bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Motivation, Personality, and Development Within Embedded Social Contexts: An Overview of Self-Determination Theory
Authors: Deci Edward L. , Ryan Richard M.
Published: February 2013

Self-determination theory maintains and has provided empirical support for the proposition that all human beings have fundamental psychological needs to be competent, autonomous, and related to others. Satisfaction of these basic needs facilitates people's autonomous motivation (i.e., acting with a sense of full endorsement and volition), whereas thwarting the needs promotes controlled motivation (i.e., feeling pressured to behave in particular ways) or being amotivated (i.e., lacking intentionality). Satisfying these basic needs and acting autonomously have been consistently shown to be associated with psychological health and effective performance. Social contexts within which people operate, however proximal (e.g., a family or workgroup) or distal (e.g., a cultural value or economic system), affect their need satisfaction and type of motivation, thus affecting their wellness and effectiveness. Social contexts also affect whether people's life goals or aspirations tend to be more intrinsic or more extrinsic, and that in turn affects important life outcomes.
Ego Depletion: Theory and Evidence
Authors: Muraven Mark
Published: February 2013

Self-control all too often fails. Despite people's best intentions and considerable negative outcomes, people often find themselves at the losing end of resisting temptation, combating urges, and changing their behavior. One reason for these failures may be that exerting self-control depletes a limited resource (ego depletion) that is necessary for the success of self-control. Hence, after exerting self-control individuals are less able to resist temptations, fight urges, or stop a behavior, which results in a loss of self-control. This chapter reviews the evidence for this theory in a wide variety of domains and examines what behaviors appear to deplete ego strength and how depletion affects behavior. A comprehensive theory that examines how depletion operates is put forth and this theory is used to examine some factors that might moderate the depletion effect.
Implicit–Explicit Motive Congruence
Authors: Thrash Todd M. , Maruskin Laura A. , Martin Chris C.
Published: February 2013

This chapter reviews the literature on congruence (consistency) between implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) motives. The prevailing wisdom that implicit and explicit motives are uncorrelated is shown to be incorrect. When methodological shortcomings of past research (e.g., unreliability of measurement) are overcome, implicit and explicit motives are positively correlated. Nevertheless, the relation is weak enough that the discrepancy between implicit and explicit motives carries important information about personality congruence. The relation between implicit and explicit motives has been found to vary systematically and meaningfully as a function of substantive moderator variables, such as self-determination and self-monitoring. Motive congruence is predicted distally by satisfaction of basic needs during childhood and proximally by stress among individuals who have difficulty regulating affect. Motive congruence predicts important outcomes, including volitional strength, flow, and well-being. The chapter closes with a discussion of future research directions, such as the distinction between congruence and integration constructs.
Work Motivation: Directing, Energizing, and Maintaining Effort (and Research)
Authors: Grant Adam M. , Shin Jihae
Published: February 2013

This chapter provides an overview of contemporary research on work motivation. We start by identifying the central premises, controversies, and unanswered questions related to five core theoretical perspectives on work motivation: expectancy theory, equity theory, goal-setting theory, job design, and self-determination theory. We then discuss four current topics and new directions: collective motivation and organizing, temporal dynamics, creativity, and the effects of rewards.
The power of culture
Authors: Plotkin Henry
Published: February 2013

Mankind's natural place is in culture, and culture is a part of human biology because it is biology that gives humans the ability to enter into culture. For this reason any contrast or opposition that is made between biology and culture, or between genes and culture, or between evolution and culture, is an expression of a wholly wrong conception of the causal structure of the world. Culture is not an entity whose causal force can be placed in a different physical (or metaphysical) realm from the causal forces exerted by genes, or the concatenation of natural selection pressures that have moulded human evolution. The human capacity for culture is a product of evolution and is as natural as having a bipedal gait or an opposable thumb.
Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
Authors: Laland Kevin N.
Published: February 2013

This article argues that the niche-construction approach is particularly germane to students of human evolution and to researchers using evolutionary methods to interpret human behaviour and society. Reasoning on the basis of niche-construction theory repudiates the suggestion, voiced by some leading evolutionary psychologists, that humans experience an atypically large ‘adaptive lag’, the idea that modern humans experience a gross discordance in their selective environments compared to those to which they are adapted. The niche-construction perspective is consistent with the philosophy and methods of human behavioural ecology, and confirms the potential applicability of behavioural ecological methods to all human societies. The article sketches how the niche-construction perspective brings with it a suite of novel hypotheses and methods of utility to human scientists.
The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
Authors: Panksepp Jaak
Published: February 2013

