Bio-Linguistics: The Santa Barbara Lectures
Abstract
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 aspects of both complex biological design and adaptive behavior. As in biology, the whole is an adaptive compromise to competing demands. Variation is the indispensable tool of learning, change and adaptation. The contrast between innateness and input-driven emergence is an interaction between genetically-coded and behaviorally-coded experience.
In enlarging the cross-disciplinary domain, the book examines the parallels between language evolution and language diachrony. Sociality, cooperation and communication are shown to be rooted in a common evolutionary source, the kin-based hunting-and-gathering society of intimates.
The book pays homage to the late Joseph Greenberg and his visionary integration of functional motivation, typological diversity and diachronic change.
... It begins with the simple act of noticing a variation-that there are two alternative ways of saying the same thing" (LABOV, 2008, p. 1). contraste, causalidade, atos de fala, entre outros (GIVÓN, 2002;LEHMANN, 2011). ...
... Domínios funcionais podem se organizar em níveis variados. Givón (1984Givón ( , 2001Givón ( , 2002, entre outros) emprega a noção de domínio funcional em referência a funções gramaticais em escala mais ampla (macrodomínios) e mais estrita (microdomínios). Esses domínios se distribuem em um continuum. ...
... A adversidade é um (micro)domínio do domínio funcional complexo denominado nexo por Lehmann (2011), mas que também pode ser denominado junção, termo utilizado por nós. Esse domínio funcional recobre, como microdomínios, diferentes funções (que podem ser entendidas como relações semântico-pragmáticas), a exemplo de temporalidade, causalidade, condicionalidade, finalidade, concessividade, comparação, consecução, adição, adversidade, disjunção, explicação (GIVÓN, 2001(GIVÓN, , 2002LEHMANN, 2011). ...
O primeiro passo de uma pesquisa variacionista é a circunscrição da variável linguística que será o objeto de estudo. Em uma perspectiva sociofuncionalista, nossos objetivos são: (i) mostrar como a convergência do conceito de variável linguística com o de macrodomínio funcional pode ser empregada como estratégia para a circunscrição da variável; (ii) aplicar essa estratégia a dois domínios funcionais, adversidade e a concessividade. As variantes de codificação desses domínios são multifuncionais: mas e só que, no caso da adversidade, e mesmo (que), apesar (de) que e nem que, no caso da concessividade. Concluímos o texto apontando vantagens da adoção da estratégia de delimitação de um macrodomínio como variável linguística.
... Para sustentar a análise do fenômeno, apoiamo-nos nos pressupostos da Gramática Baseada no Uso, conforme Givón (1995;2002), Croft (2001), Bybee (2010Bybee ( , 2015, Em outras palavras, a estrutura condicional pode ocorrer tanto na ordem subordinada > principal (prótase > apódose), quanto na ordem inversa principal > subordinada (apódose > prótase), ou ainda ser expressa somente pela oração subordinada 6 . ...
... A seguir, discorremos sobre os domínios funcionais de tempo e de modalidade, intrínsecos às construções condicionais (ELY, 2019). (GIVÓN, 1995;2002). ...
... A marcação da modalidade pode ser feita por meio de diferentes dispositivos linguísticos no ato comunicativo, como a escolha de determinada palavra, de um advérbio específico, ou, até mesmo, pelos tempos e modos verbais. Pensando nisso, Givón (2002) cita o exemplo dos verbos modais "dever" e "precisar", os quais podem expressar o valor de obrigação/imposição, bem como o de probabilidade (Ele pode/deve vir hoje 9 ). ...
Neste artigo, apresentamos os resultados de uma análise de construções hipotáticas condicionais em dados escritos do português brasileiro contemporâneo, retirados de cartas pessoais de adeus (ELY, 2019). Procedeu-se ao levantamento qualitativo de aspectos linguísticos formais (ordem, conector e forma verbal) e funcionais (modalidade e expressão temporal) das construções condicionais com base na perspectiva da Gramática de Construções Baseada no Uso, que visa ao pareamento simbólico das construções linguísticas. Os resultados apontaram para uma relação entre a construção condicional e a modalidade, sobretudo a epistêmica, vinculado à predominância da ordem sintática canônica, do uso conjuncional prototípico “se” e da temporalidade futura na forma verbal simples em razão do contexto comunicativo da amostra investigada.
... Section 2 brings home to the interactional dynamics regulating conversations in today's societies of intimates (Givón 2002), laid out by Givón as our bio-cultural descent. Section 3 outlines the cognitive endowment allowing humans to decipher implicit contents in discourse. ...
... In his Santa Barbara lectures, Givón (2002) describes some salient socio-cultural features of present-day primary social groups, which he calls societies of intimates. Societies of intimates are small-sized communities seldom exceeding 100/150 members. ...
