that encourage the acquisition of the linguistic variety of the host society, by non-Spanish-speaking immigration community, integrating the cultural referents of both collectives. It is suggested an option to this historical oblivion and we consider the following: What elements should be integrated into a program for acquiring the linguistic variety of the host society focused to Haitian immigrants fostering the cultural recognition? It is presented the design and implementation of a program that adopts the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis in a dynamic classroom working in a collaborative and situated way. As a conclusion, it is possible to educate in a second language from a program that incorporates elements that promote the interrelation of all participants in equality of knowledge, as well as the use of participants’ linguistic codes as a manifestation of respect and interest for what each participant can contribute from his/her L1, revealing their culture of origin. (shrink)

Contributions from an international team of experts revisit and update the concept of linguistic ecology in order to critically examine current theoretical approaches to language contact. Language is understood as a part of complex socio-historical-cultural systems, and interaction between the different dimensions and levels of these systems is considered to be essential for specific language forms. This book presents a uniform, abstract model of linguistic ecology based on, among other things, two concepts of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. It considers (...) the individual speaker in the specific communication situation to be the essential heuristic basis of linguistic analysis. The chapters present and employ a new, transparent and accessible contact linguistic vocabulary to aid reader comprehension, and explore a wide range of language contact situations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. This book will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across contact linguistics and cultural studies. (shrink)

So-called ‘generics’ are members of a diverse class of constructions that express generalisations that do not directly involve any precise cardinality of individuals, but rather the kinds or ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ members of the kinds contributed by arguments of the predicate. The paper argues that genericity as a unitary phenomenon of human thought has a psychological, rather than linguistic, basis. This claim is argued for by way of a survey of the linguistic diversity of the forms of genericity, and the (...) presentation of a psychological model from recent experimental work done by Prasada and Dillingham that promises to confer unity on the genericity phenomena while explaining how the linguistic diversity relates to a single cognitive representation of a form of generality. (shrink)

Though it draws on the grammatical metaphor of person (first, third, second) in terms of representations, Schilbach et al.'s target article does not consider an orthogonal line of evidence for the centrality of interaction to social cognition: the many grammatical phenomena, some widespread cross-linguistically and some only being discovered, which are geared to supporting real-time interaction. My commentary reviews these, and the contribution linguistic evidence can make to a fuller account of social cognition.

A signboard is an element of the linguistic landscape of a given place. The linguistic landscape is a space open to everyone, but it may be experienced differently by people from various generations. To examine the extent and quality of comfort or discomfort resulting from linguistic exclusion in public spaces, in the article the linguistic landscape of the center of Poznań is analyzed in terms of the absence and presence of the native language of residents and visitors to (...) this place. The research material comes from the most frequented places in this city and includes signs of private establishments (“bottom-up tokens”), which contribute to the linguistic landscape of Poznań. The study of linguistic exclusion takes into account the diverse linguistic competencies of five living generations of Poles. It aims to identify potential causes of the feeling of exclusion in open urban spaces for specific groups of Poles. (shrink)

Apart from the names of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851-1887), and, later, Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895-1978), Polish linguists and Polish linguistics generally have been little known in the West. The first two were mentioned with approval by Saussure in an unpublished paper, and this reference was picked up by Roman Jakobson and others many years later. Kuryłowicz, for his part, made himself well known in the West through his important work as Indo-Europeanist, even Semiticist, and as (...) a general linguist. The present volume is a first attempt to broaden the perspectives on the Polish contribution to linguistics both inside and outside of Poland during the past centuries. Specialists in their respective fields contributed chapters on the origins and development of general linguistics (Z. Wąsik), applied linguistics (F. Grucza), lexicology (T. Piotrowski), dialectology (St. Gogolewski), and onomastics (S. Gala), followed by five chapters presenting the theories of the arguably most remarkable Polish linguistic thinkers, from Baudouin de Courtenay (A. Adamska-Sałaciak), Kruszewski (F. M. Berezin), and Kuryłowicz (W. Smoczyński) to Mikołaj Rudnicki (1881-1978) and Ludwik Zabrocki (1907-1977) (both written by J. Bańczerowski). Detailed individual bibliographies, a full index of names (with life dates of Polish linguists from the Renaissance to the present day), and a thorough index of subjects and terms make this volume an important reference tool for anyone wishing to acquaint himself with the rich heritage of Polish linguistic thought. (shrink)