Most of the complexities in cognition are probably not controlled by detailed genetics, but by the capacity of different species to see the world differently depending upon their perceptual strengths and learning abilities intermixing with the ancient genetic-instinctual tools for living. These cognition-emotion interactions notwithstanding, at their most basic level, core emotions are so ancient that it is scientifically wise to conceptualise them independently of cognition. In their raw form, they are innate tools for living. This article is concerned mainly with those core emotions that are the genetic endowments of the mammalian brain, homologous albeit not identical, in all mammals. It focuses on the core prosocial emotional systems of mammalian brains, at the expense of the higher cognitive functions with which they interact. Seven core emotional systems have been provisionally identified through empirically robust affective neuroscience strategies, such as evocation of coherent emotional responses by localised electrical stimulation of the brain.
The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
Authors: Baron-Cohen Simon
Published: February 2013

This article discusses two cognitive processes, empathising and systemising, in terms of sex differences and the implications of these for evolutionary psychology. It also discusses the theory that assortative mating of two strong systemisers is a cause of autism, a neurodevelopmental condition involving empathy impairment alongside hypersystemising. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Empathy is a skill (or a set of skills). It defines mindreading as the ability to interpret one's own or another agent's actions as driven by mental states. The model in the article shows the ontogenesis of a theory of mind in the first four years of life, and justifies the existence of four components on the basis of developmental competence and neuropsychological dissociation.
The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
Authors: Wyman Emily , Tomasello Michael
Published: February 2013

This article suggests that the ontogenesis of shared intentionality depends on the developmentally primitive phenomenon of ‘joint attention’. This is the ability of the infant to understand that they and other individuals can attend to the same object and each other's attention simultaneously and provides a shared, interpersonal frame in which young infants can share experience with others. This article compares the skills and motivations involved in shared intentionality between humans and chimpanzees. It also emphasises a marked difference in their joint attention abilities. It suggests that this may explain various differences in social-cognitive skills between the two species, and proposes that the phylogenesis of joint attention may account for the evolution of complex forms of cooperation and uniquely human cultural practices.
Sex differences in aggression
Authors: Campbell Anne
Published: February 2013

The sex difference in physical and verbal aggression is one of the most robust, universal, and durable. In the United States, men constitute eighty six percent of all violent offenders. The proportionate involvement of men rises with the seriousness of the offence. Meta-analyses of psychological studies using experimental, observational, and self- or other-report methods also find that men are more verbally and physically aggressive than women and that this difference is greater for physical aggression. The ubiquity of this effect, its early developmental onset, and its consistency with other primate species suggest the utility of an explanation on evolution. This article suggests that the psychological instantiation of the reluctance to directly expose oneself to physical danger is fear. Fear also forms the developmental infrastructure for behavioural inhibition so that females are better able to control the behavioural expression of anger when provoked than are men.
Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
Authors: Shennan Stephen
Published: February 2013

This article demonstrates the role of evolutionary approaches in archaeology by focusing on four different topics that have long been of interest to archaeologists of virtually all theoretical persuasions. It examines how evolutionary theory can be used by presenting specific concrete examples. The four topics concern different but interrelated histories: of foraging adaptations, human populations, social institutions, and patterns in culture. Addressing these topics on the basis of archaeological data from an evolutionary point of view involves making use of several different strands from the range of complementary and sometimes conflicting evolutionary approaches to understanding human behaviour. There is a major distinction within evolutionary approaches to human behaviour between human behavioural ecology and those viewpoints that attach a significant role to culture, in particular, dual-inheritance theory.
Representations and representational specificity in speech perception and spoken word recognition
Authors: Pisoni David B. , Levi Susannah V.
Published: February 2013

This article examines how new approaches—coupled with previous insights—provide a new framework for questions that deal with the nature of phonological and lexical knowledge and representation, processing of stimulus variability, and perceptual learning and adaptation. First, it outlines the traditional view of speech perception and identifies some problems with assuming such a view, in which only abstract representations exist. The article then discusses some new approaches to speech perception that retain detailed information in the representations. It also considers a view which rejects abstraction altogether, but shows that such a view has difficulty dealing with a range of linguistic phenomena. After providing a brief discussion of some new directions in linguistics that encode both detailed information and abstraction, the article concludes by discussing the coupling of speech perception and spoken word recognition.
Statistical and connectionist models of speech perception and word recognition
Authors: Gaskell M. Gareth
Published: February 2013