... 1 Two cases worth discussing in this respect are represented by the Ute and Ngóbe communities, established in Colorado and Panama, respectively. Observing the unfolding of public forums in these societies, Givón (2002) noticed that speakers are generally reluctant to publicly challenge other members' views. ...
Indirect speech is a remarkable trait of human communication. The present paper tackles the sociobiological underpinnings of communicative indirectness discussing both socio-interactional and cognitive rationales behind its manifestation in discourse. From a social perspective, the use of indirect forms in interactions can be regarded as an adaptive response to the epistemic implications of transacted new information in small primary groups, representing – in Givón’s terms – our “bio-cultural” descent. The design features of indirect strategies today may therefore be explained in terms of a form-function mapping in which indirect communicative expressions allowed a “safer” transaction of contents and a more cooperative attitude of speakers in both face-to-face and public contexts of communication. The unchallengeability effects notably induced by underencoded meanings have now received extensive experimental backing, unveiling intriguing underlying cognitive mechanisms such as the well-known cognitive illusions or fallacies.
... Este artigo tem como objetivo a análise do uso da construção vai que e sua relação com a modalidade. A modalidade é estabelecida a partir da assertividade e/ou crença que o usuário da língua tem sobre o conteúdo da proposição enunciada (PALMER, 2001;GIVÓN, 2002; CARRACOSSI, 2011). Grosso modo, vai que é empregado como forma de o falante demonstrar expectativa sobre algo, isto é, sua crença acerca do que diz, como nos exemplos a seguir, extraídos do Corpus do Português 3 e do Twitter: ...
... Segundo Givón (2002) (LYONS, 1977;PALMER, 2001;GIVÓN, 2002 etc.). Para exemplificar dispositivos gramaticais que codificam ambos os tipos de modalidade, Givón (2002) cita os verbos "dever" e "precisar", que podem expressar um valor deôntico de obrigação/imposição: (6) "Você deve/precisa fazer isso imediatamente"; bem como o epistêmico de probabilidade: ...
Neste artigo, analisamos a relação entre os usos da construção vai que no português escrito brasileiro e a categoria de modalidade. A partir dos pressupostos teóricos e metodológicos da Gramática de Construção Baseada no Uso e da análise de dados do Corpus do Português, aba Web, e do Twitter, verificamos que vai que está vinculado à modalidade epistêmica quase-asseverativa e é usado, normalmente, como estratégia de flexibilização e como forma de projetar uma possibilidade sobre o que foi dito e, assim, aumentar o poder de argumentação. O falante, ao empregar vai que, lança mão de uma hipótese pautada na crença e expectativa do que diz. Além disso, a construção atua como estratégia de preservação de face, em que há menor comprometimento acerca da proposição por parte do falante.
... Cada cômodo de três por três dá nove metros quadrados, ou que seja maior, cada vão, cada quarto, sala A requisição de solidariedade é tematizada em Overstreet (1999Overstreet ( , 2005Overstreet ( , 2014, Terraschke e Holmes (2007), Martínez (2011), Aijmer (2013), Wagner et al. (2015), Fernández (2015), Secova (2017) org/10.5007/1984-8420.2021e76845 "maior inexplicitude implica maior aproximação social e solidariedade, sinalizando que os falantes são socialmente próximos o suficiente para deixar algumas coisas não ditas" (WAGNER et al., 2015, p. 725 Defendemos que a extensão geral pode ser tratada como um fenômeno superordenado, em consonância com a proposta de Givón (1995Givón ( , 2002Givón ( , 2011 Caso idade seja controlada em uma perspectiva de tempo aparente, a correlação entre os microdomínios e diferentes grupos etários pode revelar uma mudança em progresso em um determinado recorte sincrônico. Nesse caso, o esperado seria uma maior utilização do extensor mais gramaticalizado como indicador de requisição de solidariedade na fala de indivíduos cada vez mais jovens. ...
... Distinguimos os (sub)tipos aspectuais em conformidade comGivón (2001a/b).8 Entre os macrodomínios gramaticais explorados porGivón (1995Givón ( , 2002Givón ( , 2011, entre outros), além de TAM, estão negação, coerência referencial, quantificação, voz, posse, comparação, contraste, atos de fala, nominalização, subordinação, concordância. ...
