bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cultural differences in academic discourse
Authors: Williams Ian A.
Published: March 2014

This corpus-based study examines first-person verbs in Methods sections in English and Spanish. Quantitative analysis was based on rhetorical Move categories and qualitative analysis on linguistic profiles (collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody). Both the English and Spanish subcorpora had more texts without first-person verbs than with this verb form. However, in the texts with this feature, the frequency was significantly higher in Spanish and the distribution of the rhetorical Moves associated with the first-person forms was also significantly different. The qualitative analysis revealed that in the English texts, the first-person signals the reasoned choice of a non-standard procedure (32 tokens) compared to only seven standard procedures, whereas in the Spanish texts the distribution was even (25 and 26 tokens, respectively). The results support cross-cultural differences in discourse functions that have implications for both translation and academic writing in cross-cultural contexts.
Cognitive verbs in context
Authors: Fetzer Anita , Johansson Marjut
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the frequency, distribution and function of 1st person self-references with the cognitive verbs think and believe, and penser and croire in British English and French argumentative discourse comprising 29 British political interviews (178,712 words) and 26 French political interviews (118,825 words). It employs quantity-based methodology supplemented by insights from a context-dependent qualitative analysis, considering explicitly the co-occurrence of these cognitive verbs with discourse connectives. It argues for these 1st person self-references to be assigned not only a subjectivising function, but also one of expressing intersubjectivity.
In the two sets of data, the parenthetical constructions signify that the status of a particular piece of information encoded in a proposition is open for negotiation. Depending on their co-occurrences with discourse connectives they may boost or attenuate the pragmatic force of the contribution which they qualify.
Mood and modality in finite noun complement clauses
Authors: Kanté Issa
Published: March 2014

The present paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of modality in English and French finite noun complement clauses. On the one hand, we claim on the basis of cross-linguistic and semantic evidence that modality is a common intrinsic feature of nouns that license that/que complement clauses, and, as a consequence, that head nouns are modal stance markers. On the other hand, this paper shows that indicative-subjunctive alternation in that/que noun complement clauses is determined by the modality type of the governing noun. Contrastive analysis of French and English provides evidence to substantiate these claims.
Choice of strategies in realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian
Authors: Usonienė Aurelija , Soliene Audrone
Published: March 2014

The paper deals with the qualitative and quantitative parameters of equivalence between the realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian. The focus of the contrast is on the auxiliary and adverb strategies (van der Auwera et al. 2005) in English (can, could, may, might vs. maybe, perhaps, possibly) as opposed to the corresponding modal verb and adverb/particle strategies in Lithuanian (galėti “can/could/may/might” vs. gal, galgi, galbūt, rasi, lyg ir “maybe/perhaps/possibly”). The purpose of the corpus-based study is to find out which means of expression are preferable in the two languages and what the scope of their meanings is. The paper will also look at the frequency of epistemic and non-epistemic use of the modal expressions in the original and in translation.
Can iterated learning explain the emergence of graphical symbols?
Authors: Garrod Simon , Fay Nicolas , Rogers Shane , Walker Bradley , Swoboda Nik
Published: March 2014

This paper contrasts two influential theoretical accounts of language change and evolution – Iterated Learning and Social Coordination. The contrast is based on an experiment that compares drawings produced with Garrod et al.’s (2007) ‘pictionary’ task with those produced in an Iterated Learning version of the same task. The main finding is that Iterated Learning does not lead to the systematic simplification and increased symbolicity of graphical signs produced in the standard interactive version of the task. A second finding is that Iterated Learning leads to less conceptual and structural alignment between participants than observed for those in the interactive condition. The paper concludes with a comparison of the two accounts in relation to how each promotes signs that are efficient, systematic and learnable.
The evolution of communication
Authors: Scott-Phillips Thomas C.
Published: March 2014

Communication is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon. Evolutionary biology recognises this fact in its definition of communication, in which signals are those actions that cause reactions, and where both action and reaction are designed for that reason. Where only one or the other is designed then the behaviours are classed as either cues or coercion. Since mutually dependent behaviours are unlikely to emerge simultaneously, the symmetry inherent in these definitions gives rise to a prediction that communication will only emerge if cues or coercive behaviours do so first. They will then be co-opted for communication. A range of case studies, from animal signalling, evolutionary robotics, comparative psychology, and evolutionary linguistics are used to test this prediction. The first three are found to be supportive. However in the Embodied Communication Game, a recent experimental approach to the emergence of communication between adult humans, communication emerges even when cues or coerced behaviours are not possible. This suggests that humans are exceptional in this regard. It is argued that the reason for this is the degree to which we are able and compelled to read and interpret the behaviour of others in intentional terms.
The effects of rapidity of fading on communication systems
Authors: Galantucci Bruno , Kroos Christian , Rhodes Theo
Published: March 2014

