CiteULike: briordan's general-linguistics

English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Study

Beth Levin — 2008-07-06T02:20:44-00:00

(1993)

???

Chris Butler — 2008-06-21T12:20:17-00:00

Revista Canaria de Estudios (November 2008)

Formulaic Language and the Lexicon

Allison Wray — 2008-06-21T12:15:30-00:00

(2002)

Cognitive Linguistics

WA Croft — 2008-06-09T22:50:35-00:00

(2004)

What conversational English tells us about the nature of grammar: A critique of Thompson's analysis of object complements

Frederick Newmeyer — 2008-06-06T17:29:24-00:00

(in press)

Thierry Fontenelle (ed.). Practical Lexicography: A Reader (Oxford Linguistics).

Reinhard Hartmann — 2008-05-26T11:32:22-00:00

Int J Lexicography, Vol. 21, No. 2. (1 June 2008), pp. 193-195.

10.1093/ijl/ecn010

Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds

Derek Penn — 2008-05-20T23:10:27-00:00

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 31, No. 02. (2008), pp. 109-130.

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.

All about Language: A Guide

Barry Blake — 2008-05-10T01:08:50-00:00

(2008)

Is Structure Dependence an Innate Constraint? New Experimental Evidence From Children's Complex-Question Production

Ben Ambridge — 2008-04-30T13:56:49-00:00

Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1. (2008), pp. 222-255.

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basis of surface distributional properties of the input (Lewis & Elman, 2001; Reali & Christiansen, 2005). Two new elicited production studies revealed that (a) children occasionally produce structure-dependence errors and (b) the pattern of children's auxiliary-doubling errors (Is the boy who is smoking is crazy?) suggests a sensitivity to surface co-occurrence patterns in the input. This article concludes that current data do not provide any support for the claim that structure dependence is an innate constraint, and that it is possible that children form a structure-dependent grammar on the basis of exposure to input that exhibits this property.

Language universals in human brains

Iris Berent — 2008-04-08T20:58:25-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 14. (8 April 2008), pp. 5321-5325.

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others (e.g., bl). We demonstrate such preferences among Korean speakers, whose language lacks initial C1C2 clusters altogether. Our demonstration exploits speakers' well known tendency to misperceive ill-formed clusters. We show that universally dispreferred onset clusters are more frequently misperceived than universally preferred ones, indicating that Korean speakers consider the former cluster-type more ill-formed. The misperception of universally ill-formed clusters is unlikely to be due to a simple auditory failure. Likewise, the aversion of universally dispreferred onsets by Korean speakers is not explained by English proficiency or by several phonetic and phonological properties of Korean. We conclude that language universals are neither relics of language change nor are they artifacts of generic limitations on auditory perception and motor controlthey reflect universal linguistic knowledge, active in speakers' brains. 10.1073/pnas.0801469105

A Word-Order Constraint on Phonological Activation

Janssen — 2008-03-07T16:40:28-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 216-220.

The Syntax of Agreement and Concord

Mark Baker — 2008-03-09T02:19:33-00:00

(2008)

Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot

Sam Featherston — 2008-02-22T03:40:12-00:00

Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 3. (2007), pp. 269-318.

Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The state of the art

Ray Jackendoff — 2008-02-22T03:35:40-00:00

The Linguistic Review, Vol. 24, No. 4. (2007), pp. 347-401.

Introduction: The typology and semantics of locative predicates: posturals, positionals, and other beasts

Felix Ameka — 2008-02-22T01:23:53-00:00

Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 45, No. 5. (October 2007), pp. 847-871.

Quantitative Methods in Linguistics

Keith Johnson — 2008-02-02T01:40:39-00:00

(2008)

Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction

Ronald Langacker — 2008-02-02T01:30:10-00:00

(2008)

From the Cover: Inaugural Article: Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children

Robert Sampson — 2008-01-22T22:53:31-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 3. (22 January 2008), pp. 845-852.

Disparities in verbal ability, a major predictor of later life outcomes, have generated widespread debate, but few studies have been able to isolate neighborhood-level causes in a developmentally and ecologically appropriate way. This study presents longitudinal evidence from a large-scale study of >2,000 children ages 612 living in Chicago, along with their caretakers, who were followed wherever they moved in the U.S. for up to 7 years. African-American children are exposed in such disproportionate numbers to concentrated disadvantage that white and Latino children cannot be reliably compared, calling into question traditional research strategies assuming common points of overlap in ecological risk. We therefore focus on trajectories of verbal ability among African-American children, extending recently developed counterfactual methods for time-varying causes and outcomes to adjust for a wide range of predictors of selection into and out of neighborhoods. The results indicate that living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood reduces the later verbal ability of black children on average by approx 4 points, a magnitude that rivals missing a year or more of schooling. 10.1073/pnas.0710189104

The logic of indirect speech

Steven Pinker — 2008-01-17T09:51:20-00:00

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (16 January 2008), 0707192105.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence. 10.1073/pnas.0707192105

What is Morphology?