This article reviews the current impact of connectionism in the area of speech perception and spoken word recognition. A major advance that connectionism provided was to highlight the value and power of statistical models of language processing. Therefore, some types of statistical model—particularly those stressing statistical learning—are reviewed alongside connectionist theories such as interactive activation and competition models, error-driven learning networks, and adaptive resonance theory. The article examines how connectionist models represent speech pre-lexically, and how such prelexical representations might develop and adapt to fit the requirements of the perceptual system. It also looks at the process of word segmentation, again addressing both acquisition issues and the degree to which connectionist models can explain performance in the adult system. Finally, the article considers the process of word recognition, as modeled in terms of lexical competition. Key issues here include whether distributed models can cope with the specific properties that are imposed by the speech medium, such as the drawn-out nature of the input and the consequent requirement to entertain multiple hypothesis (parallel activation) during recognition.
Speech and spelling interaction: the interdependence of visual and auditory word recognition
Authors: Frost Ram , Ziegler Johannes C.
Published: February 2013

A critical feature of interactive networks is the bidirectional flow of activation. In an interactive model, cross-code consistency is crucial. The phonological coherence constraint puts a major emphasis on the correlations between orthographic and phonological subunits of the system. This framework makes a number of intriguing predictions with regard to spelling-to-phonology interactions. For example, it predicts that phonology should routinely be involved in visual word recognition, and that inconsistency in the mapping between orthography and phonology should hurt word recognition. Moreover, the framework predicts that inconsistency should matter not only between spelling and phonology but also between phonology and spelling (“feedback consistency”). This article summarizes the empirical evidence in favor of these predictions, reviews the behavioral data regarding speech and spelling interactions, and discusses the extent to which current computational models of word recognition are able to account for these effects. It also considers the influence of orthography on spoken language, and how print and speech interact online during word recognition.
Bilingual sentence processing
Authors: Hernández Arturo E. , Fernández Eva M. , Aznar-besé Noemí
Published: February 2013

Bilinguals live in two linguistic worlds. Given the different demands of each language, one might think that each system functions independently. However, bilinguals do not behave like two monolingual speaker/listeners housed in a single brain. Instead, the evidence to date suggests that the characteristics of bilingual language processing may appear to be “in between” the individual's two codes. Studies in bilingual sentence processing have focused on phenomena related to how semantic or syntactic representations are built. This article reviews data consistent with the view of interdependence between the two languages of the bilingual, using evidence from the literature on bilingual sentence processing. Studies of both semantic processing and syntactic processing show that bilinguals almost always use a unitary mechanism which accesses two separately represented grammars. The study of bilingual sentence processing can also offer insights into our understanding of human language processing in general, because bilinguals offer opportunities to examine sentence processing effects in within-participant designs, impossible to carry out with monolinguals. In addition to the above, this article explores parsing, the age of language acquisition, and language proficiency.
Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies of sentence processing
Authors: Kutas Marta , Federmeier Kara D.
Published: February 2013

The intact human brain is the only known system that can interpret and respond to various visual and acoustic patterns. Therefore, unlike researchers of other cognitive phenomena, (neuro)psycholinguists cannot avail themselves of invasive techniques in non-human animals to uncover the responsible mechanisms in the large parts of the (human) brain that have been implicated in language processing. Engagement of these different anatomical areas does, however, generate distinct patterns of biological activity (such as ion flow across neural membranes) that can be recorded inside and outside the heads of humans as they quickly, often seamlessly, and without much conscious reflection on the computations and linguistic regularities involved, understand spoken, written, or signed sentences. This article summarizes studies of event-related brain potentials and sentence processing. It discusses electrophysiology, language and the brain, processing language meaning, context effects in meaning processing, non-literal language processing, processing language form, parsing, slow potentials and the closure positive shift, and plasticity and learning.
Sentence-level deficits in aphasia
Authors: Martin Randi C. , Vuong Loan C. , Crowther Jason E.
Published: February 2013