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte Resumo: À luz de uma interface variação-gramaticalização, os objetivos deste estudo são: (i) descrever e exemplificar duas das estratégias que podem ser adotadas para a deli-mitação de uma variável linguística-a perspectiva da variação estrita e a perspectiva de percurso de gramaticalização; (ii) aplicar a perspectiva de percurso de gramaticalização à delimitação de uma variável discursivo-pragmática, a extensão geral. Essa variável pode ser considerada um macrodomínio funcional que agrega formas cujas funções são pro-venientes de um processo de gramaticalização que se desenvolveu entre dois microdo-mínios. Os extensores gerais tomados como variantes são E TAL e E TUDO. Os dados foram extraídos do Banco de Dados FALA-Natal. Mostramos que variáveis discursivo-pragmáticas podem ser circunscritas em consonância com a perspectiva de percurso de gramaticalização, mais especificamente aquela que leva em conta a distinção entre macro e microdomínios funcionais. A aplicação dessa estratégia para dar conta da multifuncio-nalidade de formas discursivo-pragmáticas permite um tratamento uniforme à variação em todos os níveis da língua. Palavras-chave: Variável. Variação. Gramaticalização. Multifuncionalidade. Extensão ge-ral. Abstract: Based in a variation-grammaticalization interface perspective, the goals of this study are: (i) to describe and exemplify two of the strategies that can be employed to delimit a linguistic variable-the strict variation perspective and the trajectory of gramma-ticalization perspective; (ii) to apply the trajectory of grammaticalization perspective to
... Philipse 1992). Сегодня можно констатировать, что в развитии когнитивной лингвистики на рубеже веков наступил переломный момент, связанный с провозглашением отдельными учеными идеологии физикализма и биологизма (Devitt & Sterelny 1999;Lakoff & Johnson 1999;Givón 2002;Zlatev 2003). Одним из центральных принципов этой новой идеологии, названной Дж. ...
... Буквально два года спустя после выхода в свет книги Дженкинса, в издательстве «Джон Бенджаминс» вышла книга с очень схожим названием: «Био-лингвистика», автором которой является один из корифеев современного функционализма Т. Гивон (Givón 2002). Появление этой книги весьма символично в контексте нарастающих интеграционных процессов в науке, поскольку понятие «био-лингвистики» в данном случае содержательно отличается от биолингвистики в понимании Хомского и его последователей, поскольку, по мнению Гивона, идеализированная компетенция Хомского «эмпирически абсолютно несостоятельна» (Givón 2002: xvi). ...
... Whereas the adult parser likely relies upon a number of substantially automatised procedures (Baddeley & Hitch 1974;Ferreira et al. 2002;Givón 2002;Jefferies et al. 2004;Sturt et al. 2004;Ferreira & Patson 2007;Ferreira & Lowder 2016 and references therein), this is not always necessarily true for children, especially when dealing with material that is being acquired. In this regard, it has been maintained that children employ greater resources to analyse aspects of the target grammar that are in the process of being acquired or have been recently acquired. ...
In this study we tested the comprehension of Subject Relative Clauses (SRCs) and Object Relative Clauses (ORCs) by Spanish monolingual children aged 4-6. Our results provide novel evidence that a subject-object asymmetry holds true also for Spanish: SRCs are easier than ORCs. Moreover, the test of different types of ORCs revealed that both overt Differential Object Marking (DOM) and word order properties (i.e. the subject position within the relative clause) constitute ameliorating factors in the comprehension of ORCs. Children proved to benefit more from word order than DOM-marking, with pre-verbal subjects bringing about higher accuracy rates than overt DOM. Moreover, these cues interact when occurring together: children's comprehension decreases when ORCs with a pre-verbal subject also feature overt DOM. We additionally measured children's knowledge of the grammar underlying DOM through an ad-hoc Sentence Repetition Task and found that DOM constitutes an ameliorating cue only with children who have acquired it. At the empirical level, we integrate these findings with the vast literature on children's comprehension of relative clauses and advance a new descriptive generalisation of which grammatical properties characterise as ameliorating cues across languages. At the conceptual level, we interpret our results as evidence for both processing-oriented theories and grammar-based accounts to intervention locality. Whereas the interaction between DOM and word order suggests an effect of processing cost, the fact that cues need to be associated with an acquired grammatical representation inevitably tie amelioration effects to language-specific factors. We show that this apparent contrast is predicted if amelioration effects are regulated at the interface between the grammar and the performance system, and argue in favour of an interface interpretation in line with tout court minimalist criteria.
... But do we have to stay so far behind in our understanding of the nature of our unprecedented mental powers and continue to believe that it is just the kind of brain we humans have that makes us Homo sapiens, "wise man"? Certainly not, if we stop flowing with the stream of orthodox thinking about language and approach it biologically 1 (Maturana 1978;Givón 2002;Cowley 2014;Raimondi 2019;Kravchenko 2021). Among other things, such an approach means viewing the properties of the human brain as the result of its co-evolution with language (Deacon 1997), because "language and brain adapted to each other" (Schoenemann 2009: 180), and "[t]he evolution of language must have taken place during the evolution of humans […] as arguably the most important part of that evolution" (Bickerton 2014: 83). ...
