bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nativization of English in India and its effect on multilingualism
Authors: Annamalai E.
Published: September 2007

Multilingualism is defined by the functional relationship between languages. The relationship of English with Indian languages is legitimized by its nativization. English has been nativized in grammar, semantics and pragmatics acquiring the features of Indian languages, as well documented in sociolinguistic literature. It is also adopted as a tool in native politics by some non-Hindi speaking communities to keep the largest Indian language — Hindi — from becoming the sole official language of the Union and by the linguistic minorities to curtail the dominance of the majority language in the states. The oppressed social groups want to appropriate English to serve them in their battle against upper castes, who have come to control the major Indian languages and the benefits from them. While becoming a powerful cousin to help the disadvantaged, English has simultaneously acquired a native elite cutting across regions and castes, and has spread from cerebral domains to expressive domains, which have been exclusive to Indian languages, in the name of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Such extended functions of English have a profound effect on the nature of multilingualism in India.
Media dialogical networks and political argumentation
Authors: Leudar Ivan , Nekvapil Jiří
Published: September 2007

In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research ondialogical networksin media (Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 2002a, 2002b, Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil 2003, Nekvapil and Leudar in press). We outline the concept, provide an example of analysis with that concept, and summarize constitutive properties of these networks. The analysis uses materials from both Czech and British newspaper articles and television debates, all of which relate to politically sensitive events. The Czech materials in particular concern inter-ethnic problems which were acute between 1992–1995, first in the now dissolved Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic.
Bush’s and Gore’s language and gestures in the 2000 US presidential debates
Authors: Cienki Alan
Published: September 2007

Lakoff (1996) analyzes American political positions in terms of two different sets of conceptual metaphors: the right wing ‘Strict Father’ (SF) model and the left wing ‘Nurturant Parent’ (NP) model. The current study is an empirical test of the degree to which these models were manifested in the televised debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore before the 2000 US presidential elections. While the results show little metaphorical language which would directly support the proposed models, many expressions were found which follow from the models as logical entailments. An analysis of both speakers’ metaphoric gestures shows Bush expressing the SF model largely regardless of his use of SF or NP language, and Gore using gesture more for discourse structuring purposes. This study suggests that differences in the nature of the metaphors themselves in the two models help make the SF model easier to present as a coherent framework than the NP model.
The metaphors of globalization and trade
Authors: Ghafele Roya
Published: September 2007

This research project examined the metaphors of Globalization and trade in the context of current asymmetries prevailing between high- and low-income countries. As a theoretical underpinning we used historical discourse analysis which views language as a social activity through which humans conceive and understand the reality they live in. Metaphors in particular provide speakers with an inventory of comparisons and pictures. Metaphors offer the discourse its down-to-earth shading and help in this way to secure one specific perspective on reality. How this is being done in the WTO system is demonstrated in the empirical part of the article. Metaphors on Globalization and trade were extracted from face-to-face interviews with WTO staff and trade diplomats of low-income African countries. These metaphors were analyzed with respect to their force in making trade ‘speakable’, and by doing so providing the one particular view on Globalization that hardly leaves any space for alternative considerations.
The articulation of nation and politics in the Scottish press
Authors: Higgins Michael
Published: September 2007

This article explores the political use of discourses of nation by analysing the use of location formulation across a selection of Scottish newspapers. The article looks at a sample of the election coverage of six Scottish titles and conducts a corpus analysis to set out the patterns in their use of named locales. It argues that references to nation both come in a variety of forms and are driven by the constitutional disputes around the position of Scotland relative to the United Kingdom. In particular, the article finds that the newspapers engage in different rhetorical strategies that emphasise the Scottish dimension of the election, its British dimension, or a negotiated position between the two. The article therefore seeks to highlight the discursive role that the lexical expression of nation and nationhood might have in the articulation between nation and politics, and suggests that in the Scottish case the formulation of nation is employed in the reproduction of competing, constitutionally based political discourses.
The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq
Authors: Graham Philip , Luke Allan
Published: September 2007

Beginning from recent critical work on globalisation, many critical scholars have extended the analytic vocabulary of ‘advanced’, ‘fast’ and ‘postmodern’ capitalism to explain the geopolitics of the Iraq War. This article offers a counterclaim: that current geopolitical economy can be more usefully characterised as a form of neofeudal corporatism. Using examples drawn from a 300,000 word corpus of public utterances by three political leaders — George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard — we identify and explicate defining characteristics of this system and how they are manifest in political language about the invasion of Iraq.
The rhetoric of work flexibility
Authors: Manuti Amelia
Published: September 2007