Studies in the 1970s and early 1980s demonstrated impaired sentence comprehension in conjunction with good single word comprehension in some aphasic patients. These findings generated a great deal of excitement among aphasiologists and psycholinguists because they seemed to provide support for linguistic theories that hypothesised a system of rules for specifying grammatical well-formedness which was independent of semantics. A number of findings quickly followed these initial findings which caused problems for interpreting the patient data in terms of a deficit to an independent syntactic processing module. The complications that surfaced have given rise to heated debates concerning the proper interpretation of sentence comprehension deficits—mirroring to some extent the debates in linguistics on generative vs. non-generative grammar and in psycholinguistics on syntax-first vs. constraint-based sentence processing theories. This article summarizes results from case studies on language deficits associated with aphasia. It also reviews the evidence regarding the complementary claim that syntactic comprehension deficits in patients without obvious syntactic difficulties in production could be attributed to a short-term memory deficit.
Speech Production
Authors: Fowler Carol A.
Published: February 2013

A theory of speech production provides an account of the means by which a planned sequence of language forms is implemented as vocal tract activity that gives rise to an audible, intelligible acoustic speech signal. Such an account must address several issues. Two central issues are considered in this article. One issue concerns the nature of language forms that ostensibly compose plans for utterances. Because of their role in making linguistic messages public, a straightforward idea is that language forms are themselves the public behaviors in which members of a language community engage when talking. By most accounts, however, the relation of phonological segments to actions of the vocal tract is not one of identity. Rather, phonological segments are mental categories with featural attributes. Another issue concerns what, at various levels of description, the talker aims to achieve. This article focuses on speech production, and considers language forms and plans for speaking, along with speakers' goals as acoustic targets or vocal tract gestures, the DIVA theory of speech production, the task dynamic model, coarticulation, and prosody.
Statistical learning in infant language development
Authors: Gómez Rebecca
Published: February 2013

Children learn language over such a short span of time and with such seeming ease, that many have assumed they must master language by means of a language-specific device. Artificial languages provide a useful tool for controlling prior learning and for manipulating specific variables of interest. This approach has resulted in a wealth of findings regarding the learning capabilities of children. Infant artificial language learning has become synonymous with statistical learning because of the emphasis in much of the work on learning statistical regularities. However, not all cases of artificial language learning entail learning statistical structure. For instance, some learning requires generalisation of relational patterns. This article explores statistical learning in language development in infants, phonological learning (discrimination of speech sounds, learning phonotactic regularities, phonological generalization), word segmentation, rudiments of syntax, generalization of sequential word order, category-based abstraction, and bootstrapping from prior learning.
Developmental dyslexia
Authors: Snowling Margaret J. , Caravolas Markéta
Published: February 2013

In spite of the complexities of written language systems, the majority of children learn to read easily. However, a minority have difficulty acquiring literacy skills even though they master other tasks well. These children are sometimes described as dyslexic. This article presents current scientific understanding of dyslexia from a developmental perspective. First, it considers the definition of dyslexia in behavioural terms and, with the normal development of literacy as a framework, discusses how its manifestation differs according to the language in which the child is learning to read. The article then examines cognitive explanations of dyslexia and evidence concerning sensory, biological, and environmental factors in its aetiology; behavioural manifestations of dyslexia (dyslexia in English, dyslexia in consistent orthographies, dyslexia in Chinese); theories of dyslexia (cognitive theories, automatization deficit hypothesis, auditory processing impairments, visual processing deficits, speech perception); and reading intervention programs. It concludes by looking at how theoretical advances in the field of dyslexia provide the rationale for effective interventions.
Genetics of language disorders: clinical conditions, phenotypes, and genes
Authors: Rice Mabel L. , Smolík Filip
Published: February 2013

Persons who do not acquire language in the expected ways show variation that can be linked or associated with genetic variations. Just as in ancient times, there is great interest in young children's language abilities as a window onto inherited mechanisms. In the case of language impairments, there are multiple dimensions of possible phenotypes that intertwine language symptoms with more general cognitive and sensory symptoms. This article summarises current investigations of the FOXP2 gene, as a case study of the steps involved in relating language disorders and genes, and progresses toward the molecular level. It also brings in recent investigations of the genetics of reading and speech impairments, and possible overlap with language impairments; describes the outcomes of twin studies, and the ways that phenotype definitions interact with genetic interpretations; and looks at “the first psycholinguistic experiment,” reported by Herodotus and updated to the modern scientific context.
The psycholinguistics of signed and spoken languages: how biology affects processing
Authors: Emmorey Karen
Published: February 2013