Although rapidity of fading has been long identified as one of the crucial design features of language, little is known about its effects on the design of communication systems. To investigate such effects, we performed an experiment in which pairs of participants developed novel communication systems using media that had different degrees of rapidity of fading. The results of the experiment suggest that rapidity of fading does not affect the pace with which communication systems emerge or the communicative efficacy of the emerged systems. However, rapidity of fading seems to affect the design of these systems. In particular, communication systems implemented in the more rapidly fading medium exhibited a higher degree of combinatorial reuse of their forms than systems implemented in the medium that faded more slowly. These results suggest that the design of language might be constrained by subtle relations the presence of which can be ascertained only through direct experimental manipulation. Human communication systems crafted today in the laboratory can provide new insights into the design of natural languages.
Investigating how cultural transmission leads to the appearance of design without a designer in human communication systems
Authors: Cornish Hannah
Published: March 2014

Recent work on the emergence and evolution of human communication has focused on getting novel systems to evolve from scratch in the laboratory. Many of these studies have adopted an interactive construction approach, whereby pairs of participants repeatedly interact with one another to gradually develop their own communication system whilst engaged in some shared task. This paper describes four recent studies that take a different approach, showing how adaptive structure can emerge purely as a result of cultural transmission through single chains of learners. By removing elements of interactive communication and focusing only on the way in which language is repeatedly acquired by learners, we hope to gain a better understanding of how useful structural properties of language could have emerged without being intentionally designed or innovated.
A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis
Authors: Hammarström Harald
Published: March 2014

One attempt at explaining why some language families are large (while others are small) is the hypothesis that the families that are now large became large because their ancestral speakers had a technological advantage, most often agriculture. Variants of this idea are referred to as the Language Farming Dispersal Hypothesis. Previously, detailed language family studies have uncovered various supporting examples and counterexamples to this idea. In the present paper I weigh the evidence from ALL attested language families. For each family, I use the number of member languages as a measure of cardinal size, member language coordinates to measure geospatial size and ethnographic evidence to assess subsistence status. This data shows that, although agricultural families tend to be larger in cardinal size, their size is hardly due to the simple presence of farming. If farming were responsible for language family expansions, we would expect a greater east-west geospatial spread of large families than is actually observed. The data, however, is compatible with weaker versions of the farming dispersal hypothesis as well with models where large families acquire farming because of their size, rather than the other way around.
Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates?
Authors: Holman Eric W.
Published: March 2014

The shape of phylogenetic trees of language families is used to test the null hypothesis that languages throughout a family originate and go extinct at constant rates. Trees constructed either by hand or by computer prove to be more unbalanced than predicted, with many languages on some branches and few on others. The observed levels of imbalance are not explainable by errors in the trees or by the population sizes or geographic density of the languages. The results suggest changes in rates of origination or extinction on a time scale shorter than the time depth of currently recognized families.
Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary
Authors: Tadmor Uri , Haspelmath Martin , Taylor Bradley
Published: March 2014

This paper reports on a collaborative quantitative study of loanwords in 41 languages, aimed at identifying meanings and groups of meanings that are borrowing-resistant. We find that nouns are more borrowable than adjectives or verbs, that content words are more borrowable than function words, and that different semantic fields also show different proportions of loanwords. Several issues arise when one tries to establish a list of the most borrowing-resistant meanings: Our data include degrees of likelihood of borrowing, not all meanings have counterparts in all languages, many words are compounds or derivatives and hence almost by definition non-loanwords. We also have data on the age of words. There are thus multiple factors that play a role, and we propose a way of combining the factors to yield a new 100-item list of basic vocabulary, called the Leipzig-Jakarta list.
Homelands of the world’s language families
Authors: Wichmann Søren , Müller André , Velupillai Viveka
Published: March 2014