Gestures’ Contribution to Collective Metaphorical Thinking in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). This paper explores an idea expressed by a student discussing where our thoughts come from: to think we have to move our hands. Such sentence echoes the literature on the role of gesture for thinking. This study also focuses on the collective advancement of reasoning in a CPI. The instructor chooses to conclude by asking each student to suggest an analogy of thinking. This closing sequence reveals (...) how the instructor, through metaphorical gestures, fosters collective awareness of new propositions, and their further elaboration. After characterizing the cognitive models so produced, video analysis is used to follow their collective, verbal and gestural construction along the discussion. (shrink)

Corpus linguistics is becoming a respected method of statutory and constitutional interpretation in the United States over the past decade, yet it has also generated a backlash from a group of scholars that engage in empirical work. This essay attempts to demonstrate both the contributions and the risks of using linguistic corpora as a primary tool in legal interpretation. Its legitimacy stems from the fact that courts routinely state that statutory terms, when not defined as a (...) matter of law, are to be given their ordinary meaning. Judges have responded to this challenge, with the assistance of the linguistics community, by using corpora to determine which meanings are ordinary. However, legal analysts have not determined exactly what makes one meaning ordinary and another not ordinary. This gap has led to a level of disagreement in the field. Moreover, while linguists who engage in corpus linguistic analysis typically emphasize the importance of context, the legal application is peculiarly context-free, in keeping with legal philosophies that eschew reliance on reference to a law’s purpose and the intent of the legislature that enacted it. This move adds a political dimension to corpus analysis as a means of legal interpretation. Yet, the article concludes that by relying on a blend of general and specialized corpora, the legal system can substantially reduce the problem of contextualization, as some linguists and practitioners have already recognized. (shrink)

This chapter examines Chomsky's influence on the modeling of linguistic variation, focusing specifically on the notion of parameter. It begins by examining the different conceptualizations of “parameter” in Chomsky's work, from the Government and Binding era, through early Minimalism to more recent approaches which locate variation in phonological form. The idea that grammatical variation should be modeled by abstract parameters is arguably one of Chomsky's most important contributions to linguistic theory, and one which has had significant influence. Two (...) domains of variation (word order and argument expression) are used as case studies to illustrate how Chomsky's ideas have given rise to different kinds of parametric models. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the potential objections to the concept of parameters before concluding. (shrink)

Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language cease to be proscribed and when a certain geneticism—or a certain generativism—comes back into its own. One could show that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activity is (...) no longer elaborated solely at the margins of scientific practice, and its results are already being felt. In particular, we are no longer at the stage of the prejudice according to which linguistics as a science was born of a single "epistemological break"—a concept, called Bachelardian, much used or abused today—and of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think, as does Maurice Grammont, that "everything prior to the nineteenth century, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several lines."1 Noam Chomsky, in an article announcing his Cartesian Linguistics, which presents in its major lines the concept of "generative grammar," states: "My aim here is not to justify the interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its procedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it takes us back to a tradition of ancient thought, rather than constituting a new departure or a radical innovation in the domain of linguistics and psychology."2If we are to set ourselves down in the space of this "curious detour," we could not help encountering the "linguistics" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what ways Rousseau's reflections on the sign, on language, on the origin of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, and so on announce what we are so often tempted to consider as the very modernity of linguistic science, that is, modernity as linguistic science, since so many other "human sciences" refer to linguistics as their particular model. And we are all the more encouraged to practice this detour in that Chomsky's major references, in Cartesian Linguistics, are to the Logi cand General and Reasoned Grammar of Port-Royal, works that Rousseau knew well and held in high esteem.3 For example, on several occasions Rousseau cites Duclos' commentary on the General and Reasoned Grammar. The Essay on the Origin of Languages even closes with one of these citations. Thus Rousseau acknowledges his debt.1. Maurice Grammont, cited by Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics , p. 1.2. Chomsky, "De quelques constantes de la théory linguistique," Diogène, no. 51 ; my italics. See also Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory , p.15 ff. There is an analogous gesture in Jakobson, who refers not only to Peirce and, as does Chomsky, to Humboldt but also to John of Salisbury, to the Stoics, and to Plato's Cratylus: see Jakobson, "A la recherche de l'essence du langage," Diogène, no. 51 .3. "I began with some book of philosophy, like the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay, Malebranch, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." .Jacques Derrida, professor of the history of philosophy at the Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Marges de la philosophie, from which the present essay is taken. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Law of Genre," appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, has published essays on deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary analogies and metaphors are potential useful tools for thinking and creativity. The exploration of other conceptual philosophies and fields can be rewarding and can contribute to produce new useful ideas to be applied on different problems and parts of reality. The development of the so-called 'sustainability' approach allows us to explore the possibility of translate and adapt some of its main ideas to the organisation of human language diversity. The concept of 'sustainability' clearly comes from the tradition of (...) thinking that criticises the perspective of economic development that overlooks almost totally the natural environment -the precise context where this development takes place -and which thus leads it to a final end devoid of resources and clearly harmful for the life of human beings. Against this economicist view, which is blind to its very important side effects, some academic and activist enclaves have proposed the perspective of 'sustainable development' or 'lasting development'. In other words, they have theorised, constructed, and begun to practice an economic and urbanistic development respectful of, integrated into, and in keeping with the dynamics of nature. Such perspective provides a way of improving the material aspects of human life while at the same time not damaging other environmental aspects still more necessary and fundamental for the quality —and even for the simple possibility- of human existence. In fact, the view is a synthesis of possible opposed patterns. It does not renounce material and economic improvement, but nor does it exclude a fully healthy environment that is appropriate for the continuation of the species. If we now try to transfer and to apply this way of thinking to the linguodiversity reality, are there useful analogies and metaphors to be made? We believe there are, and ones that can be used to good advantage, and linked, moreover, to the traditions of thought that have always been present but perhaps even more so these last years with the drive to develop the thinking we are calling ‘eco-linguistic’. From the outset, we would underscore the will to connect apparent ‘opposites’ in an integrative conceptualisation, such as the very syntagm ‘sustainable development’. On the sociolinguistic plane, our debate should probably be about our ‘opposites’, which could be on the one hand the expansion of the dominant languages and, on the other hand, the maintenance and development of human linguistic diversity. (shrink)