Linguists are learning to speak differently about language. They see a continuity between life and language in languaging, a uniquely human activity with which humans form a unity in their cognitive domain as organism-environment systems. The chapter explores this aspect around an ecolinguistic understanding of language and deals with how the ability for languaging brings humans' responsibility for the global ecology.
... Például a főemlős-életben oly fontos finom mozgásszerveződés idegrendszeri mechanizmusainak újrafelhasználása. Emellett mások, például Givón (2002) az exaptáció fogalmát kitágítottan használva lényegében azt emelik ki, hogy az emberi nyelv megjelenéséhez a kategorizáció, a szándékkódolás és a motoros rendszer összekapcsolására volt szükség. Az újrafelhasználás fogalma tehát beilleszkedik a nyelvkeletkezés funkcióváltási, illetve moduláris alrendszereket összekapcsoló felfogásába. ...
Az ember kognitív tevékenységét számos kulturális rendszer teszi lehetővé, illetve irányítja. A mai evolúciós irányultságú kognitív pszichológia ezeket a rendszereket nem egyszerűen a ’magas kultúra’ és az iskoláztatás konstruált következményeinek tartja, hanem olyan, beállítást és egyéni élet során történő stabilizációt igénylő reprezentációs fordulatok (Merlin Donald) eredményeinek, melyek az ember biológiai alapú szocialitásának és a kultúra önkényeit elfogadó természetes pedagógiai hozzáállásának (Csibra és Gergely) a következményei. A természetes nyelv mint egyetemes rendszer lehetővé teszi nemcsak a távoli dolgokról való kommunikációt, hanem a nem közvetlenül észlelt tudások elsajátítását, a Russell értelmében vett kettős episztemológia (érzékelésen és leíráson alapuló tudás) megjelenését is. A nyelv mint elsődleges kulturális rendszer egyszerre ad számunkra kódokat és általános, illetve specifikus tudásokat. Ugyanaz érvényes a másodlagos kulturális rendszerekre, az írás/olvasás, számolás, zene stb. rendszereire is. A dolgozatban elsősorban az olvasásra és a webalapú tudásszervezésre összpontosítva bemutatom ezeknek a másodlagos rendszereknek néhány feszítő jellemzőjét, melyek a kognitív kutatás és a szervezett oktatás közös kérdéseibe helyezik őket. A másodlagos rendszerek, miközben lassan alakulnak ki az egyénnél, működésükben ugyanolyan gyorsak és hatékonyak, mint az észlelés elsődleges rendszerei. Miközben nincsenek evolúciósan kialakult előre specializált moduláris idegrendszeri „központjaik”, egy idegrendszeri újrahasznosítás (Dehaene) révén megtalálják a működtetésükhöz optimális agykérgi rendszereket. A paradoxonok mellett kitérek a mai legújabb rendszerek felvetette gondokra is. Vajon a digitális eszközök támogatta feladatmegoldás, a képernyőn keresztüli állandó vándorlás, az állandóan hozzáférhető tudásrendszerek kattintásnyi távolsága és például a webalapú tudáskeresés ki fogja-e alakítani a maga idegrendszeri fülkéjét, mint az olvasás tette volt, illetve visszafejleszti-e vagy új kategorizációkra készteti-e a meglevő kognitív rendszereinket?
... Over the years, these proclitics have fused with nouns and verbs and are no longer segmental or transparent in meaning in many words. This may be a result of grammaticalisation or of the development from concrete lexemes to abstract grammatical concepts that normally takes place during language change, but more significantly also during language evolution (Givón 2002;Heine & Kuteva 2007). The following table is exemplary. ...
The Great Andamanese is a generic term used to refer to ten different tribes who spoke closely related varieties of the same language in the entire set of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Their language is known by the same name, i.e. Great Andamanese. It constitutes the sixth language family of India, the other five being Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, all of them spoken in mainland India.
... De acordo com esse modelo teórico, a gramática stricto sensu pode ser analisada como um subsistema emergente, que codifica a semântica proposicional e a pragmática discursiva (Givón, 2002), valendo-se para isso de construções gramaticais específicas, como as construções de estrutura argumental (Goldberg, 1995) e tantas outras, cujo desenvolvimento diacrônico já foi amplamente estudado, por exemplo, dentro do paradigma da gramaticalização (Heine;Kuteva, 2002;Votre;Martelotta, 2004; entre outros). ...