Biology-based distinctions between sign and speech can be exploited to discover how the input–output systems of language impact online language processing and affect the neurocognitive underpinnings of language comprehension and production. This article explores which aspects of language processing appear to be universal to all human languages and which are affected by the particular characteristics of audition versus vision, or by the differing constraints on manual versus oral articulation. Neither sign language nor spoken language comes pre-segmented into words and sentences for the perceiver. In contrast to written language, sign and speech are both primary language systems, acquired during infancy and early childhood without formal instruction. This article discusses sign perception and visual processing, phonology in a language without sound, categorical perception in sign language, processing universals and modality effects in the mental lexicon, the time course of sign versus word recognition, tip-of-the-fingers, non-concatenative morphology, the unique role of space for signed languages, and speaking versus signing.
The evolution of language: a comparative perspective
Authors: Fitch W. Tecumseh
Published: February 2013

Understanding how, why, and when language evolved has become the focus of a rapidly growing interdisciplinary research effort, sometimes termed “biolinguistics.” Language does not fossilize, and the fossil record relevant to language evolution is thus exceedingly sparse and provides few dependable indicators about when or why language evolved. Two promising lines of research are an increased understanding of the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying language, and rigorous application of the comparative method. Both approaches seem destined to play a central role in any future science of biolinguistics. A key component of biolinguistics is comparative biology, in particular the explicit use of a broad comparative method. This article explores the evolution of language from a comparative perspective, focusing on the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. It also considers hominin fossil data from Australopithecus to modern Homo, the evolution of speech, and the biology and evolution of language per se.
Introduction
Authors: Malchukov Andrej L. , Spencer Andrew
Published: February 2013

The notion of ‘case’ has played an important role in thinking about grammar since the days of Pāṇini and Aristotle. Nonetheless, the concept of case and its relation to grammatical relations, meaning, and morphological form remains elusive and controversial. This book brings together in synopsis form, recent work on the problems of case, focusing on as many relevant aspects as possible. It features contributions by scholars from a variety of different backgrounds and theoretical persuasions to summarise the way that the notion of case figures in current grammatical theory, and how it relates to other aspects of morphology, syntax, and semantics. The book also contains articles on the types of case systems that languages exhibit and the way that case paradigms are structured, the way case systems develop and decay over time, and the kinds of functions and meanings that are expressed by case systems. In addition, it offers the reader a variety of articles relating the notion of case to other grammatical phenomena such as transitivity, the alignment of grammatical relations, and so on.
Case in GB/Minimalism
Authors: Bobaljik Jonathan David , Wurmbrand Susi
Published: February 2013

Case theory in government-binding/minimalism is about the distribution of noun phrases (NPs), rather than morphological form per se. In this theory, ‘abstract case’ plays a central role in being one of the driving forces of movement, uniting a variety of transformations (passive, raising, unaccusative, etc.), and in regulating alternations between overt and unpronounced subjects in non-finite clauses. In the original presentation of case theory in Chomsky (1980), abstract Case is related to the morphological property case via the hypothesis that the formal features that regulate the syntactic distribution of NPs are the same features that are overtly realised as case morphology in some languages. This article explores case theory in government-binding, case filter, the notion of government, the transition from government-binding to minimalism, and topics in case theory within government-binding/minimalism such as null case, ergativity, and case typology.
Case as a Morphological Phenomenon
Authors: Spencer Andrew
Published: February 2013

In most modern approaches to grammar, the term ‘case’ is systematically ambiguous between ‘(inflected) form of a nominal word’ and ‘property of a noun phrase (determiner phrase)’. In a typical, well-behaved system we find that the lexical head noun of a phrase is, say, ‘in the accusative’ and this means that the phrase itself bears accusative case. However, this simple relationship between morphological case (‘m-case’) and syntactic case (‘s-case’) is often violated. This article deals with the morphological expression of case. First, it discusses different types of morphological case system, and then case morphology and grammatical theory. It also considers case-marked categories other than nouns, focusing on case marking of verbs and cases in Kayardild. After exploring syntagmatic aspects of case marking, the article concludes by summarising some of the problems raised by morphology of case, including ‘core’ vs. ‘non-core’ grammatical functions, case inventories and outliers, ‘case’ marking on pronominal clitics, ‘non-autonomous’ (‘virtual’) cases, segmentation problems, case endings as nouns in Hungarian, and case and morphosyntax.
The Distribution of Case
Authors: Moravcsik Edith A.
Published: February 2013