A systematic, computer-automated tool for narrowing down the homelands of linguistic families is presented and applied to 82 of the world’s larger families. The approach is inspired by the well-known idea that the geographical area of maximal diversity within a language family corresponds to the original homeland. This is implemented in an algorithm which takes a lexicostatistically derived distance measure and a geographical distance measure and computes a lexical diversity measure for each language in the family relative to all the other related languages. The location of the language with the highest diversity measure is heuristically identified with the homeland.
Beyond lexicostatistics
Authors: Heggarty Paul
Published: March 2014

This article surveys various long-standing ambiguities and confusions that continue to dog lexicostatistics and glottochronology. I aim to offer some novel perspectives and clarifications, which also help map out how we might devise new, alternative methods to build upon the good in Swadesh’s troubled legacy. I challenge the recent trend towards honing down Swadesh’s original list to a minimal core. A richer signal on language relationships is to be had not by discarding the data in meanings considered ‘unstable’, but by exploring the revealing patterns that emerge only when those meanings are kept, and contrasted against their ‘core’ counterparts.
A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction
Authors: Tria Francesca , Caglioti Emanuele , Loreto Vittorio , Pagnani Andrea
Published: March 2014

In this paper we introduce a novel stochastic local search algorithm to reconstruct phylogenetic trees. We focus in particular on the reconstruction of language trees based on the comparison of the Swadesh lists of the recently compiled ASJP database. Starting from a generic tree configuration, our scheme stochastically explores the space of possible trees driven by the minimization of a pseudo-functional quantifying the violations of additivity of the distance matrix. As a consequence the resulting tree can be annotated with the values of the violations on each internal branch. The values of the deviations are strongly correlated with the stability of the internal edges; they are measured with a novel bootstrap procedure and displayed on the tree as an additional annotation. As a case study we considered the reconstruction of the Indo-European language tree. The results are quite encouraging, highlighting a potential new avenue to investigate the role of the deviations from additivity and check the reliability and consistency of the reconstructed trees.
Assessing language impairment in aphasia
Authors: Westbury Chris
Published: March 2014

Language is complicated and so, therefore, is language assessment. One complication is that there are many reasons to undertake language assessments, each of which may have different methods and goals. In this article I focus on the specific difficulties faced in aphasia assessment, the assessment of acquired language deficits. As might be expected, the history of aphasia assessment closely mirrors the history of our understanding of the neurological underpinnings of language. Early assessment was based on classical disconnection theories, dating from the 19th century, that conceptualized language as consisting of independent connected modality-specific language centers that could be disconnected by brain damage. Although these models were recognized early on as being too simplistic, aphasia assessment instruments followed the models until quite recently due to the lack of any fully specified alternative language model. It was only in the 1990s, after aphasiology had come increasingly under the influence of experimental psycholinguistics, that attempts were made to create aphasia assessment instruments that did not explicitly follow disconnection models. The most successful of these is the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA; Kay, Coltheart, & Lesser, 1992). These psycholinguistically influenced instruments conceptualize language as a complex multi-dimensional system consisting of many partially independent sub-systems that may be compromised to a greater or lesser degree. Aphasia assessment instruments become longer and more detailed as a reflection of our growing understanding of the complexity of the language system. As they do, the problem of collating and integrating assessment information becomes more intractable. The future of aphasia assessment will require increasing automation to deal with the large amounts of information that must now be synthesized to fully characterize an individual deficit. I discuss recent attempts to computerize aphasia assessment and what benefits they can offer over traditional pencil-and-paper instruments.
Behavioral profiles
Authors: Gries Stefan Th.
Published: March 2014

This paper introduces a fairly recent corpus-based approach to lexical semantics, the Behavioral Profile (BP) approach. After a short review of traditional corpus-based work on lexical semantics and its shortcomings, I explain the logic and methodology of the BP approach and exemplify its application to different lexical relations (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy) in English and Russian with an eye to illustrating how the BP approach allows for the incorporation of different statistical techniques. Finally, I briefly discuss how first experimental approaches validate the BP method and outline its theoretical commitments and motivations.
Chinese as a natural experiment
Authors: Myers James
Published: March 2014

The Chinese lexicon is characterized by its typologically unique one-to-one-to-one mapping of morphemes, syllables, and orthographic characters. This architecture poses practical difficulties for the psycholinguist wanting to study lexical processing in Chinese. More seriously, seen as a natural experiment, Chinese challenges assumptions that processing models traditionally make about the roles of phonemes, morphemes, lemmas, and words in lexical access. It is argued that cross-linguistic variation in lexical processing cannot be accommodated by simply modifying lexical processing models, but instead what is needed is a universal learning model. Suggestions are given for how such a model could be tested empirically by extending methods already used for testing language-specific lexical processing.
Lexical knowledge without a lexicon?
Authors: Elman Jeffrey L.
Published: March 2014