Linguistic Behaviorism (Place, 1996) is an attempt to reclaim for the behaviorist perspective two disciplines, linguistics and linguistic philosophy, most of whose practitioners have been persuaded by Chomsky's (1959) Review of B. F. Skinner's (1957) "Verbal Behavior" that behaviorism has nothing useful to contribute to the study of language. It takes as axiomatic (a) that the functional unit of language is the sentence, and (b) that sentences are seldom repeated word-for-word, but are constructed anew on each occasion of utterance (...) out of units, words, phrases and turns of phrase, that are repeated. On this view, the problem of discriminating the true from the false arises from the use of novel declarative sentences (statements) to depict or, to use Skinner's term, "specify" contingencies the like of which the listener need never have encountered and to which he would otherwise have no access. In such cases the listener needs to distinguish among the sentences he receives from other speakers between those where the situation depicted/specified corresponds to that which actually exists at the time and place specified in the sentence and are, therefore, true, and those to which no actual situation corresponds and which are, therefore, false. (shrink)

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of language in the (...) modern period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modern philosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether analytic philosophers who are non-native English speakers are subject to linguistic injustice and, if yes, what kind of injustice that is and whether it is different from the general disadvantage that non-native English speakers meet in a world where English is rapidly becoming the lingua franca. The paper begins with a critical review of the debate on linguistic justice, with a particular focus on the emergence of a lingua franca and the related questions of justice, (...) both in terms of the disadvantages suffered by those groups who bear the cost of learning another language and in terms of forms of discrimination due to accents and language improprieties. We argue that being at a relative disadvantage compared to others does not necessarily translate in a proper injustice if fundamental civil, political and social provisions are in place. We suggest that a circumstance of injustice arises when such disadvantage affects those who are not yet members of such academic community such as prospective students, thus contributing in keeping the non-native group a minority. We qualify this case of disadvantage as a matter of structural injustice. (shrink)

Modelling with Words is an emerging modelling methodology closely related to the paradigm of Computing with Words introduced by Lotfi Zadeh. This book is an authoritative collection of key contributions to the new concept of Modelling with Words. A wide range of issues in systems modelling and analysis is presented, extending from conceptual graphs and fuzzy quantifiers to humanist computing and self-organizing maps. Among the core issues investigated are - balancing predictive accuracy and high level transparency in learning (...) - scaling linguistic algorithms to high-dimensional data problems - integrating linguistic expert knowledge with knowledge derived from data - identifying sound and useful inference rules - integrating fuzzy and probabilistic uncertainty in data modelling. (shrink)