Propõe-se uma abordagem integrada dos diferentes usos de levar, a partir de uma perspectiva construcionista baseada no uso (Bybee, 2010; Traugott e Trousdale, 2013; Goldberg, 1996, 2005; Langacker, 2008; Croft, 2001; entre outros). Assim, além de se caracterizarem alguns dos principais empregos desse verbo nos dados do Corpus do Português (Davies e Ferreira, 2008), apresentam-se hipóteses acerca das relações de herança que as construções mais idiossincráticas mantêm com a Construção de Movimento Causado (CMC) – considerada o contexto de uso mais prototípico do verbo levar (Stein, 2020; Paz e Silva, 2009). Com relação aos empregos considerados, constatou-se que levar ocorre preferencialmente em construções de verbo-suporte, como [levar vantagem] e [levar a vida], ambas vinculadas ao esquema [levar SN]; também são muito comuns no corpus construções mais procedurais, a exemplo do conector [levando em conta], que estabelece relação de causa do tipo ‘se X, então Y’. Quanto às relações de herança, há evidências de que o esquema de verbo-suporte [levar X] viabiliza, pelo menos em parte, diversas construções independentes, funcionando como ponto de contato entre elas e a CMC. Embora as construções elencadas não sejam descritas exaustivamente, apresenta-se aqui um inventário de tais unidades, para que sejam investigadas com mais detalhe em trabalhos futuros.
... During the last few decades it has become fashionable in linguistics-and in some other human sciences-to look to the theory of evolution for a new explanatory framework. 6 A number of books appeared transferring the biological metaphor to language and language change, the most important being Keller (1994), Saliloko (2001), Croft (2000), Givón (2002). 7 I will discuss in broad outline William Croft's book Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach (2002). ...
The primary aim of this article is to find out what different linguists say about the role of intentions in the study and explanations of language change. I try to investigate if in the explanation of language change, “having an intention” does any explanatory work. If intentions play a role, how do they do it, at which point it is salutary to invoke them, and what do they contribute to the explanation of language change? My main claim is that speakers’ intentions have a role to play only on higher linguistic levels, e.i., in speakers’ communicative strategies. Since this is a celebration for Kathy Wilkes and her contribution to goal-directed behaviour, in the Concluding remarks I go back to her remarks on language and intentions and see how they fi t my discussion in this paper.
... The role of IS is crucial in this second step, since it provides cues to the addressee on how to place sentence contents in her mental model of discourse. However, to effectively fulfil this function, a preliminary construal of relevant alternatives sets is not necessary to decodify focus, as this would result in an unnecessary computational operation which the high processing rates of sentences (Givón 2002) and the scant mental resources available (Sweller 2003) would make weakly bearable and hardly economical. Therefore, from a functional perspective, why shall we consider focus function based on its association to other virtual alternatives? ...
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.
... The discussion is about whether speech is fundamentally iconic or arbitrary and whether signs preceded speech in pre-historic language or not [33,34]. One theory argues that pre-historic language initially consisted of iconic signs, which were later successively replaced by conventionalized symbols, giving rise to arbitrariness [35,36]. A competing theory argues that speech perforce is arbitrary, manifests itself by convention [30,37], and therefore must have been arbitrary from the start. ...
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
... Over the years, these proclitics have fused with nouns and verbs and are no longer segmental or transparent in meaning in many words. This may be a result of grammaticalisation or of the development from concrete lexemes to abstract grammatical concepts that normally takes place during language change, but more significantly also during language evolution (Givón 2002;Heine & Kuteva 2007). The following table is exemplary. ...
Historical Linguistics and Linguistic Typology have been used to demonstrate that PGA is an independent language family of India. Data from extra-linguistic sources such as anthropology, archaeology and genetics have been used as additional supportive evidence. This chapter will give a summary of the findings and will familiarise the audience with some distinct characteristics of the highly endangered language of the hunter-gatherer society of the Great Andamanese population.
... Mendivil-Giró's argument represents a generativist view of language which has so far been influential in the field of biolinguistics. In contrast to this generativist view, functionalist views of language change argue that language structure, and particularly its diverse manifestations across the world's languages, must emerge through adaptation to the communicative needs of their speakers and their use of language in discourse (Nichols, 1984;Givón, 1995Givón, , 2002Evans and Levinson, 2009). One such view on adaptation in language is provided by Lupyan and Dale (2015), who cite Cassirer's statement regarding how linguistic systems of classification arise as a result of the social and cultural engagement of humans with the environment: "Every classification is directed and dictated by special needs, and it is clear that these needs vary according to the different conditions of man's social and cultural life […] Languages vary with the functions they fulfil in the cultures in which they are spoken" (Cassirer, 1962: 136). ...
We argue that the human ability to linguistically describe spatial locations, relations and paths is likely to contribute importantly to human survival, and that consequently the relation between linguistic elements and structures used in spatial reference, and the environment in which humans navigate, ought to be of concern for evolutionary studies of language. We make the case for systematically studying the correspondences between the structures of human spatial language and the spatially structured practices of human groups within specific landscapes, and for considering this relation within a diachronic framework, as a process of cultural and linguistic adaptation to the physical environment. The last section presents the research design of the Nahuatl Space Project, which investigates the possibility of environmental adaptation of spatial language in four varieties of the Nahuan languages of Mexico.