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words — with primary interest on rules — this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon.
Detecting inherent bias in lexical decision experiments with the LD1NN algorithm
Authors: Keuleers Emmanuel , Brysbaert Marc
Published: March 2014

A basic assumption of the lexical decision task is that a correct response to a word requires access to a corresponding mental representation of that word. However, systematic patterns of similarities and differences between words and nonwords can lead to an inherent bias for a particular response to a given stimulus. In this paper we introduce LD1NN, a simple algorithm based on one-nearest-neighbor classification that predicts the probability of a word response for each stimulus in an experiment by looking at the word/nonword probabilities of the most similar previously presented stimuli. Then, we apply LD1NN to the task of detecting differences between a set of words and different sets of matched nonwords. Finally, we show that the LD1NN word response probabilities are predictive of response times in three large lexical decision studies and that predicted biases for and against word responses corresponds with respectively faster and slower responses to words in the three studies.
Eye movements and morphological processing in reading
Authors: Bertram Raymond
Published: March 2014

In this article, I will give an overview of eye tracking studies on morphological processing since 2005 and a few earlier studies. An earlier survey article of Pollatsek and Hyönä (2006) covers almost all studies until then, but a number of interesting articles have been left undiscussed or were published after 2005. Before that, I will discuss (a) the advantages of studying morphological processing by means of eye tracking; (b) methodological issues related to eye movement experiments on morphological processing; (c) the dependent measures one can extract from the eye movement record and how they can be used in assessing the time course of morphological processing; (d) the boundary paradigm that has been used in morphological processing studies. I will argue that eye tracking should be used more often in morphological processing research, since it allows for studying morphologically complex words in a natural way and at the same time its rich data output allows for deeper levels of analyses than some other methods do.
The EEG/ERP technologies in linguistic research
Authors: Stemmer Brigitte , Connolly John F.
Published: March 2014

The field of neuroimaging has experienced a tremendous boom due to technological advances in the last ten years and this is also reflected in the electroencephalography / event-related potentials (EEG/ERP) method. This contribution provides an overview of the main EEG/ERP hardware systems and software development currently on the market and the benefits of such technology for the study of language issues. We discuss the “added-value” such technology brings to the research of language and the possibilities of combining various neuroimaging techniques with emphasis on the integration of EEG/ERP and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our contribution ends with a look at what we think may be the methodologies that drive the field forward in the not too distant future.
Brain imaging and conceptions of the lexicon
Authors: Meltzer Jed A.
Published: March 2014

Neuroimaging plays an increasingly important role in the investigation of all aspects of human cognition, including language. Historically, experimental psychology and neuroimaging relied on very different techniques, as neuroimaging studies required comparisons between different tasks rather than manipulation of conditions within a single task, as is standard in behavioural experiments. However, methodology has advanced in the past decade such that many classic behavioural paradigms can now be employed in studies that measure brain activity. We review the technical foundations of conducting studies on single-trial brain responses, using event-related fMRI and electrophysiological recordings. We focus in particular on studies of picture naming, illustrating how the same techniques that were originally used to define temporal processing stages in reaction time studies can now be applied to brain imaging studies to reveal the neural localization of those stages.
Complex embeddings in free speech production among late Turkish-Dutch bilinguals
Authors: Yılmaz Gülsen
Published: March 2014

This study investigates potential changes or simplifications in the L1 grammar of late Turkish-Dutch bilinguals in a migrant setting and examines the non-linguistic factors that might have played a role in this process. In our analyses, the bilingual group’s production of embedded sentences in spontaneous speech was compared to that of a monolingual reference group. Based on previous frameworks, complex embeddings were ranked according to their morphological complexity, and it was investigated to what extent a change in preferential patterns (if any) could be explained by linguistic and socio-cultural preferences and demographic characteristics of the bilingual group. Statistical analyses revealed a slight tendency to underuse the most complex types of embeddings by the bilingual group, while their performance did not differ from the monolingual group for any of the other embedding types. Where a difference in performance was observed, the level of education turned out to be the only parameter that influenced the outcome, while language use patterns, age of immigration, length of residence or cultural orientations did not have any impact.
Optionality in bilingual native grammars
Authors: Perpiñán Silvia
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the vulnerability of mature native grammars at the interfaces in adult Spanish speakers who have been residing in the US for a mean period of five years but continue to use their L1 on a daily basis. Participants were tested on production and comprehension of subject-verb inversion on two wh-constructions: matrix questions and relative clauses. The crucial distinction between inversion in these two types of constructions is that in relative clauses it is regulated by extra-syntactic conditions such as pragmatic and/or phonological considerations, while inversion in matrix questions is syntactically obligatory. Results showed that pragmatic/phonological inversion is affected by language attrition in the bilingual speakers, whereas purely syntactic inversion remains intact. However, no optionality was found in the comprehension task and no differences in reaction times were attested between monolingual and bilingual speakers.
Thematising multilingualism in the media
Authors: Kelly-Holmes Helen , Milani Tommaso M.
Published: March 2014