This book aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact and their evolution, be they the result of political or economic (dis)integrations or migrations or for technological reasons. Via an interdisciplinary, holistic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm, based on an ecological and complexical perspective. This perspective is based on the fact that linguistic structures do not live in isolation from their social functions and (...) must be situated in relation to the sub- and supra-systems that determine their existence if we are to understand their fortunes. It is a contribution in understanding and promoting the processes of linguistic revitalization in the world, combining at the same time the maintenance and development of diversity while ensuring the intercommunication of human species. (shrink)

The present article explores the epistemological conditions of intercultural encounters. Based on an analysis of Raimon Panikkar's intercultural hermeneutics, we argue that intercultural encounters cannot take place adequately when they are based on purelyrhetoricalrationality or rationalpersuasion. We point to the limitations of grounding intercultural relationships on dialectical dialogue and, therefore, of educating them by simply enhancing discursive capacities. We underline the need for other epistemological conditions that should be fostered in order to move forward on the path to actual interculturality. (...) These can be summarised by what Panikkar calls "conversion", an epistemic framework of love—personalrelationality, that goes beyondobjectifyingrationality—for the communication between (culturally different) subjects. We conclude that the culturally diverse human condition refers to being encountered and being understood on a level that is not merely logical or linguistic. What can be understood of a person with another cultural background goes beyond what can be comprehended by logical rationality or captured byveritativejudgements about objects. In other words, in intercultural encounters,ontological, rather than merely logical truth is at stake, which means that the presence of the other can lead to experiences of meaning: it reveals a being that calls for conversion. Conversion demands anonticaction on the part of the subject, not merely an epistemological one, that cancels the violence that rational persuasion might entail. (shrink)

An elaboration on some loose ends in Grodzinsky's analysis shows that data from the field of aphasia contribute to the formulation of theoretical linguistic principles, and provides extra arguments in favor of Grodzinsky's claim that linguistic theory is the best tool for the investigation of aphasia. This illustrates and emphasizes the importance of communication between researchers in the field of (Broca's) aphasia and of theoretical linguistics.

The papers in this series of five volumes provide a snapshot of current trends in European Cognitive Science. Each of the volumes deals with problems in cognitive science from a different perspective, covering the interacting disciplines of cognitive psychology, logic and linguistics, human-computer interaction, neuroscience and artificial intelligence respectively. Linguistics is concerned with the structure and use of languages, and logic with the form and correctness of argumentation in ordinary and scientific language. The two fields are presented (...) with respect to their role in cognitive science and artificial intelligence: How are they realised by psychological mechanisms or biological processes on the one hand or programmed or wired in machines on the other. The contributions in this volume give introductions to the state-of-the-art, emphasizing the analysis of complexity and flexibility in logic and language in the framework of classical approaches (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7). At the same time some contributions present a broader perspective in which an integration of the formal structure with the structure of the processing systems might be possible (Chapters 2 & 6). In this context, the differences and the perspectives of the classical approaches on the one hand and of connectionist approaches on the other are compared. (Chapters 1 & 6).contributions present a broader perspective in which an integration of the formal structure with the structure of the processing systems might be possible (Chapters 2 & 6). In this context, the differences and the perspectives of the classical approaches on the one hand and of connectionist approaches on the other are compared. (Chapters 1 & 6). (shrink)

This article explores the link between CEOs’ language and hubristic leadership. It is based on the precepts that leaders’ linguistic utterances provide insights into their personality and behaviours; hubris is associated with unethical and potentially destructive leadership behaviours; if it is possible to identify linguistic markers of CEO hubris then these could serve as early warnings sign and help to mitigate the associated risks. Using computational linguistics, we analysed spoken utterances from a sample of hubristic CEOs and compared (...) them with non-hubristic CEOs. We found that hubristic CEOs’ linguistic utterances show systematic and consistent differences from the linguistic utterances of non-hubristic CEOs. Demonstrating how hubristic leadership manifests in CEO language contributes to wider research regarding the diagnosis and prevention of the unethical and potentially destructive effects of hubristic leadership. This research contributes to the wider study of hubris and unethical leadership by applying a novel method for identifying linguistic markers and offers a way of militating against the risk of unethical and destructive CEO behaviours induced or aggravated by hubristic leadership. (shrink)