This article deals with the discursive construction of work flexibility in Italy, through the analysis of the integral Italian White Paper on Occupation and of a corpus of 55 Editorials which discuss this topic in the pages of a popular Italian economic newspaper. Evident similarities have been registered between them as both texts are actually socio-political texts aimed at constructing and conveying a specific representation of work flexibility, thus proposing and supporting the reformation of the Italian labour market. Any difference has been discussed by making reference to the different kind of audience that the texts address: the expert audience of the Italian government for the White Paper and the more heterogeneous audience of mass communication for the editorials.
The discursive representation of masculinity in the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ)
Authors: Geden Oliver
Published: September 2007

Organizations of the extreme right are clearly dominated by men, much more than parties of the political mainstream. But instead of analyzing the specific attractiveness of right-wing extremism for men, gender sensible research in this field has mainly focused on women. This explorative study will reconstruct discourses of masculinity within the Freedom Party of Austria, which is part of the national government since 2000. The analysis of two of the party’s newspapers and of group discussions conducted with young party activists will show the party’s willingness to seize on the insecurities that men experience in the ongoing transformation of gender relations. We can find a general orientation towards a traditional concept of gender roles, but the ways of developing and distributing this knowledge differ widely, depending on the specific conditions in the different political arenas in which the newspapers and the activists are involved.
The institutional provision for silence
Authors: McKenzie Kevin
Published: September 2007

This paper explores how what is both appropriate to and excluded from consideration in a given episode of talk involving question-and-answers between a speaker and audience is the outcome of complex negotiation. We consider the details of such collaborative work in talk at a press conference with the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in discussion concerning his own and other countries’ military involvement in the Middle East. What gets excluded from consideration in the talk is itself established in dialogic interaction where the problematic nature of inferences potentially made relevant to the discussion is highlighted by reporters and brought to account by the Prime Minister. This feature of dialogue is related to recent scholarly debate regarding the place that context of controversy and the implicit availability of meaning should play in an analysis of talk, where what does not get said features as of equal importance as what does get said. We explore how the questions at issue in just such debates get taken up as participant concerns, pursued as a practical order of business in efforts where principal speakers work to foreclose the inferential potential otherwise opened up by audience scrutiny.
Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices
Authors: Ross Fiona
Published: September 2007

The paper considers women’s testimonies before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tracing the complexities of speaking about suffering. A growing literature suggests that violence and horror corrupt language and interrupt its flow. Testimonial practices focused on violence’s recall then occupy unstable grounds. Arguing that testimony is mediated by the subject positions from which women speak and that these are shaped by cultural convention, the paper traces the effects of ‘modes of discomfort’, drawing attention to the faultlines between words and experience when violence is recalled.
Systemic theory of language competition
Authors: Donskoi Vladimir
Published: September 2007

After Robert Phillipson argued in Linguistic Imperialism (1992) that the present spread of English throughout post-colonial societies is a specific form of Western imperialism, a vigorous academic debate ensued. It revolved around several interrelated questions: How do different languages interact in the global arena?; Is such language competition a manifestation of imperialism or of globalisation?; What are the social implications of language growth and of language decline/death?; etc. The present article is a critique of the debate and an attempt to develop a positivist, systemic, macro-level theory of language competition, which would offer a general framework for dealing with the issues in question.
Learning the ‘linguistic habitus’ of a politician
Authors: Boussofara-Omar Naima
Published: September 2007

In this essay, I analyze the changes that were brought to the handwritten draft of the first political address that Ben Ali, the current president of Tunisia (then the newly appointed Prime Minister), delivered on November 7, 1987 across the airwaves, to announce the deposition of President Bourguiba (1956–1987), and to proclaim himself the successor of the deposed ‘old’ and ‘sick’ president. Through the description and linguistic analysis of some excerpts, I demonstrate how the linguistic changes capture the processes whereby the new ‘presidential’ voice and discursive authority are being crafted in front of our eyes and how the speaker is being initiated, linguistically and pragmatically, into how and when to appropriate “the colloquy of other voices” (Farmer 1995: 318), their discourses and words, and how and when to subtly speak their own voice and words while respecting the pragmatics of appropriateness and appropriation, i.e. norms of what can be said, what cannot be stated or acknowledged, and what can be appropriated and how and when it can be appropriated in order to find a balance between competing voices (Bakhtin 1986), words, and linguistic habituses (Bourdieu 1991). By the same token, the analysis explores the intricate interweaving of text and discourse regulation, valuation of forms of speaking and styles of speaking, and political ideology. The analysis of the linguistic changes offers fertile ground to conceptualize ways to bridge the gap between the micro-analysis of linguistic patterns and the macro-processes of social and political factors, knowing that “much of the meaning and hence communicative value that linguistic forms have for their speakers lies in the ‘indexical’ connections between the linguistic signs and the contextual factors of their use” (Kroskrity 2000:7).
Habitual and imperfective in Guyanese Creole
Authors: Sidnell Jack
Published: September 2007