The focus of this volume is on the opportunities presented and challenges posed by the thematisation of multilingualism in the media. A number of case studies from a variety of linguistic, media, political, social, economic and educational contexts are presented, with the objective of addressing the challenges and opportunities that arise when multilingualism becomes thematised. In this introduction, we would like to address two main theoretical and methodological issues: (1) what we mean by multilingualism; and, (2) what we mean by thematising.
Media representations of multilingual Luxembourg
Authors: Horner Kristine
Published: March 2014

Following Ruiz’s discussion of orientations in language planning, distinguishing between language as right, resource and problem, this chapter unpacks the ways in which related discourses are circulated in the Luxembourgish print media. Particular attention is paid to how these discourses are interwoven with debates on education and citizenship and how they draw on deeply entrenched language ideological beliefs about language and society, e.g. that “valuable” forms of individual multilingualism are a desirable goal, whereas linguistic heterogeneity constitutes a problem. Moreover, the analysis shows that the texts thematizing multilingualism are bound up with a discourse of rights and duties, and that right and duty, as well as problem and resource, need to be conceptualized as two intersecting continua informing language ideological debates.
Sex, lies and thematising Irish
Authors: Kelly-Holmes Helen
Published: March 2014

Thematising Irish in the media reflects the complex and contradictory sociolinguistic and language-ideological situation in Ireland. This chapter explores some of that complexity by investigating a thread on an online discussion forum on the subject of the first ever party leaders’ debate in Irish that took place during the 2011 general election in Ireland. In the discussion thread, three particular discourses emerge: a “discourse of truth” about Irish as lacking both authority as a national language and authenticity as a minority language of a recognizable ethnic group; a discourse of “them and us”; involving a differentiation between “Irish speakers” and “non-Irish speakers”, largely based on notions of competence; and, finally, a newly emerging discourse of “sexy Irish”, which signals a commodification of Irish speakers as young, beautiful and mediatisable. The features of the forum and the online, real-time evolution of the discussion thread impact in a number of ways upon these discourses and ideologies. However, despite the possibilities afforded by the forum, which are utilized by posters for performing Irish in different ways, these everyday practices are effectively erased and invalidated by the prevailing discourses, which rely strongly on the notion of bilingualism as parallel and discrete monolingualisms.
Sonority, gender and the impact of suffix predictability on the acquisition of German noun plurals
Authors: Laaha Sabine
Published: March 2014

The acquisition of German noun plurals has been the topic of many studies and of much controversy. This study presents a new method of assessing distributional properties of plural suffix application in German in which the predictability of a given suffix (-s, -(e)n, -e, -er or zero) is calculated according to sonority/gender distributions in actual language use, in our case, in child-directed speech. The relevance of suffix predictability is tested in 140 Viennese children from the age of three to nine years by means of a plural elicitation task. Results show that suffix predictability has an impact on children’s correct and erroneous production of plural suffixes. The results are compatible with a usage-based variant of the single-route view which emphasizes speakers’ preference for local generalizations and the role of neighbourhood density in generalization.
The impact of typological factors in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition
Authors: Harr Anne-Katharina , Engemann Helen
Published: March 2014

The present study compares (1) monolingual English vs. French adults and children and (2) simultaneous French-English bilingual children who describe caused motion events. The results concerning L1 speakers showed developmental progressions in both languages, e.g. utterance complexity increases with age. However, response patterns differed considerably across languages in that responses were denser and more compact in English than in French. The results concerning bilingual children showed unidirectional crosslinguistic interactions. Responses elicited in English paralleled monolingual developmental patterns, whereas bilinguals’ French productions differed from those of monolingual French peers. The findings suggest that bilingual children transfer lexicalisation patterns from one of their languages to the other when the former provides more transparent means of achieving high semantic density.
Developmental perspectives on the expression of motion in speech and gesture
Authors: Hickmann Maya , Hendriks Henriëtte , Gullberg Marianne
Published: March 2014