A case marker is a formal device associated with a noun phrase that signals the grammatical role of that noun phrase. ‘Formal device’ includes segmental morphemes (affixes, clitics, stem modification, suppletion) and suprasegmentals (stress, pitch). Of these, the discussion in this article is restricted to segmental markers: case affixes and adpositions. The aspect of case marking that forms the topic of this article is its distribution. ‘Distribution’ refers to the conditions under which something must or may occur. Describing the distribution of an element within a linguistic structure involves two components: selection (what element occurs with what other elements) and linear order (temporal precedence relations among co-occurring elements). This article considers a hypothesis that excludes one-to-zero relations between case markers and noun phrases with grammatical roles. Generally, case markers have unique positions relative to the noun phrase. However, there are departures from this pattern.
The Acquisition of Case
Authors: Eisenbeiss Sonja , Narasimhan Bhuvana , Voeikova Maria
Published: February 2013

Case is one of the most heterogeneous nominal morphological categories: the number of case forms in morphological paradigms, the syntactic and semantic functions of case, and the set of declension classes differ even in typologically similar languages. Hence, the acquisition of case presents the child with a major learning challenge. This article presents empirical studies and theoretical perspectives on case acquisition in children, focusing on generative, natural morphology, cognitive-functional, and usage-based approaches. The empirical focus is on the acquisition of accusative, ergative, and split case systems. The article also explores productivity in children's early case forms, the role of nature or nurture in the acquisition of case, form-meaning mappings in the acquisition of case, and the time course of case development.
Case and Contact Linguistics
Authors: Johanson Lars
Published: February 2013

Language contact affects case categories in various ways. This article examines the effects of contacts between linguistic codes (languages, unrelated or related, or language varieties): changes in one code on the model of another. It deals with inflectional case markers, affixes, and adpositions from which they evolve. Though most adpositions express more specific relations, some are relatively desemanticised. Affixes and case-like adpositions may fulfil similar functions; the close correspondences between Dravidian case suffixes and Indic postpositions. Case markers and case functions are acquired through what is called ‘borrowing’, ‘diffusion’, ‘transfer’, ‘interference’, ‘replication’, etc. Speakers copy case markers or case functions from a model code (a ‘source’, ‘donor’, or ‘diffusing’ language) and insert the copies into their basic code (a ‘recipient’ or ‘replica’ language). The term ‘copying’ is used to stress the non-identity of models and copies. This article also discusses selective copying and grammaticalisation, copiabililty and stages of grammaticalisation, copying of valency patterns, polysemy and syncretism, and impoverished case systems.
Terminology of Case
Authors: Haspelmath Martin
Published: February 2013

As in all areas of grammar, the terminology surrounding case phenomena is often not straightforward: Linguists with different backgrounds use the same terms for somewhat or radically different concepts, or they use different terms for very similar or identical concepts. It is unlikely that terminological consensus will emerge soon, primarily because there is no consensus about the concepts that we need, and terminological polysemy will continue to be rampant because there are many more concepts than handy terms. But it is useful to be aware of some of the most important terminological issues. This article discusses basic notions of case, different kinds of cases (grammatical cases vs. concrete cases, structural case and inherent case, oblique cases), alternatives to labelling, non-case uses of case labels, cases as language-particular categories, case polysemy, concrete nonspatial cases, and spatial cases.
Varieties of Ergative
Authors: Palancar Enrique L.
Published: February 2013

Ergative case — also ergative marker or simply ergative — is the term given to the grammatical morpheme associated with the noun phrase functioning as subject of a transitive clause. In phonological terms, ergative cases are in general highly grammaticalised morphemes. In semantic terms, ergatives mark noun phrases that typically play the role of agents in the transitive event rendered by such clauses. Ergative case is used on the noun phrase functioning as A; this is called a ‘dependent-marking’ strategy. The other way to encode such an alignment is using a so-called ‘head-marking’ strategy; that is, using a special pronominal morphology in the verb to cross-reference A, which is different from the one encoding S or O. Traditionally, this pronominal morphology has also been called ‘ergative’, but it should not be confused with ‘ergative case’. This article describes the formal varieties of the ergative case. It discusses restrictions on ergative case, ergative case on non-typical hosts, ergative case polysemy patterns, and the origin of ergatives.
Varieties of Instrumental
Authors: Narrog Heiko
Published: February 2013