This paper describes variation in the grammar of aspect in Guyanese Creole. In particular, the various grammaticalized strategies for conveying ha-bituality, progressivity and imperfectivity are discussed. The paper contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the function of various preverbal markers and their interrelationships (see Bickerton, 1975; Edwards, 1984; Gibson, 1988; Ja-ganauth, 1994; Rickford, 1987; Winford, 1993a). Choice of preverbal marker is shown to be strongly conditioned by the stativity of the predicate (in the case of habituals). Drawing on the insights of Weinreich (1953), it is suggested that partial congruence between relatively independent grammatical systems encourages recurrent interlingual identifications.
Two Indo-Portuguese Creoles in contrast
Authors: Clements J. Clancy , Koontz-Garboden Andrew J.
Published: September 2007

This paper presents a comparative study of two Indo-Portuguese creoles, Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) and Daman Creole Portuguese (DP). Using recently collected data, the phonology, pronominal systems, TMA markers, syntactic properties, and lexical items of KP and DP are compared and contrasted. The question of the common vs. independent origin of KP and DP is also discussed.
The “basic locative construction” in Gbe languages and Surinamese creoles
Authors: Essegbey James
Published: September 2007

This paper compares the conceptualisation and expression of topological relations in Surinamese creoles with that of Gbe languages (which were part of the substrate) and English (the superstrate). It investigates the components of the Basic Locative Construction (BLC), i.e. the most neutral construction that is used to code topology, and the type of situations for which the BLC is used in the languages. It shows that the BLC in the creole and Gbe languages has a locative phrase which is made up of a noun phrase that expresses the Ground and a spatial element that expresses the Search Domain i.e. the specific part of the Ground where the Figure is located. The locative phrase in the creoles also has a preposition but this does not contribute to its spatial meaning. By contrast, English has a locative phrase which is made up of a preposition that expresses the Relation between the Figure and the Ground, and the Search-Domain information. The paper concludes that the Suriname creoles display a strong substrate influence in this spatial domain. There are some differences, which can be attributed to gradual Dutch influence and generalisation on the part of the creoles.
A word order paradox resolved by copy deletion at PF
Authors: Stjepanović Sandra
Published: September 2007

In this paper I point out a word order paradox in Serbo-Croatian and propose a solution to it. I show that there are data indicating that the subject must move overtly to the highest projection in the split IP, as well as data indicating that it can remain in SpecVP overtly. I argue that the key to resolving the paradox lies in a mechanism of pronunciation of lower copies motivated by PF considerations, similar to the one proposed in Franks (1998) and Bošković (2001, 2002). The mechanism entails that PF has a preference for pronunciation of the highest copy of elements moved in syntax, but that a lower copy can be pronounced in order to avoid a PF violation. I show that in Serbo-Croatian, a PF factor that can affect copy deletion is prosody. The proposed analysis captures extremely free word order of SC as well as discourse effects of scrambling.
On the syntactic expression of pejorative mood
Authors: Grohmann Kleanthes K. , Nevins Andrew
Published: September 2007

The hypothesis of the copy theory of movement forces us to look at mismatches between syntax and LF on the one hand, and syntax and PF on the other in particular ways, often revealing new insights. Through such a lens, we examine the syntactic expression of pejorative mood through echo reduplication, focusing on shm-reduplication in (varieties of predominantly American) English. It is argued that the two elements in a reduplicated structure form a chain of two left-peripheral positions that, due to a distinctness requirement within a Spell-Out unit for the Transfer to PF, cannot be mapped onto linear order. A number of seemingly unrelated facts are derived rather naturally: (i) English shm-reduplication cannot appear in an argument position; (ii) the two copies involved in shm-reduplication are strictly adjacent; (iii) the phonological phrasing of the two copies is not the intonation of a compound; (iv) the discourse context felicitating shm-reduplication is not out-of-the-blue; (v) no echo reduplication process yields the reverse order (e.g., with the echo reduplicant preceding the base); and (vi) echo reduplication is never the exponent of a Case- or wh-feature. One of the more general issues advanced in this paper is an investigation of the clausal realization of pejorative mood expression, whether expressed through shm-reduplication or by other means.
Microparameters for Norwegian wh-grammars
Authors: Vangsnes Øystein Alexander
Published: September 2007