The article examines how discourse participants use language, the body and the local interactional and material context in the construction of offers. The data consist of eight hours of video recordings of everyday interactions in English and Finnish, and conversation analysis is used as the method. We focus on offers that make available to the recipient some concrete referent or material object or artifact in the current situation, that is, ‘concrete offers’. The article shows that such offers can be conceptualized (...) as consisting of two interlinked actions, one identifying the referent and the other explicating the offer. The article further argues that the frequent accomplishment over time of such complex actions may contribute to the emergence of a set of social action formats for offers. This action combination is explored by discussing offers that range from fully linguistically articulated ones, to types where embodied actions take an increasingly central role. (shrink)

Talk of the functions of language or concepts plays a central role in developing an appealing pragmatic approach to conceptual engineering. But some have expressed skepticism that we can make any good sense of the idea of function as applied to concepts or language, or argued that the most we can say is that the function of ‘F’ is to refer to the Fs. In this paper, however, I argue that identifying linguistic functions is not hopeless, and that we can (...) make progress by working at the level of system functions, and drawing on work in systemic functional linguistics. For that enables us to develop a better framework for thinking about the functions that language serves, and the ways its subsystems contribute to those functions. This approach to understanding linguistic functions enables us to develop a pragmatic approach to conceptual engineering that provides standards for conceptual engineering without metaphysical mysteries. It also enables us to make progress in figuring out what functions certain philosophically interesting parts of language serve, and how they are introduced into language, in ways that may disentangle us from a range of old philosophical problems. (shrink)

This research focuses on the contributions of a non-Arab scholar who has significantly impacted the study of the language of the Qur'an, the most revered and miraculous of texts. Despite its eternal wonders and the mysteries of its miraculous nature remaining untapped, the language of the Qur'an continues to be a subject of intense study. After reviewing the works of al-Farahi, I was impressed by the boldness of this non-Arab scholar in critiquing many established theories of Arabic lexicographers, morphologists, (...) and grammarians from both earlier and later periods. His responses in linguistic matters, particularly in grammatical issues, will be the main focus of this research. The research will examine his responses in grammatical issues, which we have categorized into two sections: responses related to nouns and responses related to prepositions. The section on nouns is further divided into two main categories: responses concerning inflected nouns and responses concerning constructed nouns. This classification follows the approach of al-Zamakhshari in his book Al-Mufassal, and is organized as follows. (shrink)

Human linguistic phenomenon is at one and the same time an individual, social, and political fact. As such, its study should bear in mind these complex interrelations, which are produced inside the framework of the sociocultural and historical ecosystem of each human community. Understanding this phenomenon is often no easy task, due to the range of elements involved and their interrelations. The absence of valid, clearly developed paradigms adds to the problem and means that the theoretical conclusions that emerge may (...) be unclear on certain points. It is true that in the last fifty years sociolinguistic studies have advanced considerably, and today we have access to an impressive set of data and a wide variety of theoretical reflections. But as a discipline sociolinguistics does not yet have unified, powerful theoretical models able to account rigorously and clearly for the phenomena it studies. Sociolinguistic studies are today a diverse set of contributions in which certain and theoretical schools and lines of research emerged; but as is to be expected in a relatively new field, there is not enough communication between the various schools and they cannot yet be said to be integrated in terms of their conceptual and theoretical postulates. Against this background, our work aims to contribute to the overall, integrated understanding of the processes of language contact. Via an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach, it also aims to aid the theoretical grounding and integration of a unified, common sociolinguistic paradigm. Our strategy will not be merely to combine the contributions from ongoing research lines, but to address the question from a more global viewpoint which, together with the more innovative contemporary scientific disciplines, permits a harmonious integration of the various sociolinguistic perspectives in a broad, deep and unitary approach to the reality. The materials used to construct this unified approach are taken from many sources: Theoretical physics, ecology, the philosophy of science and mind, anthropology, phenomenological and process sociology, cognitive sciences, political science, pragmatics, history, systems theory, approaches to complexity and obviously sociolinguistics, are all involved in a dialogue in this desire for integration. (shrink)

The present study aims to reveal how evaluative meanings shape the depiction of Ukrainian emigration and women emigrants in Ukrainian literature of the early 2000s by employing Appraisal Theory developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and subjecting excerpts from the following five novels to an in-depth linguistic analysis: Usi dorohy vedut’ do Rymu by Olesia Halych, Shliub iz kukhlem Pil’zens’koho pyva by Lesia Stepovychka, Ia znaiu, shcho ty znaiesh, shcho ia znaiu by Irena Rozdobud’ko, Hastarbaiterky by (...) Natalka Doliak, and Korotka istoriia traktoriv po-ukraiins’ky by Marina Lewycka. The authors employ various grammatical and lexical items to communicate their assessments of the emigrant women characters and the phenomenon of emigration from Ukraine. Appraisal Theory allows us to identify such linguistic realisations of evaluations and interpret authors’ attitudinal positions voiced or implied in text. This research is significant as the first study of its kind using Appraisal Theory to analyse literary texts written in Ukrainian thus expanding the theory’s reach and relevance. Additionally, employing linguistic techniques when assessing the depiction of women’s emigration and its agents enriches an analysis by providing a detailed and balanced perspective. The findings of this research contribute to the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and migration studies. (shrink)