Instrumental case typically marks the semantic role of an instrument. There are seven strategies for the coding of concomitant functions, including instrumental functions. These are concomitant predication (converbs, gerunds, coverbs), adpositional marking, case marking, verb derivation, incorporation, conversion, and lexical fusion. Cross-linguistically, all of these strategies are also found for the marking of instrumental functions. Individual languages may have several of them, and may differ with respect to which of the strategies they prefer. This article deals not only with case marking, but also with adpositional marking. For one thing, instrumental marking through adpositions is more common than case marking, as the instrumental is typically not a structurally or syntactically definable case but a semantic case that marks peripheral participants and adjuncts. This article explores the functional varieties and polysemy patterns of the instrumental case by looking at a sample of 200 languages.
Casein an African Language
Authors: König Christa
Published: February 2013

Africa is known for being a continent where there are not so many languages with a grammaticalised case system. In East Africa, there is one language which is quite exceptional. Not only does it have a case system distinguishing seven cases, which on African standards is a lot, but it is also unusual in that nearly all elements in the language are case-inflected, including nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Nevertheless, even though case is ubiquitous in Ik, the encoding of core participants, that is intransitive subjects (S), transitive subjects (A), and transitive objects (O), is so defective that it is questionable whether the elements under consideration are really cases and not something else. This article shows that case is a highly productive mechanism of Ik. Nearly all lexical items of the language can be case-inflected, including adverbs, conjunctions, adpositions, and verbs.
Case in a Topic-Prominent Language
Authors: Ogawa Akio
Published: February 2013

Discussions about topic-prominent language verus subject-prominent language are old but still of current interest. According to the now classic work of Li and Thompson (1976), topic-prominent languages possess the following characteristics: the topic is coded on the surface, that is morphologically and/or syntactically; passive constructions either do not or only marginally exist or carry a special meaning; there are no dummy or empty subjects; double subject constructions are available; it is not the subject but the topic that controls coreferential constituent deletion; verb-final languages tend to be topic-prominent; there are no constraints on what kind of constituent may be the topic; and topic-comment sentences are basic. The traditional grammar of Japanese distinguishes between two types of postpositional particles: kaku-joshi (case particles) on the one hand and kakari-joshi (relating/charging particles) on the other hand. Japanese reveals a relatively free word order, while maintaining a rigid verb-final position. This article sketches synchronic and diachronic case-drop phenomena, and exemplifies some other typologically related as well as unrelated languages for their functional parallelism.
Case Relations in Tlaanec, a Head-Marking Language
Authors: Wichmann Søren
Published: February 2013

Tlapanec is a head-marking language, in which case relations are marked by verbal suffixes. Four types of relations are marked in this way. Three of these bear many resemblances to cross-linguistically well-known cases: the ergative, absolutive, and the dative. The fourth, however, is a novel type of relation and called pegative. This encodes an actor involved in an event which also involves a dative-like undergoer. Tlapanec exhibits a VAO basic word order with the possibility of fronting A or O in a topicalisation construction. Predicates inflect for aspect, polarity, and person, while nouns may inflect for person of possessor. This article presents the Tlapanec system with special attention to the three following features: the markers attach to the predicate, the ergative case is morphologically unmarked, and the inventory includes the pegative relation. It also discusses the morphology of case marking, the morphosyntax of the Tlapanec case markers and their semantics, the mechanisms of case assignment, monopersonal verbs, and similarities between verbal suffixes and canonical case marking.
‘Case Relations’ in Lao, A Radically Isolating Language
Authors: Enfield N. J.
Published: February 2013

This article examines data from Lao, a radically isolating Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, and asks how speakers of such a language might cope without case. Lao is like Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese, and Riau Indonesian in exemplifying the extreme of pragmatically oriented grammar. Where case marking simply distinguishes who from whom, it is mostly dispensable, thanks to the richness of pragmatics. Moreover, for more ‘expressive’ functions of case marking, where features of transitivity are manipulated for expressive or information-structural effect, Lao finds constructional means to treat certain arguments in special ways, thereby explicitly marking non-redundant semantic information in case-like ways. This article also examines patterns of argument-predicate relations, focusing on monovalent predicates, symmetric and other non-oriented bivalent predicates, and asymmetric bivalent predicates. Finally, it considers the expressive functions which case marking might perform, that is where special treatment of one or another argument serves to manipulate semantic distinctions in the construal of event structure and participant involvement.
The Northern European Atlantic World
Authors: Klooster Wim
Published: February 2013

Confronted with the establishment of Portugal and Spain as the hegemonic Atlantic powers, northern Europe — France, England, and the Netherlands — initially tried to obtain African and American riches by raiding and trading. Successful colonisation of the New World had to wait until the early seventeenth century, and settlements remained small until the 1640s. By then, northern Europe held sway in various parts of North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, and had captured Portugal's main West African trading station. As raiders, traders, and settlers, they had formed relations with native Africans and Americans, who had often enabled them to survive. But prejudice against their new neighbours intensified. This article looks at the northern European Atlantic world, focusing on privateers, merchants, and fishermen as well as informal intermediaries.
The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Authors: Marzagalli Silvia
Published: February 2013