The absence of V2 in mainclausewh-questions is geographically speaking a very widespread phenomenon in Norwegian, absent only in central eastern and southeastern Norwegian dialects. The characteristics of the phenomenon are nevertheless not uniform across the dialects – three descriptive variables can be discerned: (i) whether or not V2 is required, (ii) whether or not V2 is optional alongside non-V2, and (iii) whether or not non-V2 is allowed with shortwh-elements only. In addition these variables are relative to a 77;subjecthood distinction on thewh-constituent. The phenomenon has received considerable attention by both dialectologists and theoretical syntacticians, and the main purpose of this paper is to systematize the information available in previous works. On the basis of the resulting overview a microparametric account of the variation will be proposed whereby the variation hinges on three microparameters: (i) whether or not interrogative C must be lexicalized, (ii) whether or not shortwh-elements are heads that may lexicalize C, and (iii) whether or not the elementsomthat appears in subjectwh-questions is a head or not. Diachronic speculations concerning the development of the variation will also be raised.
A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity
Authors: Stockall Linnaea , Marantz Alec
Published: September 2007

Against longstanding assumptions in the psycholinguistics literature, we argue for a model of morphological complexity that has all complex words assembled by the grammar from lexical roots and functional morphemes. This assembly occurs even for irregular forms like gave. Morphological relatedness is argued to be an identity relation between repetitions of a single root, distinguishable from semantic and phonological relatedness. Evidence for the model is provided in two MEG priming experiments that measure root activation prior to lexical decision. Both regular and irregular allomorphs of a root are shown to prime the root equally. These results are incompatible both with connectionist models that treat all morphological relatedness as similarity and with dual mechanism models in which only regular forms involve composition.
Activation of segments, not syllables, during phonological encoding in speech production
Authors: Schiller Niels O. , Costa Albert
Published: September 2007

Two experiments are reported that tested whether syllables can be primed in English speech production using a (masked) priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, we presented masked syllable primes for 45 ms. In Experiment 2, primes were presented for either 45 ms or 105 ms under unmasked conditions. In both experiments, we tested three different SOAs, namely −200 ms, 0 ms, and +200 ms. Both under masked and under unmasked conditions phonological priming effects were obtained. However, no evidence for a syllabic priming effect was found. Instead, at SOAs −200 ms and 0 ms, priming effects increased when the segmental overlap between prime and target was increased. This outcome supports a segmental overlap account but contradicts the syllable priming hypothesis. The theoretical implications of the results for current theories of phonological encoding are discussed.
Regular morphologically complex neologisms leave detectable traces in the mental lexicon
Authors: de Vaan Laura , Schreuder Robert , Baayen R. H.
Published: September 2007

This study investigates whether regular morphological complex neologisms leave detectable traces in the mental lexicon. Experiment 1 (subjective frequency estimation) was a validation study for our materials. It revealed that semantic ambiguity led to a greater reduction of the ratings for neologisms compared to existing words. Experiment 2 (visual lexical decision) and Experiment 3 (self-paced reading in connected discourse) made use of long-distance priming. In both experiments, the prime (base or neologism) was followed after 39 intervening trials by the neologism. As revealed by mixed-effect analyses of covariance, the target neologisms elicited shorter processing latencies in the identity priming condition compared to the condition in which the base word had been read previously, indicating an incipient facilitatory frequency effect for the neologism.
Cross-language differences in the use of internal orthographic structure when reading polysyllabic words
Authors: Taft Marcus , Álvarez Carlos J. , Carreiras Manuel
Published: September 2007

The way in which adult readers process the internal orthographic structure of words was examined in two languages that differ in their syllabic structure, English and Spanish. Readers of both languages were presented with polysyllabic words split according to either their pronounced syllable (e.g., cac tus) or their maximized initial unit corresponding to their Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS, e.g., cact us). In agreement with other recent research, it was found that speed of lexical decision to syllabically split words was faster than to BOSS split words for poorer English speakers, while better English speakers were more oriented toward the BOSS. The Spanish data suggested an overall syllable bias regardless of reading ability, though less so for better readers. The contrast between the English and Spanish results is explained in terms of phonological considerations being more important for Spanish readers.
Semantic interference effects in the production of verbs
Authors: Collina Simona , Tabossi Patrizia
Published: September 2007