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

Different disciplines converge to trace language evolution from motor skills. The human ability to use tools has been advocated as a fundamental step toward the emergence of linguistic processes in the brain. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging research has established that linguistic functions and tool-use are mediated by partially overlapping brain networks. Yet, scholars still theoretically debate whether the relationship between tool-use and language is contingent or functionally relevant, since empirical evidence is critically missing. Here, we measured both linguistic production and (...) tool-use abilities in the same participants, as well as manual and linguistic motor skills. A path analysis ruling out unspecific contributions from manual or linguistic motor skills, showed that motor proficiency using a tool lawfully predicts differences in individual linguistic production. In addition, more complex tool-use reveals stronger association between linguistic production and tool mastery. These findings establish the existence of shared cognitive processes between tool-use and language. (shrink)

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers’ reports about their toddlers’ involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children’s prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups – US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European American families – were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study’s analytic focus was mothers’ responses to interview questions (...) asking about the child’s efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children’s agency and children’s prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children’s contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children’s agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children’s autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children’s helpfulness is supported in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child’s efforts to help with linguistic forms that “pivoted” to either the mother as the focal agent in the child’s prosocial engagement or to reframing the child’s involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children’s prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community. (shrink)

One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel. The fields of language evolution and evolutionary biology have been swapping tools for centuries to the enrichment of both. Here I will discuss three categories of tool swapping: conceptual tools, where analogies are drawn between hypotheses, patterns or processes, so that one field can take advantage of the path cut through the intellectual jungle by the other; theoretical (...) tools, where the machinery developed to process the data in one field is adapted to be applied to the data of the other; and analytical tools, where common problems encountered in both fields can be solved using useful tricks developed by one or the other. I will argue that conceptual tools borrowed from linguistics contributed to the Darwinian revolution in biology; that theoretical tools of evolutionary change can in some cases be applied to both genetic and linguistic data without having to assume the underlying evolutionary processes are exactly the same; and that there are practical problems that have long been recognised in historical linguistics that may be solved by borrowing some useful analytical tools from evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Combining the frameworks of multi-dimensional analysis and rhetorical structure theory, this study examines the linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of corporate annual reports and interprets their underlying functional dimensions. Our corpus consists of texts of corporate 10K reports from firms listed on New York Stock Exchange. Five functional dimensions are quantitatively extracted and qualitatively interpreted: expression of direct persuasion; expression of impersonal stance; subjective versus objective positioning; integrative expression of stance versus fragmented expression; and expression of reliability. All (...) these dimensions contribute to the communicative function of persuasion. The analysis of the rhetorical structures of excerpts with high concentrations of co-occurring linguistic features on each dimension further indicates the communicative strategy of persuasion. The proposed MD model is then applied to analyze the effect of firm performance on the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. We found that firm performance can significantly affect the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. CAR discourse from firms with good performance is more reliable. The result reveals managements’ use of concealment strategy in impression management. This study has implications for MD analysis, business discourse analysis, language pedagogy and accounting research. (shrink)

Literature on epistemic injustice has grown tremendously as an increasingly rich and diverse body of work in recent years. From the point of view of intercultural and anticolonial discussions, contemporary contributions have also helped to illuminate how epistemic injustice and other forms of cultural domination might be related to essential processes within the structures of colonial and racial supremacy. -/- This proposal aims to contribute to such relevant and illuminating discussions by focusing on the role that language and (...) culture might have in phenomena of epistemic injustice, particularly, hermeneutical injustice. Despite the central role played by semantics in epistemic injustice studies, the question about whether certain languages could also themselves be the recipients of epistemic injustice has been rather undertheorized. Simultaneously, recent movements to advocate for minority language rights, such as the Linguistic Human Rights Movement (LHR), raise important questions in this connection. -/- In the present paper, I argue that attending to the intercultural context reveals a new sort of hermeneutical injustice, one that, surprisingly, has never been articulated before. In particular, I am referring to a kind of HI that is essentially “linguistic” and “culture-specific”. I will be presenting two different subtypes for this kind of hermeneutical injustice: The first concerns the possibility of considering certain languages themselves as genuine objects of hermeneutical injustice, while the second has to do with certain specific culturally-established expressions or forms of talking. (shrink)