Mark Aronoff — 2007-12-30T01:44:51-00:00

(2007)

Thinking Linguistically: A Scientific Introduction

Maya Honda — 2007-12-30T01:40:51-00:00

(2007)

Word classes/parts of speech

Martin Haspelmath — 2007-12-23T03:02:06-00:00

(2007), pp. 16538-16545.

Deriving verbs in English

RMW Dixon — 2007-12-19T01:38:37-00:00

Language Sciences, Vol. 30, No. 1. (January 2008), pp. 31-52.

Phonological and semantic principles which underlie the derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives in English are examined. There is intricate phonological conditioning for suffix -ize and for suffix -(i)fy; a third major process is zero derivation. These derivational processes cover more than a score of semantic relations (some with overlap between processes). It is shown that whether a noun or adjective forms a derived noun (and, if so, how) depends on a combination of (i) the meaning of the noun or adjective; (ii) its phonological forms; and (iii) its etymology, in particular whether it is of Romance or of Germanic origin. The generalizations arrived at are then applied to prediction of how new verbalizations may be created from proper names.

The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism

Thomas Roeper — 2007-12-18T14:11:24-00:00

(2007)

The iconicity of embodied meaning. Polysemy of spatial prepositions in the cognitive framework

Fieke Van der Gucht — 2007-12-17T01:39:22-00:00

Language Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 6. (November 2007), pp. 733-754.

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the `principled polysemy model' of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of over. Language 77, 724-765; Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2003a. The case of over. In: Brigitte Nerlich, Zazie Todd, Vimala Herman, Clarke, David D., (Eds.), Polysemy. Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 99-159; Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2003b. The Semantics of English Prepositions. Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. After situating the polysemy problem in a historical context (its roots can be traced back at least to Leibniz' discussion of Locke's semantic account of particles), some merits of Tyler and Evans's model are pointed out. Tyler and Evans support a moderate polysemy view by distinguishing more carefully between an item's uses and senses than was previously done in the radical polysemy hypothesis advocated by authors working in the Brugman-Lakoff tradition. The paper then focuses on Tyler and Evans's criteria to postulate a list of 15 distinct senses of a linguistic item, viz. the preposition over. An analysis of the `covering' sense of over, which according to Tyler and Evans should be considered as a distinct sense because it cannot be pragmatically inferred, shows that Tyler and Evans's argument is not conclusive. This observation leads to the question whether the view that over is a polysemous word with a fixed number of distinct senses is valid beyond the cognitive model Tyler and Evans propose. Building on E. Coseriu, we argue, firstly, that the cognitive model in general erroneously conceives of prepositional meanings in terms of lexical rather than instrumental meanings, and that the alleged distinct senses of the preposition over Tyler and Evans postulate are in fact utterance meanings of entire phrases and clauses; this explains the still high number of distinct senses attributed to the prepositional item. Secondly, we attempt to illustrate that the main reason why a battery of senses is postulated in the first place derives from a non-linguistic criterion we term the `iconicity of embodied meaning'. This criterion prompts the linguist to accept as many distinct senses as there are prototypical common sense experiences commonly associated with (or, `reflected by') the use of a specific linguistic item in various instantiations.

Word Classes

Jan Rijkhoff — 2007-12-13T01:35:21-00:00

Language and Linguistics Compass, Vol. 1, No. 6. (2007), pp. 709-726.

Abstract This article 1 provides an overview of recent literature and research on word classes, focusing in particular on typological approaches to word classification. The cross-linguistic classification of word class systems (or parts-of-speech systems) presented in this article is based on statements found in grammatical descriptions of some 50 languages, which together constitute a representative sample of the world's languages. It appears that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between word class systems of individual languages. Whereas some languages employ a parts-of-speech system that includes the categories verb, noun, adjective and adverb, other languages may use only a subset of these four lexical categories. Furthermore, quite a few languages have a major word class whose members cannot be classified in terms of the categories verb-noun-adjective-adverb, because they have properties that are strongly associated with at least two of these four traditional word classes (e.g. adjective and adverb). Finally, this article discusses some of the ways in which word class distinctions interact with other grammatical domains, such as syntax and morphology.