Picture–word interference studies have consistently shown semantic interference effects with nouns. However, only few contradictory results are available at present with verbs. Two experiments on the production of Italian verbs were conducted in order to clarify the issue. Experiment 1 replicated Roelofs (1993). Experiment 2 showed that semantic interference effects obtain regardless of whether or not the distractor verbs are part of the response set. The results are interpreted as evidence that similar processes occur in the production of nouns and verbs. An explanation of the discrepancies present in the current literature is suggested.
Social-Relational Wisdom: Developmental Diversity in Children’s Written Narratives About Social Conflict
Authors: Daiute Colette , Buteau Ellie , Rawlins Caren
Published: September 2007

Research has focused on perspective-coordination as a central mechanism and achievement of social development. Theorists have raised questions about whether and how cultural, social, and personal experiences affect such a process. Children from historically discriminated backgrounds, for example, have reasons to be especially knowledgeable about the perspectives of others, but whether and how such knowledge complicates normative developmental patterns requires further inquiry. This paper describes “narrative social wisdom,” extending cognitive-developmental notions of perspective-coordination with a discourse analysis of 224 autobiographical and fictional narratives about social conflict by 56 children identifying as African American (15), Latino (16), and White (25) in 3rd and 5th grades in urban schools. Analyses illustrate social wisdom in children’s context-sensitive representations of conflicts, in particular, via dramatic within- and across-group differences in representations of conflict resolution processes. Notable contrasts include the greater complexity of conflict strategies in autobiographical narratives by African American children compared to relatively elaborated conflict strategies in fictional narratives by White children. These and other results illustrate how children juggle resources from sociocultural histories with requirements of mainstream institutions. Conflict representations in fictional narratives were, moreover, consistent with cognitive developmental theory, but, as predicted, autobiographical narratives captured diversities that alter developmental patterns. We discuss the relevance of these results for theory and practice around social relational development and skills.
The hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion
Authors: Josselson Ruthellen
Published: September 2007

Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised. In this paper, his distinction is applied to interpretive stances in narrative research. From the point of view of a hermeneutics of faith, the interpretive effort is to examine the various messages inherent in an interview text, giving “voice” in various ways to the participant(s), while the researcher working from the vantage point of the hermeneutics of suspicion problematizes the participants' narrative and “decodes” meaning beyond the text. Examples are offered of narrative research from each point of view and the implications of working from each stance are explored. Each interpretive position also effects both reflexivity and ethics, and these matters are also discussed. Finally, the implications and possiblities of combining these interpretive positions are considered. (Hermeneutics, Ricoeur, Narrative Analysis, Interpretive Stance, Reflexivity)
A model of narrative circulation
Authors: Hänninen Vilma
Published: September 2007

This article suggests that narrative meaning structures have different modes of existence: the “told”, the “inner” and the “lived” modes. Their definitions and mutual relationships are presented in the form of a schematic model. The inner narrative represents the experiental mode of narrative form. It is an individual's interpretation of his/her life, in which the past events, present situation and future projects are understood using cultural narrative models as resources. It is (partly) made external by told narratives, and validated/revised in that process. The lived narrative, again, refers to the real-life drama, which is shaped in the interplay between situational constraints and the inner narrative that guides one's actions in changing life situations. The article reviews narrative research focusing on the studies and discussions related to the relations between the different modes of narrativity. (Narrative Theory, Narrative Methodology, Inner Narrative, Lived Narrative)
Revisiting the black Jesus
Authors: McVee Mary B.
Published: September 2007

This article proposes that close examination of story retellings, both oral and written, can reveal a narrator's attempts to re-emplot a story in various ways. The retellings presented occurred in the context of a teacher education course where, across the semester, Ellie a white teacher, retold the same story six times. The retellings provided a unique opportunity to add to previous research on retold stories by examining differences and similarities in the six narratives that surfaced issues of culture and race related to teaching. The article also contributes methods of narrative analysis used to analyze and compare narrative structure and evaluations across the retellings. Discourse patterns revealed changes in narrative emplotment and evaluation and in the narrator's positioning of herself, a Euro-American teacher, and others, primarily African American students.
The role of cognition in reacting to argumentative unfairness
Authors: Mischo Christoph
Published: September 2007

