Linguistics

This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while this theory is thereby focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such otherwise erroneously individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include mediation at any degree of remove).

Analogy is a central component of language structure, language processing, and language change. This book addresses central questions about the form and acquisition of analogy in grammar. What patterns of structural similarity do speakers select as the basis for analogical extension? What types of items are particularly susceptible or resistant to analogical pressures? At what levels do analogical processes operate and how do processes interact? What formal mechanisms are appropriate for modeling analogy? What analogical processes are evident in language acquisition? Answers to these questions emerge from this book which is a synthesis of typological, experimental, computational, and developmental paradigms.

This is a book about language as a species-typical trait of humans. Linguists customarily describe it as an extremely exceptional capacity, even when compared with the biological endowment of closely related species, and this is the source of the many quarrels that exist around the aim of explaining its evolutionary origins. This book argues that language is not so exceptional after all, as according to the text it is just the human version of a rather common and conservative organic system that they refer to as the Central Computational Complex. The book argues that inter-specific variation of this organ is restricted to (i) accessible memory resources, and (ii) patterns of external connectivity, both being the result of perturbations in the system underlying its development. The book thus offers a fresh perspective on language as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

The Construal of Spatial Meaning: Windows into Conceptual Space explores the construal and expression of various aspects of the SPACE domain. Within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, the research reported probes the interaction between language and cognition. We take linguistics to encompass both verbal and non-verbal communication systems and include metaphorical as well as literal forms of expression. Although the papers focus on the relation between physical and mental space as expressed in human communication, they cover a wide variety of research topics and reflect the multidisciplinary character of the study of space. Through the structure of this book the editors wish to convey to the reader the metaphor that the different approaches in the analysis of SPACE offer windows through which researchers are able to catch glimpses of ‘inner space’. An eye-tracking experiment shows eye movement to reflect spatiality during visualizations of both pictures and spoken scene descriptions. A study of a child shows how the development of linguistic communicative ability may be seen as a transition from pointing in physical space to pointing in mental spaces. A study of drawings based on verbal stimuli suggests that people are engaging in an imaginative embodied simulation of metaphorical motion. In one gesture study on route direction with blocked visibility, participants tend to use the dominant hand for referential aspects and the weak hand for self-orientational functions. In another, through gestures and body postures, a girl with the Patau syndrome extracts and conveys intricate information in communication situations. In yet another gesture study, speakers express lateral (left/right) direction in co-speech gestures when using next to to complement the linguistic spatial unit with unlexicalized locative information. An analysis of the motion situation distinguishes between primary and secondary figure and ground, and subdivides Talmy’s notion of Manner into manner of static existence and dynamic activity and makes Talmy’s telic Path dependent on autonomous resultant state situations. One cross-linguistic study offers experimental support for basic-level verbs of locomotion without making recourse to the loose notion of Manner, while another, in which German and French children describe motion events, supports the view that general cognitive factors and language-specific properties determine children’s construction of the semantics of space when encoding Manner and Path. In a usage-based study of children’s acquisition of Dutch spatial adjectives it is suggested that children, who often use spatial adjectives to express contrast, store specific adjective–noun/object pairings from the input and start by reproducing them with the same communicative function as in the language they hear around them. A corpus-study of Danish directional adverbs shows how the forms can be described and explained as different ways of profiling a dynamic motion event in a basic Path event frame. A construction-grammar analysis of some complex predicate constructions reveals systematic differences between English and Spanish in the organization of the argument structure, and argues that fundamental typological distinctions should be based on the relative importance of constructional and lexical constraints. In a corpus-based study of road, path, way it is shown that both non-metaphorical and metaphorical instances of these terms are closely connected with people’s embodied experiences of travel through space along paths, roads, or ways. The last paper, investigating negation, opens up a window to the ‘inner space’ by suggesting that antonyms are organized into conceptual spaces. ‘Not’ is a degree modifier operating on the configurational construals in space. In combination with bounded antonyms it operates on the boundary and bisects a spatial structure, while with unbounded antonyms it modifies the unbounded scale structure and evokes a range on the scale in space, like ‘fairly’.

This book surveys the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields and offers a new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the conclusions of early generative linguistics: that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is interdisciplinary. The book proposes that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture allows for a reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. The book aims to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, this book offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics.

This book presents Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). Chapter 1 gives an overall picture of the model and places it in the context of contemporary linguistics. Chapter 2 presents the interpersonal level of the grammar, at which the Discourse Act, the central object of FDG, is analysed. Chapter 3 is a systematic account of the representational level, where semantic distinctions are located. Chapter 4 is concerned with the morphosyntactic level and Chapter 5 with the phonological level; these show how FDG treats formal distinctions across languages. The book ends with Chapter 6, an application of the theory to sample Discourse Acts.

The notions of ‘function’, ‘feature’, and ‘functional feature’ are associated with relatively new developments and insights in several areas of cognition. This book brings together different definitions, insights, and research related to defining these notions from such diverse areas as language, perception, categorization, and development. Each of the contributors in this book explicitly defines the notion of ‘function’, ‘feature’, or ‘functional feature’ within their own theoretical framework, presents research in which such a notion plays a pivotal role, and discusses the contribution of functional features in relation to their insights in a particular area of cognition. As such, this book not only presents new developments devoted to defining ‘function’, ‘feature’, and ‘functional feature’ in several sub-disciplines of cognitive science, but also offers a focused account of how these notions operate within the cognitive interface linking language and spatial representation.

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics and pursues the enterprise of the influential Generic Book edited by Gregory Carlson and Jeffry Pelletier, which was published in 1995. Genericity is a key notion in the study of human cognition as it reveals our capacity to organize our perceived reality into classes and to describe regularities. The generic can be expressed at the level of a word or phrase (i.e., the potato in The Irish economy became dependent upon the potato) or an entire sentence (e.g., in John smokes a cigar after dinner, the generic aspect is a property of the expression, rather than any single word or phrase within it). This book gathers new work from senior and young researchers to reconsider the notion of genericity, examining the distinct contributions made by the determiner phrase (e.g., the notions of kind/individual) and the verbal predicate (e.g., the notions of permanency, disposition, ability, habituality, and plurality). Finally, in connection with the whole sentence, the analytic/synthetic distinction is discussed as well as the notion of normality.

This book brings together leading figures to present an overview of different approaches to the formal expression of information structure in language and how it works in human communication. Information structure concerns the ways in which aspects of grammar including semantics, pragmatics, syntax, morphology, prosody, and intonation interact in the communication and reception of information. It is also concerned with the neurolinguistics of the production and cognition of meaning. This book reflects recent research in all central aspects of the subject. It examines the concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters combine theoretical and experimental approaches and include examination of variations of information structure across different languages and within the same language over time.

The fine structure of conversational interaction is of significant interest for wide swathes of the behavioural sciences: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, literary scholars, artificial intelligence researchers must all contend with issues relating to the nature of meaning and its sharing among interlocuters, the possibility of repair — the wide range of corrective actions that occur when ‘trouble’ arises in interaction — and the characterization of coherence in interaction. This book presents the results of attempting to create a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. It develops KoS, one of the most detailed theories of context in conversation, and uses this to analyze a variety of linguistic constructions characteristic of spoken interaction, many of which have not been previously analyzed formally. KoS has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational (e.g., self-repair at the word level) to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. KoS provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. KoS also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. It suggests a new methodological criterion — stronger than traditional compositionality — regulating allowable semantic denotations. All in all, KoS provides a highly detailed theory of relevance, taking in the illocutionary, metacommunicative, metadiscursive, and genre-based components of this complex notion. This book challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that grammar and interaction are intrinsically bound. It argues that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.