Recent research shows that adult speakers of verb- vs. satellite-framed languages (Talmy, 2000) express motion events in language-specific ways in speech (Slobin 1996, 2004) and co-verbal gestures (Duncan 2005; Kita & Özyurek 2003; McNeill 1992). Although such findings suggest cross-linguistic differences in the expression of events, little is still known about their implications for first language acquisition. This paper examines how French and English adults and children (ages four and six) express Path and Manner in speech and gesture when describing voluntary motion presented in animated cartoons. The results show that English adults conflate Manner+Path in speech more often than French adults who frequently talk about Path only. Both groups gesture mainly about Path only, but English adults also conflate Manner+Path into single gestures, whereas French adults never do so. Children in both languages are predominantly adult-like in speech and gesture from age four on, but also display developmental progressions with increasing age. Finally, speech and gestures are predominantly co-expressive in both language groups and at all ages. When modalities differ, English adults typically provide less information in gesture (Path) than in speech (Manner+Path; ‘Manner modulation’ phenomenon), whereas French adults express complementary information in speech (Manner) and gesture (Path). The discussion highlights theoretical implications of such bi-modal analyses for acquisition and gesture studies
Uh and Um as sociolinguistic markers in British English
Authors: Tottie Gunnel
Published: March 2014

This study is based on the British National Corpus (BNC) and also takes data from the London-Lund Corpus (LLC) into account. It shows that the so-called filled pauses er/uh and erm/um are sociolinguistic markers that differentiate between registers of English and along gender, age and socio-economic class. Men, older people and educated speakers use more fillers than women, younger speakers and less educated speakers. Nasalization is used more often by women, younger speakers and more educated speakers. These sociolinguistic factors can probably partly explain the fact that the use of fillers is higher in the LLC and the context-governed sample of the BNC than in the demographic sample of the BNC. It is argued that a more positive view should be taken of fillers as planning signals, or planners, and that their functions should be submitted to careful discourse analytic study. Their recognition as words will facilitate such an undertaking.
Windows on the mind
Authors: Rühlemann Christoph , Bagoutdinov Andrej , O'Donnell Matthew Brook
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates four different types of pauses in conversational narrative: the filled pauses er and erm, and short and long silent pauses. The study is based on the Narrative Corpus (NC), a recently created corpus of everyday narratives. The texts, which include both the narrative and some context, have been annotated for important textual components. The current analysis reveals that pauses are more frequent in conversational narrative than in general conversation. We suggest three factors that account for this high frequency: (i) the need for narrators, in the opening utterance of the story, to provide specific information to orient listeners to the situation in which the events unfolded, (ii) the need to coordinate narrative clauses to match the story events, and (iii) the preference of narrators to present speech, thought, emotion and gesture using direct-mode discourse presentation, which is more ‘dramatic’ but also more costly in terms of reference resolution.
Well I’m not sure I think… The use of well by non-native speakers
Authors: Aijmer Karin
Published: March 2014

Pragmatic markers are an important part of the grammar of conversation and not simply markers of disfluency. They have a number of functions that help the speaker to organize the conversation and to express feelings and attitudes. Advanced EFL learners use frequent pragmatic markers such as well. However their use of well diverges from the native speaker norm. The present study uses data from the Swedish component of the LINDSEI corpus and its native speaker counterpart (LOCNEC) to examine similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers. The overall picture is that Swedish learners overuse well, although there are considerable individual differences. Thus learners use well above all as a fluency device to cope with speech management problems but underuse it for attitudinal purposes. Pragmatic markers cannot be taught in the same way as other lexical items but it is important to discuss how and where they are used.
Negation in Turkish Sign Language
Authors: Gökgöz Kadir
Published: March 2014