When confronted with unfair contributions in an argumentative discourse, participants evaluate these contributions negatively and show emotional and verbal reactions. These reactions may be crucial for further discourse and may depend on cognitive evaluation. In order to investigate the relationship between cognitive, emotional and verbal responses to unfair contributions, such contributions were embedded in argumentational episodes and presented to participants in written, auditory or role play modality. The application of a path model relating indicators of cognitive, emotional and verbal reactions, demonstrated that the intensity of emotional reactions depends on evaluative cognitions (severity of the rule violation and the offender’s perceived awareness), whereas verbal confrontativeness merely depends on the offender’s perceived awareness. The results are discussed with respect to methodological and theoretical issues.
Mental models theory and relevance theory in quantificational reasoning
Authors: Nicolle Steve
Published: September 2007

Human reasoning involving quantified statements is one area in which findings from cognitive psychology and linguistic pragmatics complement each other. I will show how mental models theory provides a promising account of the mechanisms underlying peoples’ performance in three types of reasoning tasks involving quantified premises and conclusions. I will further suggest that relevance theory can help to explain the way in which mental models are employed in the reasoning processes. Conversely, mental models theory suggests that human reasoning typically does not involve deductive rules, which in turn entails a modification to the nature of the deductive processes proposed by relevance theory. The mechanism proposed by mental models theory also helps to clarify the nature of the relevance theory distinction between conceptual and procedural information.
Naturoids
Authors: Negrotti Massimo
Published: September 2007

It is commonplace to maintain that technology will never be able to reproduce a natural object in full detail. Nevertheless, if one tries to rigorously demonstrate the methodological foundation on which such an assumption is based, one finds a number of interesting problems to clarify. This paper attempts to provide a general framework for the understanding of naturoids (man made objects that aim at reproducing some natural object), arguing that every naturoid — and the cognitive model upon which it is based — is the result of a reduction in the complexity of natural objects due to an unavoidable multiple selection process. Naturoids take on their own new complexity, which leads to a transfiguration of the natural exemplars and their performances. On the one hand, this transfiguration poses severe problems for those who try to gain knowledge from naturoids regarding the analogous natural objects. On the other hand, a generalized replacement of natural objects and processes with naturoids will change our way of looking at nature. Therefore, the technology of naturoids could develop through successive generations, each of which would take as exemplars already artificialized objects, giving rise to a new kind of evolution.
On verbal irony, meta-linguistic knowledge and echoic interpretation
Authors: Livnat Zohar
Published: September 2007

The aim of this paper is to examine some actual examples of written verbal irony that contain apposition. Meta-linguistic knowledge about apposition as a syntactic structure is claimed to be involved in the interpretation process of the utterance and especially in recognizing the victim of the irony. This discussion demonstrates the interdependence between apposition, its echoic quality in particular cases, and the victim of the irony. Since syntactic structure may serve as a cue to indirect meaning, pointing at the specific meta-linguistic knowledge used for interpreting ironic utterances may enrich the discussion and enhance the description of the interpretation process. Different types of echoing are demonstrated and examined. The analysis also suggests that untruthfulness may serve mainly as a cue to the presence of irony, rather than as an essential component of this phenomenon.
A non-Russellian treatment of the referential-attributive distinction
Authors: Kuczynski John-Michael
Published: September 2007

Kripke made a good case that “…the phi…” is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that “…the phi…” is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that “…the phi…” is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by “…the phi..”, on the one hand, and what Russell’s theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to implicature. This paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When “…the phi…” is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim.
The father, the son, and the daughter
Authors: Millikan Ruth Garrett
Published: September 2007

The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing” themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations without function or “attitude”.
Keeping track of individuals
Authors: Penco Carlo
Published: September 2007

This paper gives attention to a special point in Brandom’s Making it Explicit. Brandom proposes in MIE a “Fregean” way out of Kripke’s puzzle about belief. In the first part, I analyze two main features of Brandom’s strategy, the definition of anaphoric chains as senses of proper names and the implausibility of the application of a disquotational principle to proper names. In the second part, I discuss (i) the problem of the stability of contents and (ii) the problem of sharing contents. I claim that Brandom’s strong holism leads to irresolvable difficulties with the concept of conceptual content as it emerges from the discussion of Kripke’s puzzle.
Using conversation policies to solve problems of ambiguity in argumentation and artificial intelligence
Authors: Walton Douglas N.
Published: September 2007

