Psycholinguistics / Neurolinguistics / Cognitive 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.

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 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.

Natural language allows for efficient communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of qualitative spatial reasoning, mapping motion descriptions in language to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. The book provides an extensive discussion of prior research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, and devotes chapters to the compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion, and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from textual descriptions. The book is written accessibly for a broad scientific audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and those working in fields such as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

This book provides a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and impassioned Greeks — sometimes with fatal results — for over two hundred years. It begins in the late 18th century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and by the different groups'contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The vernacularists — later known as demoticists — sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. The book explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, it traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. The book describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last twenty-five years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and from what it once aspired to be.