... Resulta interesante constatar que el giro biolingüístico es heteróclito y hasta proteico. Además del clásico trabajo de Lenneberg, se han publicado ensayos diferentes como los de Deacon (1997), Jenkins (2000, Givón (2002), Lieberman (2006), Hurford (2007), entre otros. Igualmente interesante es constatar que, a diferencia de algunas décadas, los trabajos de iniciación lingüística no pueden soslayar el aspecto evolutivo y, más bien, se sumergen en la cuestión de la evolución de la gramática: Pinker (1994) y Jackendoff (2002. ...
Desde la segunda mitad del siglo XX se configuró un movimiento científico que clamaba por una mayor colaboración entre la lingüística y la biología, y el término Biolingüística comenzó a fraguar un nuevo horizonte interdisciplinario que tenía un preclaro objetivo: estudiar el lenguaje como un fenómeno eminentemente natural. Dado que en la última década del siglo XX hubo la concurrencia de dos avenidas científicas impactantes (los estudios sobre el cerebro con nuevas técnicas muy poderosas y la irrupción del programa minimalista en la teoría lingüística), el sueño del proyecto de la biolingüística comenzó a cristalizarse y en el nuevo milenio ha tenido unos prolegómenos bastante promisorios: la fundación de una revista especializada, la publicación de manuales actualizados y el trayecto serio de programas de doctorado. En este marco interdisciplinario, surge la necesidad de replantear la cuestión del innatismo asociado al dispositivo de adquisición del lenguaje (o la denominada gramática universal). Una respuesta sugerente puede provenir del análisis desprejuiciado de la relación entre genes y lenguaje. El engarce entre el genotipo lingüístico (la gramática universal) y el fenotipo lingüístico concebido como un proceso madurativo (con algunos aspectos de epigénesis) entraña hacer una reconsideración sobre el innatismo, postulado raigal de la tradición generativa. La comprensión de las bases ontogenéticas y filogenéticas del lenguaje nos conduce a sostener la siguiente hipótesis: en la forja de la gramática universal ha intervenido el mecanismo conocido como efecto Baldwin, lo que cabe interpretar, como señalan Calvin y Bickerton, dentro del marco evolutivo más ortodoxo. Asimismo, el programa biolingüístico entraña hacer una reducción definitoria del lenguaje: este se conceptúa stricto sensu, siguiendo el criterio sintactocéntrico, como un mecanismo de fusión (Merge) y recursión. Así se puede concluir que el lenguaje está genéticamente determinado, no como una metáfora sugerente, sino como un constructo teórico bien cimentado.
... No entanto, Givón sugere, também no final do primeiro capítulo, que o consulente faça uma imersão em material teórico suplementar. Indiquem-seGivón (1995Givón ( , 2002Givón ( e 2005 como leituras em que a discussão teórica dos temas sintáticos é feita com mais fôlego.NEVES, Maria Helena de Moura. Gramática de usos do português. ...
O capítulo apresenta uma visão geral de dez livros (e de dez propostas) sobre funcionalismo em linguística, levantando os principais pontos que configuram esse campo dos estudos linguísticos.
... The gradualist view (though not necessarily via natural selection) is endorsed by, e.g., Givón (1979Givón ( , 2002aGivón ( ,b, 2009); Pinker and Bloom (1990);Newmeyer (1991Newmeyer ( , 1998Newmeyer ( , 2005; Jackendoff (1999,2002); Carstairs-McCarthy (1999);Fitch (2004Fitch ( , 2010; Culicover and Jackendoff (2005); Számadó and Szathmary (2006); Progovac (2006Progovac ( , 2009aProgovac ( ,b, 2013Progovac ( , 2015Progovac ( , 2019; Tallerman (2007Tallerman ( , 2013aTallerman ( ,b, 2014a; Heine and Kuteva (2007); Hurford (2007Hurford ( , 2012; Tallerman and Gibson (2011);Yang (2013), among many others. The saltationist view is endorsed by Berwick (1998); Berwick et al. (2013a,b); Bickerton (1990Bickerton ( , 1998; Lightfoot (1991); Hauser et al. (2002); Chomsky (2002Chomsky ( , 2005Chomsky ( , 2010; Piattelli-Palmarini andUriagereka (2004, 2011); Moro (2008);Hornstein (2008); Piattelli-Palmarini (2010); Berwick andChomsky (2011, 2016); Di Sciullo (2011Sciullo ( , 2013; Bolhuis et al. (2014); Miyagawa et al. (2015); Miyagawa (2017), etc. ...