This paper presents a detailed description of manual and nonmanual markers (NMMs) in negative sentences in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). It has been argued that TİD has a manual dominant pattern for negation with a backward head tilt being the major NMM in negative sentences. By contrast, in this paper I argue that, when it comes to negation, TİD is not a strictly manual dominant language. I will consider spreading of NMMs such as headshake, brow-lowering, and brow-raising and argue that these spreading NMMs play a syntactic role in TİD negative sentences. They mark the syntactic domain of negation, either through c-command, a spec-head-relation or both. In addition, I offer a generative analysis of the syntax of negation in TİD based on the syntactic background provided for TİD and the distributional patterns of NMMs.
Eye gaze and verb agreement in German Sign Language
Authors: Hosemann Jana
Published: March 2014

Eye gaze as a nonmanual component of sign languages has not yet been investigated in much detail. The idea that eye gaze may function as an agreement marker was brought forward by Bahan (1996) and Neidle et al. (2000), who argued that eye gaze is an independent agreement marker occurring with all three verb types (plain verbs, spatial verbs, and agreeing verbs) in American Sign Language (ASL). Thompson et al. (2006) conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the interdependency between eye gaze and ASL verb agreement in depth. Their results indicate that eye gaze in ASL functions as an agreement marker only when accompanying manual agreement, marking the object in agreeing verbs and the locative argument in spatial verbs. They conclude that eye gaze is part of an agreement circumfix. Subsequently, I conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the correlation of eye gaze and manual agreement for verbs in German Sign Language (DGS). The results differ from Thompson et al.’s, since eye gaze with agreeing verbs in the DGS data did not occur as systematically as in ASL. Nevertheless, an analysis of verb duration and the spreading of a correlating eye gaze suggests that there is a dependency relation between eye gaze and manual agreement.
Mouth gestures in British Sign Language
Authors: Lewin Donna , Schembri Adam C.
Published: March 2014

This article investigates the claim that tongue protrusion (‘th’) acts as a nonmanual adverbial morpheme in British Sign Language (BSL) (Brennan 1992; Sutton-Spence & Woll 1999) drawing on narrative data produced by two deaf native signers as part of the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) corpus. Data from ten BSL narratives have been analysed to observe the frequency and form of tongue protrusion. The results from this preliminary investigation indicate tongue protrusion occurs as part of the phonological formation of lexical signs (i.e., ‘echo phonology’, see Woll 2001), as well as a separate meaningful unit that co-occurs (sometimes as part of constructed action) with classifier constructions and lexical verb signs. In the latter cases, the results suggest ‘th’ sometimes appears to function as an adverbial morpheme in BSL, but with a greater variety of meanings than previously suggested in the BSL literature. One use of the adverbial appears similar to a nonmanual signal in American Sign Language described by Liddell (1980), although the form of the mouth gesture in our BSL data differs from what is reported in Liddell’s work. Thus, these findings suggest the mouth gesture ‘th’ in BSL has a broad range of functions. Some uses of tongue protrusion, however, remain difficult to categorise and further research with a larger dataset is needed.
Nonmanual markings for topic constructions in Hong Kong Sign Language
Authors: Sze Felix
Published: March 2014

Across sign languages, topic constructions are marked by nonmanual features such as a brow raise and head tilt. This study investigates whether a topic constituent is marked nonmanually in Hong Kong Sign Language. Spontaneous and elicited data show that the majority of ‘scene-setting’ topics, which provide a temporal, spatial or individual framework for the proposition in the sentence, are accompanied with a brow raise and a specific head/body position different from the rest of the sentence. In contrast, ‘aboutness’ topics that represent what a sentence is about are neither marked by nonmanuals consistently nor separated intonationally from the rest of the sentence. Grammatical objects fronted to the sentence-initial position are not marked nonmanually, either. The findings suggest that there are cross-linguistic differences with respect to the functions of nonmanuals in the information structuring of sign languages.
Nonmanuals, semantic operators, domain marking, and the solution to two outstanding puzzles in ASL
Authors: Wilbur Ronnie B.
Published: March 2014

This paper provides an analysis of certain nonmanuals from a semantic perspective with respect to the different types of semantic operators they are associated with. The categories of operators include simple/monadic and tripartite/dyadic. This semantic analysis will explain different phonological spreading among upper face/head nonmanuals: negative headshake, brow lowering, and structurally varied use of brow raise. Negative headshake and [+wh]-question brow lowering spread over their c-command domain. However, brow raise does not spread over its c-command domain, and its spreading domain is harder to characterize. The operator analysis provides a coherent explanation for the spreading domain. This distinction underlies a new analysis of the derived sign understand′, and helps resolve two puzzling issues related to its use: (1) why it has brow raise; and (2) what position it occupies in CP. This solution offers additional evidence in support of the claim that ASL has the spec,CP on the left.
Linguistics as structure in computer animation
Authors: Wolfe Rosalee , Cook Peter , McDonald John C. , Schnepp Jerry
Published: March 2014