Based on applied linguistics, this study looked at the decision support system for emphasizing self-assurance in academic writing. From a generic perspective, academic writing has been considered both a process and a product. It has highlighted the planning composite processes, editing, composing, revising, and assessment, which depend upon the familiarity of someone with confidence in their capability for engagement in these activities. As a product, it has focused on the writing results through the product’s characteristics. These contain specific (...) content areas in acceptable depth and well-structured technical vocabulary. Higher education aims to support students in optimizing their potential for achieving satisfactory outcomes. For example, the assessment of grades involves academic writing, contributing to the degree course classification. Students have differences in many respects, such as expectations, background knowledge, and study and learning approaches. There were varying students’ beliefs about what academic writing is for evaluation. Modern-day motivations and theories highlight the significance of students’ confidence in their studies. The role of high confidence can support students to apply more effort toward setting challenging goals. Students may find it more difficult to succeed in higher education if they lack confidence in their academic writing abilities. A DSS has many applications in diverse areas and can play a significant role in the ranking and prioritization process. The current study has considered the DSS for prioritizing self-assurance in academic writing based on applied linguistics. Various criteria were considered for the evaluation of the research. The Super Decision software was used for the experimental process of the proposed research. The results of the study show the effectiveness of the proposed research. (shrink)

The impetus for this volume developed from the 1982 University of Western Ontario Learnability Workshop, which was organized by the editors and sponsored by that University's Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Cognitive Science. The volume e~plores the import of learnability theory for contemporary linguistic theory, focusing on foundational learning-theoretic issues associated with the parametrized Government-Binding framework. Written by prominent re searchers in the field, all but two of the eight contributions are pre viously unpublished. The editor's (...) introduction provides an overview that interrelates the separate papers and elucidates the foundational issues addressed by the volume. Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein's "Learning Theory and Natural Language" first appeared in Cognition ; Matthews's "The Plausi bility of Rationalism" was published in the Journal of Philosophy. The editors would like to thank the publishers for permission to reprint these papers. Mr. Marin Marinov assisted with the preparation of the indices for the volume. VB ROBERT 1. MATTHEWS INTRODUCTION: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 1. INTRODUCTION Formal learning theory, as the name suggests, studies the learnability of different classes of formal objects under different formal models of learning. The specification of such a model, which specifies a learning environment, a learn ing strategy, and a criterion for successful learning, determines a class of formal objects, namely, the class that can be acquired to the level of the specified success criterion by a learner implementing the specified strategy in the specified enviroment. (shrink)

Number facts are commonly assumed to be verbally stored in an associative multiplication fact retrieval network. Prominent evidence for this assumption comes from so-called operand-related errors (e.g. 4 × 6 = 28). However, little is known about the development of this network in children and its relation to verbal and non-verbal memories. In a longitudinal design, we explored elementary school children from grades 3 and 4 in a multiplication verification task with the operand-related and -unrelated distractors. We examined (...) the contribution of multiplicative fact retrieval by verbal and visuo-spatial short-term and working memory. Children in grade 4 showed smaller reaction times in all conditions. However, there was no significant difference in errors between grades. Contribution of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory also changed with grade. Multiplication correlated with verbal working memory and performance in grade 3 but with visuo-spatial working memory and performance in grade 4. We suggest that the relation to verbal working memory in grade 3 indicates primary linguistic learning of and access to multiplication in grade 3 which is probably based on verbal repetition of the multiplication table heavily practiced in grades 2 and 3. However, the relation to visuo-spatial semantic working memory in grade 4 suggests that there is a shift from verbal to visual and semantic learning in grade 4. This shifting may be induced because later in elementary school, multiplication problems are rather carried out via more written, i.e., visual tasks, which also involve executive functions. More generally, the current data indicates that mathematical development is not generally characterized by a steady progress in performance; rather verbal and non-verbal memory contributions of performance shift over time, probably due to different learning contents. (shrink)

This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt offers a new contextualist take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, and argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. This approach allows the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry - namely the intended, primary meaning - and its adoption as a unit of semantic analysis despite the varying provenance of the contributing information. The analysis transcends the said/implicated distinction and (...) heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool and at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics, and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism, particularly with regard to the role of salience, the dynamic nature of the unit that forms a basis of the interpretation process, and the flexibility of word meaning. It is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics. (shrink)