Significant advances have been made in artificial systems by using biological systems as a guide. However, there is often little interaction between computational models for emergent communication and biological models of the emergence of language. Many researchers in language origins and emergent communication take compositionality as their primary target for explaining how simple communication systems can become more like natural language. However, there is reason to think that compositionality is the wrong target on the biological side, and so too the wrong target on the machine-learning side. As such, the purpose of this paper is to explore this claim. This has theoretical implications for language origins research more generally, but the focus here will be the implications for research on emergent communication in computer science and machine learning---specifically regarding the types of programmes that might be expected to work and those which will not. I further suggest an alternative approach for future research which focuses on reflexivity, rather than compositionality, as a target for explaining how simple communication systems may become more like natural language. I end by providing some reference to the language origins literature that may be of some use to researchers in machine learning.
... Concerning the diachronic and typological orientation of external functionalism, Bernd Heine published in 2002 together with Tania Kuteva a Word Atlas of Grammaticalization that summarizes two decades of research on that topic across hundreds of languages, and in 2011 Heine edited in collaboration with Heiko Narrog a state of the art volume with their Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization based on the fascinating works of Paul Hopper, Elisabeth Traugott, Talmy Givón (2002Givón ( , 2009, Joan Bybee, William Croft (2001), etc. ...
The article explores the place of Systemic Functional Linguistics initiated by M.A.K. Halliday in the field of functional grammars of structuralist or emergentist origin and questions the "systemic" character of this theory.
in A. Sellami-Baklouti / L. FOntaine (eds.2018), Perspectives from Systemic Functional Linguistics. London : Routledge
... By contrast, being more resistant to external pressures and interferences, automatic mechanisms allow many processes to occur in parallel. We will recall this double modality under the labels of explicit vs. implicit processing, as it has been named by Givón (2002) in his Bio-linguistics program. ...
Human information processing is managed by a resource-limited system. For this reason, information in utterances must be packed in a way that prevents it from being lost in decoding. A developmental model of information structure units is proposed according to which Topic-Focus articulation has emerged in order to comply with this constraint. The basic function of Topic and Focus is to instruct the addressee to different attitudes: Focus causes controlled, more effortful processing; Topic automatic, less effortful processing. This model accounts for the well-known restriction on the iteration of Foci in sentences – because cognitive resources for multiple Foci are not available – but it also explains at which conditions can the expression of more new ideas in a single utterance happen with overall bearable costs for the speaker and receiver, thus increasing efficiency in communication.
... The "unity in diversity" that underlies children's adaptability to various linguistic ecologies/environments is certainly of evolutionary significance, and we propose that the nature and trajectory of language evolution provides a key to understanding both the diversity and equal learnability of human languages. As previously noted, "language cannot be fully understood without reference to its evolution, whether proven or hypothesized" (Greenberg, 1966;Givón, 2002) 2 . The position that we advance here concurs with this statement: while we acknowledge that there are no definitive answers regarding how language evolved, there are specific hypotheses that can be used as tools to probe this question. ...
We address the puzzle of “unity in diversity” in human languages by advocating the (minimal) common denominator for the diverse expressions of transitivity across human languages, consistent with the view that early in language evolution there was a modest beginning for syntax and that this beginning provided the foundation for the further elaboration of syntactic complexity. This study reports the results of a functional MRI experiment investigating differential patterns of brain activation during processing of sentences with minimal versus fuller syntactic structures. These structural layers have been postulated to represent different stages in the evolution of syntax, potentially engaging different brain networks. We focused on the Serbian “middles,” analyzed as lacking the transitivity (vP) layer, contrasted with matched transitives, containing the transitivity layer. Our main hypothesis was that transitives will produce more activation in the syntactic (Broca's–Basal Ganglia) brain network, in comparison to more rudimentary middles. The participants (n = 14) were healthy adults (Mean age = 33.36; SD = 12.23), native speakers of Serbo-Croatian. The task consisted of reading a series of sentences (middles and transitives; n = 64) presented in blocks of 8, while being engaged in a detection of repetition task. We found that the processing of transitives, compared to middles, was associated with an increase in activation in the basal ganglia bilaterally. Although we did not find an effect in Broca's area, transitives, compared to middles, evoked greater activation in the precentral gyrus (BA 6), proposed to be part of the “Broca's complex.” Our results add to the previous findings that Broca's area is not the sole center for syntactic processing, but rather is part of a larger circuit that involves subcortical structures. We discuss our results in the context of the recent findings concerning the gene-brain-language pathway involving mutations in FOXP2 that likely contributed to the enhancement of the frontal-striatal brain network, facilitating human capacity for complex syntax.