This investigation joins recent research on problems with ambiguity in two fields, argumentation and computing. In argumentation, there is a concern with fallacies arising from ambiguity, including equivocation and amphiboly. In computing, the development of agent communication languages is based on conversation policies that make it possible to have information exchanges on the internet, as well as other forms of dialogue like persuasion and negotiation, in which ambiguity is a problem. Because it is not possible to sharply differentiate between problems arising from ambiguity and those arising from vagueness, obscurity and indeterminacy, some study of the latter is included. The semantic web is based on what are called ontologies, or systems of classification of concepts, shown to be useful tools for dealing with these problems.
The poetics of bipolar disorder
Authors: Goss James
Published: September 2007

This article explores the role of affect in the disorganized language and thought that can manifest itself in bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, or as it was previously known, manic-depressive illness, can produce psychotic language and thought in its more extreme forms. During the production of discourse in bipolar disorder, there is a strong correlation between the underlying affective state, i.e., depression, euthymia, hypomania, and mania, and linguistic and cognitive performance. A psycholinguistic model of the dynamics between language, thought, and affect in bipolar disorder based on McNeill’s (1992, 2000) concept of a “Growth Point” is proposed. In particular, the poetic structural phases of discourse production in bipolar disorder, which vary according to the underlying affective state, provide a phenomenological bridge between the psychotic discourse of mania and normal language production.
Thinking in groups
Authors: Gureckis Todd M. , Goldstone Robert L.
Published: September 2007

Is cognition an exclusive property of the individual or can groups have a mind of their own? We explore this question from the perspective of complex adaptive systems. One of the principal insights from this line of work is that rules that govern behavior at one level of analysis (the individual) can cause qualitatively different behavior at higher levels (the group). We review a number of behavioral studies from our lab that demonstrate how groups of people interacting in real-time can self-organize into adaptive, problem-solving group structures. A number of principles are derived concerning the critical features of such “distributed” information processing systems. We suggest that while cognitive science has traditionally focused on the individual, cognitive processes may manifest at many levels including the emergent group-level behavior that results from the interaction of multiple agents and their environment.
Contextualism, minimalism, and situationalism
Authors: Corazza Eros
Published: September 2007

After discussing some difficulties that contextualism and minimalism face, this paper presents a new account of the linguistic exploitation of context, situationalism. Unlike the former accounts, situationalism captures the idea that the main intuitions underlying the debate concern not the identity of propositions expressed but rather how truth-values are situation-dependent. The truth-value of an utterance depends on the situation in which the proposition expressed is evaluated. Hence, like in minimalism, the proposition expressed can be truth-evaluable without being enriched or expanded. Along with contextualism, it is argued that an utterance’s truth-value is context dependent. But, unlike contextualism and minimalism, situationalism embraces a form of relativism in so far as it maintains that semantic content must be evaluated vis-à-vis a given situation and, therefore, that a proposition cannot be said to be true/false eternally.
Towards an interface between Pragma‑Dialectics and Relevance Theory
Authors: Oswald Steve
Published: September 2007

This paper investigates the tentative compatibility of two pragmatic approaches, Pragma-Dialectics (PD) and Relevance Theory (RT). The development of pragmatics historically led to conceptions of communication that supplied answers formal logic approaches had trouble capturing. Within argumentation studies, PD took this pragmatic turn while at the same time pursuing a normative agenda. This gives evidence of an external approach to language (in that argumentation follows norms imposed by the theorist) excluding, though not closing the door to cognitive insights. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the extent to which PD can operate from an internal cognitive perspective — i.e., with explicit ambitions of dealing with cognitive mechanisms of meaning construction and belief fixation.
Is it a promise or a threat?
Authors: Castelfranchi Cristiano , Guerini Marco
Published: September 2007