[Publisher's description] -/- * Authoritative review of this dynamic field placed in an interdisciplinary context * Approximately 175 articles by leaders in the field * Compact and affordable single-volume format -/- The application of philosophy to language study, and language study to philosophy, has experienced demonstrable intellectual growth and diversification in recent decades. This work comprehensively analyzes and evaluates many of the most interesting facets of this vibrant field. An edited collection of articles taken from the award-winning Encyclopedia of (...) Language and Linguistics 2nd edition, this volume acts as a single-stop desk reference resource for the field, comprising contributions from the foremost scholars of philosophy of linguistics in their various interdisciplinary specializations. From Plato's Cratylus to Semantic and Epistemic Holism, this fascinating work authoritatively unpacks the diverse and multi-layered concepts of meaning, expression, identity, truth, and countless other themes and subjects straddling the linguistic-philosophical meridian, in 175 articles and over 900 pages. Readership: Relevant to any department, institute or individual interested in the philosophical aspects of language. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to clarify the meaning of the term saṁketa, which is usually translated as ‘ convention’, in the Yogasūtrabhāṣya, the first and the most authoritative commentary to the Yogasūtras. This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of the classical Yoga view on the relation between word and its meaning, for saṁketa is a key term used by this darśana in discussing this relation. The textual analysis of the Yogasūtrabhāṣya has led me to the conclusion (...) that its author’s understanding of the linguistic convention is different from the notion of the linguistic convention of the Vaiśeṣikas and Naiyāyikas and similar to the notion of the linguistic convention of the Grammarians. These are interpretations of the term saṁketa which reflect Yogasūtrabhāṣya’s understanding of the linguistic convention: the tradition of the usage of words, established usage of words. Saṁketa of the Yogasūtrabhāṣya, unlike saṁketa/samaya of the Vaiśeṣikas and Naiyāyikas, is not an agreement established by anyone, but an agreement in the sense of tradition, established practice, or established custom. Unlike the saṁketa/samaya of these philosophers, the saṁketa of the Yogasūtrabhāṣya, having neither beginning nor end, is not re-created, but only made known at the beginning of each cycle of existence of the world. (shrink)

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus (...) on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far. (shrink)

This book presents comparisons of recent accounts in the formalization of natural language with informal conceptions of interaction that have been developed in both psychology and epistemology. There are four parts which explore: historical and systematic studies; the formalization of context in epistemology; the formalization of reasoning in interactive contexts in psychology; the formalization of pathological conversations. Part one discusses the Erlangen School, which proposed a logical analysis of science as well as an operational reconstruction of psychological concepts. These first (...) chapters provide epistemological and psychological insights into a conceptual reassessment of rational reconstruction from a pragmatic point of view. The second focus is on formal epistemology, where there has recently been a vigorous contribution from experts in epistemic and doxatic logics and an attempt to account for a more realistic, cognitively plausible conception of knowledge. The third part of this book examines the meeting point between logic and the human and social sciences and the fourth part focuses on research at the intersection between linguistics and psychology. Internationally renowned scholars have contributed to this volume, building on the findings and themes relevant to an interdisciplinary scientific project called DiaRaFor which was hosted by the MSH Lorraine from 2007 to 2011. (shrink)

Barsalou's contribution converges with basic ideas and empirical findings of cognitive linguistics. They posit the same general architecture. The perceptual grounding of conceptual structure is a central tenet of cognitive linguistics. Our capacity to construe the same situation in alternate ways is fundamental to cognitive semantics, and numerous parallels are discernible between conceptual construal and visual perception. Grammar is meaningful, consisting of schematized patterns for the pairing of semantic and phonological structures. The meanings of grammatical elements reside primarily (...) in the construal they impose on conceptual content. This view of linguistic structure appears to be compatible with Barsalou's proposals. (shrink)

This book provides an original and provocative combination of ethnomethodological analysis and the concepts of linguistic philosophy with a breadth and clarity unusual in this field of writing. It is designed to be read by sociologists, psychologists and philosophers and concerns itself with the contributions of Wittgenstein, defending the claim for his relevance to the human sciences. However, this book goes some way beyond the usual limitations of such interdisciplinary works by outlining some empirical applications of ideas derived (...) class='Hi'>from the Wittgenstein tradition. (shrink)