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but well-tolerated by members of the Deaf community. Unfortunately, animation poses several challenges stemming from the necessity of grappling with massive amounts of data. However, the linguistics of ASL may aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing animation data. An exploration of the linguistic and extralinguistic behavior of the brows from an animator’s viewpoint yields a new approach for synthesizing nonmanuals that differs from the conventional animation of anatomy and instead offers a different approach for animating the effects of interacting levels of linguistic function. Results of formal testing with Deaf users have indicated that this is a promising approach.
On fictional turns, fictionalizing twists and the invention of the Americas
Authors: Valdeón Roberto A.
Published: March 2014

In his 2008 book, Translation and Identity in the Americas, Edwin Gentzler proposed a “fictional turn” to refer to translation in connection with the construction of identity in the Americas, a highly positive view of the role played by this activity since the arrival of the Europeans. This paper proposes a “fictionalizing twist,” that is, a complementary approach that would attest to the less positive use of translation in the relation between Europe and the Americas on the one hand, and among European nations on the other. Thus, I examine how translation and Translation Studies have contributed to creating certain negative images of translators and nations, a tendency that can still be traced nowadays. First, I discuss the views on the indigenous interpreter Malinche and her part in the conquest of Mexico. Then I move on to examine the ideological manipulation of texts used to promote antagonistic national identities within the European context at the time. Finally, it is argued that both the fictional turn and the fictionalizing twist need to be considered as an integral part of the identity-construction process in the Americas and in Europe.
Prosody in spontaneous humor
Authors: Flamson Thomas , Bryant Gregory A. , Barrett H. Clark
Published: March 2014

The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portuguese. Our analyses focused on humorous utterances identified by the subsequent presence of laughter. Acoustic features of these utterances were compared to non-humorous utterances by the same speakers of similar length and immediately preceding them to look for prosodic contrasts. This corpus provided a unique opportunity for examining the way people mark their humorous productions in a non-humorous environment. Contrary to the notion that speakers must mark their production of humor in order to facilitate audience understanding, no significant marking of a joking “frame” was detected across a range of acoustic dimensions. The only consistent difference — that the set-up and punch line segments were louder than baseline speech before it — does not well support a marking hypothesis and more likely reflects speaker adjustments to the acoustic conditions of the meeting hall. We present these data from the perspective of the encryption theory of humor that predicts speakers will not generally mark spontaneous, conversational humor in most contexts.
Formulaic jokes in interaction
Authors: Bird Christy
Published: March 2014

While both humor and prosody in interaction have received scholarly attention in recent years, the prosody of humor has not been extensively explored. This study begins to fill this gap by investigating whether prosodic cues can be identified for riddles told in interaction, focusing on wh-questions in riddles versus ordinary conversation. The analysis demonstrates that in comparison to conversational wh-questions, riddles have less pitch variation both within the utterance and at the syllable level. It is argued that riddles do not contain such wide pitch excursions because they do not require contextual disambiguation. While this study provides no evidence that riddles must be prosodically packaged in a specific way, the analysis suggests that the pitch of riddles is constrained due to interactional context. This constrained pitch is argued to work in conjunction with the formulaic syntax and content of riddle questions to signal to hearers that a joke is being told.
Rich pitch
Authors: Wennerstrom Ann
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that intonation contributes to the humorous meaning of a certain class of jokes. Examples of both canned and spontaneous jokes show that two intonation patterns, the intonation of contrast, or “L+H* pitch accent”, and the intonation of given information, or “deaccent”, can contribute to a humorous effect. Both of these patterns act as cohesive devises in discourse: they trigger a mental search in the mind of a hearer for a cohesive tie that may not be obvious from the lexicogrammatical structure alone. A punch line effect is created if this search yields an unexpected incongruity between the hearer’s initial mental model of the joke discourse and a humorous alternative. The hearer must shift his “script” (Raskin 1984) of the discourse in an unexpected way. To the extent that intonation facilitates processing by directing attention to particular elements in the information structure of the discourse (Chafe 1994), the processing of jokes depends in part on their intonation. The implications of this premise for the processing of humorous texts will be discussed for the two intonation patterns in question. It is argued that intonation analysis can lead to a broader understanding of cognitive processes and structures.