Thomas / Givón

University of Oregon | UO · Department of Linguistics

A presentation on Givon (1988) on quantative analysis of topic continuity

A radical revision & update of the 1979 book that tied together the core of human language: functionalism, grammaticalization and cross-language typology; as well as language ontogeny, phylogeny and cognition. 8 chapers with indices & bibliography

Morphological switch-reference systems have been described as complex structural phenomena with specific marking for chain-medial cataphoric referential continuity (SS) and discontinuity (DS). This paper attempt to place these synchronic structural systems in two explanatory contexts: First, the functional context of discourse structure and the man...

The grammatical, cognitive, communicative, typological and diachronic aspects of zero-marking in language, including both nominal and verbal zero anaphora as well as cataphoric zero.

As elsewhere in biology, the synchronic structure of language is shaped by developmental processes. In the case of language, those are: phylogeny (evolution), ontogeny (maturation) and diachrony (adult on-line behavior). The only developmental process that could be directly responsible for the synchronic diversity of language structure is diachrony...

Language is one of the defining characteristics of homo sapiens. It is deployed in a wide range of adaptive contexts: social interaction, cultural transmission, education, literature, theatre, music, humour and play, love and war. Of this rich array of useful applications, two core adaptive functions make all the rest possible: (i) mental represent...

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Complex hierarchic syntax is a hallmark of human language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a special status as the evolutionary apex of the uniquely - human language faculty - evolutionary yet mysteriously immune to Darwinian adaptive selection. Prof. Givón's book treats syntac...

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. Bu...

Is human language an evolutionary adaptation? Is linguistics a natural science? These questions have bedeviled philosophers, philologists and linguists from Plato through Chomsky. Prof. Givón suggests that the answers fall naturally within an integrated study of living organisms.In this new work, Givón points out that language operates between aspe...

This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight...

This paper undertakes to begin to perform the overdue task of de-objectivizing the key pragmatic notion of `context'. This notion will be re-interpreted in terms of mental models, which correspond to that portion of `reality' that is relevant for information processing. For this purpose, a variety of examples of the role of `context' in pragmatics...

L'auteur propose d'interpreter diachroniquement la complexite synchronique de la distribution de la morphologie verbale utilisee pour marquer la voix detransitive en athapaskan tolowa (AT). Les remarques faites a propos de cette langue peuvent etre generalisees a l'ensemble des langues athabaskanes. Cette langue presente la caracteristique d'etre p...

This commentary makes a case for a connection between the hierarchically organized skills emphasized in Greenfield's (1991t) target article and rhythmic skills utilized in music. It also links hierarchical organization with automated processing. Implicit is the notion that lower levels of a hierarchy become automatic, as they go under control...

A consistent finding in second language acquisition research has been that in the early stages of acquisition learners often receive simplified input. This finding has led researchers to question whether or not simplified input has a facilitative effect on the acquisition process. This study examines the effects of simplified input in early L2 acqu...

A consistent finding in second language acquisition research has been that in the early stagesof acquisition learners often receive simplified input. This finding has led researchers to questionwhether or not simplified input has a facilitative effect on the acquisition process. This studyexamines the effects of simplified input in early L2 acquisi...

This study used event-related brain potentials and performance to trace changes in the underlying brain circuitry of undergraduates who spent 5 weeks learning a miniature artificial language. A reaction time task involving visual matching showed that words in the new language were processed like nonsense material before training, and like English w...

Part 1 Introduction: grammar and communication whose grammar? grammar for communication theme and variation in syntactic description parsing - tree diagrams deep structure, surface structure and meaning. Part 2 Vocabulary - words and morphemes: preliminaries lexical vs. grammatical vocabulary the morphemic status of English vocabulary lexical word-...

This paper suggest that in order to understand the cross-language distribution of the subjunctive mood one needs to understand the cross-grammar distribution of the irrealis modality, as well as have a general theory of modality, within which irrealis takes its rightful natural place. The subjunctive mood turns out to occupy two coherent sub region...

This paper suggests that text coherence is a multi-factored affair that, ultimately, pertains to the mental organization of episodic memory, most likely as a partially-hierarchic mental structure. What text researchers usually describe as coherence is merely an artifact of the cognitive phenomenon. The role of grammatical clues in signalling text c...

Referents ("topics") serve as file labels in the episodic memory for stored text. The grammar of topic marking is a set of processing instructions that cue two major cognitive systems: attention and episodic memory. The cataphoric elements in the grammar tell the hearer/reader whether the referent is important and thus needs to be activated and the...

Pragmatics is an approach to description, to information processing, thus to the construction, interpretation and communication of experience. At its core lies the notion of context, and the axiom that reality and/or experience are not absolute fixed entities, but rather frame-dependent, contingent upon the observer's perspective. (PsycINFO Databas...

The pragmatics of word-order involves two general cognitive principles: (a) Anaphoric coherence: The predictability/accessiblity of the referent. (b) Cataphoric coherence: The importance/topicality of the referent. Other considerations also weight in, such the structure of clause-chains and contrast/emphasis. Pragmatically-controlled ("flexible")...

Two theses concerning word order in Mandarin Chinese have been investigated through a quantified study of written and spoken contemporary Mandarin. It is found, first, that Mandarin is synchronically a typical VO language, in terms of text distribution of VO and OV orders. OV appears at the level of 10% or lower in text, and this is true for both d...

The article covers basic notions of discourse-pragmatics, such as the relationship between multi-propositional discourse and the notion of coherence; a pragmatic definition of ‘information’ in terms of relative compatibility with the knowledge and/or world-view of the hearer; thematic structure and multi-stranded coherence; foreground, background,...