In this paper we analyse the concepts of Promise (P) and Threat (T) and their inter-relations. Our objective is to study the uses of P and T in persuasion and to shed some light on related concepts such as requesting, ordering, giving prizes, punishing, etc. First, we show that some Ps and Ts are used for persuasion and some are conditional in nature. Using general definitions of P and T (along with the concepts of speech act and social commitment) and a broad notion of persuasion, four different typologies of P and T are introduced. They are distinguished on their conditional/non-conditional dimension and on their influencing/non-influencing aim. We then focus on Conditional Influencing Ps and Ts (CIPs and CITs) used in persuasion. CIPs and CITs are incentive-based influencing actions rooted on dependence and power relations. Moreover, in the CIP and CIT classes the concepts of threat and promise are closely connected: the CIP is always (though often covertly) accompanied by a CIT (“if you do not do your homework I will not take you to the cinema”), and vice versa. Next, we discuss the issue of why CIPs and CITs are credible. We also identify — beyond their surface, rhetorical form — a deeper difference: a ‘substantial’ threat consisting in a choice between two losses compared with a ‘substantial’ promise where the choice is between a gain and a missed-gain. In the article we present a pre-formal model as a basis for a computational treatment of these concepts.
A developmental perspective on Hebrew narrative production in an ultra-Orthodox population
Authors: Tannenbaum Michal , Abugov Netta , Ravid Dorit
Published: September 2007

This article reports a study conducted with a rarely studied minority group, the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, Israel, an extremely religious group that endorses patterns of voluntary segregation. The segregation of the group explored in the present study involves also a linguistic component: this group uses only Yiddish for daily communication and relates to Hebrew, Israel’s official language, mainly as a sacred tongue. The sample consisted of 56 girls, 20 4th graders and 36 7th graders, who were asked to write a story in Hebrew about a good thing that had happened to them. Analysis revealed developmental changes in most of the linguistic measures examined — text length, language productivity measures, and lexicon. In contrast to baseline studies on mainstream L1 groups, Optional Bound Morphology usage also increased with age. Global structure analysis shows that, beside canonic narratives, the girls’ stories also include script-like reports, eventive narratives, and retellings of traditional Hasidic stories. These findings intertwine in interesting ways with the linguistic and socio-cultural findings of the study to reveal how lexical and syntactic categories develop in a second language in the context of narrative text production.
‘Composition of place’, experiential set, and the meditative poem
Authors: Tsur Reuven , Benari Motti
Published: September 2007

Meditative poetry has the ability to reproduce aspects of the meditative experience. In this paper we explore this ability, trying to clarify the phenomenon by pointing out the cognitive processes involved. We focus on Christian Jesuit meditation and pinpoint one of its most effective elements: “the composition of place”. We argue that three main abilities associated with “the composition of place” are responsible for the meditative quality detected in poetic meditative texts: The text’s ability to evoke an orientation process; the text’s ability to support diffuse perception and encourage divergent ways of processing; the text’s ability to generate the mental set required for this experience, the absence of purpose, and to supply the conditions that enable such a mental set to exist over time. We illustrate our theoretical discussion through a close reading of two meditative poetic masterpieces: Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 7, and the Spanish anonymous sonnet “A Cristo Crucificado”.
Attention and the evolution of intentional communication
Authors: Brinck Ingar
Published: September 2007

Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attention-focusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects have focused on each other beforehand (subject-subject attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action.
Something for everyone?
Authors: Truman Michael , Giménez María Jesús Torres
Published: September 2007

In this article we examine letters that three candidates for the office of Presidente of the Junta de Andalucía sent to voters in the final stages of the March 2000 elecciones autonómicas. Although part of the election ephemera, the letters reveal much about the candidates and their policies. Being direct appeals, the letters also focus on hopes, fears, ambitions and preoccupations shared by politicians and the electorate alike. The content of the letters provides some insights into each party’s perceptions of its own strengths and weaknesses while the candidates’ choice of language often reveals how they see their relationship with the electorate, their adversaries and political power. To this end, the skilful use of linguistic devices can often play a more important persuasive role than the content of the message itself, helping to increase the impact of texts such as these.
What did sociolinguistics ever do for language history?
Authors: Penny Ralph
Published: September 2007

This paper discusses the role of sociolinguistics in the development of historical linguistics in general, and then examines the particular importance that sociolinguistics has for the linguistic history of Spain and Spanish America. Particular attention is given to the relevance of accommodation theory (Giles, 1980), dialect contact theory (Trudgill, 1986), and social network theory (Milroy & Milroy, 1985) to an understanding of the way that Spanish developed in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. A series of koineizations took place in Central and Southern Spain, in the Balkans, and in the Americas, resulting from the processes of social and dialect mixing which the Reconquest of Islamic Spain, the expulsion of the Peninsular Jews, and the settlement of the American colonies entailed. The main conclusion from this approach to the history of Spanish is that linguistic history should not be regarded as a linear process, but one which is discontinuous, full of blind alleys, hiccups, and new starts. Sociolinguistics has taught language historians, including those working with Spanish, that it is not true to say that ‘language changes’; what happens is that speakers change language.