The French were major actors in the creation of an Atlantic world. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Atlantic sphere provided employment for thousands of French sailors, sustained a large merchant community, and supplied much capital. In the following two centuries, cities and ports involved in Atlantic trade emerged and prospered. French imperial policy was a source of permanent tensions — between colonists and authorities in Versailles; planters, free coloured, and slaves; France and other European colonial powers — leading eventually to the progressive loss of the French empire in the course of the eighteenth century. Although French colonial trade and movements of people increased considerably over this period — the French West Indies provided Europe with huge quantities of sugar and coffee produced by an increasing number of African slaves — the French Atlantic world was never confined within its imperial boundaries. After the loss of Haiti, the French empire in the Americas was reduced to Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyana, where slavery was abolished in 1848.
Atlantic Trade and Commodities, 1402–1815
Authors: Hancock David
Published: February 2013

This article reviews the transfer of goods and services between the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean. It shows that the demands of long-distance trade, particularly but not solely across the Atlantic, encouraged innovation in technologies and methods, transformed commercial institutions, and required traders to develop novel ways of managing their businesses. After regaining independence from Spain in 1640, Portugal created a transatlantic trading system that was more vigorous than what had existed before 1580. The long eighteenth century witnessed a precipitate decline of France as an Atlantic commercial power and a steady rise of England. Paradoxically, France's Atlantic trading burgeoned, at least at first. While Britain and France struggled for Atlantic control, the Netherlands flourished, albeit in slightly different channels than before. The increase in the efficiency of shipping, the dematerialisation of finance, and the spread of information were substantial results of a burgeoning Atlantic trade. They also forced changes in traders' and governments' ideas about how commerce should be managed.
People and places in the Americas
Authors: Kagan Richard L.
Published: February 2013

Writing in the wake of King George's War, Edmund Burke, together with his cousin, offered the first comparative analysis of European settlement patterns in the New World in his Account of the European Settlement of America (1757). Although Burke never crossed the Atlantic, he was still able to provide insights into the ‘comparatively weak’ state of Spanish settlement in New Mexico, the lack of ‘towns and villages’ in New France, and the defects in James Oglethorpe's plan in Georgia to create a colony based on small, independent farms. This article examines patterns of European settlement in selected portions of the Americas (South, Central, and North America). It also considers the primacy of towns in Spanish America, settlement in Luso-America, the settlement patterns that developed in France's New World colonies, merchants and traders in Dutch America, and the ‘planting’ of British North America.
Household Formation, Lineage, and Gender Relations in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Authors: Shammas Carole
Published: February 2013

Households did not figure prominently in the early Atlantic migration to the Americas. The opportunity for innovation in household structure, given the ethnicities, economies, and colonial regimes involved, was great. Large portions of the Americas diverged from the prescribed patterns of marriage in the Western European empires that had laid claim to the territory. The potential for differing versions of the early modern American family can be grasped best by looking at how the population had evolved towards the end of the colonial period. This article explores household formation, lineage, and gender relations in the early modern Atlantic world, as well as differences in the household organisation of Atlantic migrants and Native Americans, household and land, and whether creole women's advantage can be attributed to an African woman's later age at birth of first child or her higher probability of being a sugar-field worker.
Identities and Processes of Identification in the Atlantic World
Authors: Herzog Tamar
Published: February 2013

We tend to think about the inhabitants of the Atlantic world as members of discrete groups. We thus argue that ‘Spaniards’ had encountered ‘Indians’, ‘Europeans’ competed with one another, and ‘Africans’ were imported as slaves. Although these categories may be meaningful to us, like all identities and processes of identification, they were dynamic constructions in constant flux. Having gradually emerged during the early modern period and to a great extent because of the engagement with the Atlantic world, their creation involved both confrontation and dialogue and it allowed for competing interpretations. Not only were these identities and processes of identification highly complex, other group solidarities that were just as important — such as the division between people of different religions, nobles and commoners, local citizens and foreigners — mediated between them, on occasions breaking them apart. This article discusses identities and processes of identification in the Atlantic world. It also examines how people inhabiting the Atlantic world are differentiated according to religion.