... Some scholars have gone further and claim that the encoding of referents may provide indications about the identity of a given referent, even if it conveys the same contents as other alternatives available. In other words, if a speaker can choose between two encodings differing only in their formal complexity, choosing the most complex one implies referring to an entity less accessible to the addressee than the entity that would have been referred to with the simplest encoding (see, for instance, Ariel 1990or Givón 2002. Example (14) above may illustrate this point, and is therefore reproduced again as (17) with additional context and omitting the glosses of the fragment already given. ...
This paper studies the role of two different types of motivation that have been proposed to explain the use of subject personal pronouns in Spanish, namely their function as indications for the addressee to identify the subject’s referent, and their suitability for expressing informational values such as contrastiveness or focus. This study focuses exclusively on third-person forms and relies on conversational data. The distribution of third-person pronouns is analysed combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. It will be argued that the informational and referential properties of subject personal pronouns are by themselves insufficient to account for their expression, their occurrence depending crucially on their activation through the previous use of units of the same type.
... In Kimbundu, however, this is not the case. According to Givón (2002), left dislocations in that language may lead to a passive interpretation. In both (10) and (11), the object of the verb that bears the thematic role, Nzua (10): the morphemes a-and -mu-agree with aana 'children', and Nzua 'John', respectively. ...
Despite recent research on the building blocks of language processing, the nature of the units involved in the production of written texts remains elusive: intonation units, which are evidenced by empirical results across a growing body of work, are not suitable for writing, where the sentence remains the common reference. Drawing on the analysis of the writing product and process, our study explores how children with and without dyslexia handle sentences. The children were asked to write a short story and the writing process was recorded using keystroke logging software (Inputlog 7 & 8). We measured the number of pauses, the nature of the language sequences segmented by pauses, and the revision operations performed throughout the process. We analyzed sentences both in product and process. Our results showed that both the written product and the writing process reflect the establishment of a syntactic schema during language processing in typical children, in line with the first functional step in processing. This was not clearly evidenced in the case of dyslexic children, due to their limited production: beyond spelling, syntactic elaboration was also affected. In contrast, it appeared that the units of language processing cannot be equated with sentences in writing: the information flow is produced through usually smaller bursts that each carry part of the meaning or correspond to a specific operation of text crafting and revision.
This book examines the young science of psycholinguistics, which attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. This book brings together the views of seventy-five leading researchers to provide a review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development, and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics.
Cognitive linguistics sets a stress on the importance of considering the phenomenon of “embodiment” through the prism of studying the core role of the human body, the corresponding cognitive and linguistic anthropomorphic structures, and their influence on man’s sensemaking of the world. Within the framework of the article, it has been demonstrated using the material of the lexical structure of the polysemantic word arm that the structure and functioning of the human body predetermines the vital aspects of our thinking, verbalization and existence in general. Lexical invariant of this polysemantic word is defined as a cluster of dominant features that underlies the figurative metaphorical meanings of this word which can be considered as a part of our educational system. The description of functioning of the human body is projected onto abstract and concrete objects and environmental phenomena around us.
This paper raises specific puzzles for the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) based on certain crosslinguistic patterns. I do so by pointing out that the SMT entails two undesirable consequences: first, the SMT assumes that the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture is true; in other words, that all syntactic variation across languages is due to lexical differences. Second, it assumes that there can be no ordering restrictions on Merge, because they would imply the existence of an independent linguistically proprietary entity. I first present crosslinguistic evidence from case and agreement that the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture alone is not sufficient to account for syntactic variation. I then present evidence for the existence of ordering restrictions on Merge, based on a cartographic distinction between high and low complementizers. I argue that both of these patterns are purely syntactic, in that they are independent of Merge. I conclude that these independent problems raise puzzles for saltationist theories of language evolution.
This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.
Cognitive linguistics sets a stress on the importance of considering the phenomenon of “embodiment” through the prism of studying the core role of the human body, the corresponding cognitive and linguistic anthropomorphic structures, and their influence on man’s sensemaking of the world. Within the framework of the article, it has been demonstrated using the material of the lexical structure of the polysemantic word arm that the structure and functioning of the human body predetermines the vital aspects of our thinking, verbalization and existence in general. Lexical invariant of this polysemantic word is defined as a cluster of dominant features that underlies the figurative metaphorical meanings of this word which can be considered as a part of our educational system. The description of functioning of the human body is projected onto abstract and concrete objects and environmental phenomena around us.
As a contribution to the more general discussion on causes of language endangerment and death, we describe the language ecologies of four related languages (Bà Mambila [mzk]/[mcu], Sombә (Somyev or Kila) [kgt], Oumyari Wawa [www], Njanga (Kwanja) [knp]) of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland to reach an understanding of the factors and circumstances that have brought two of these languages, Sombә and Njanga, to the brink of extinction; a third, Oumyari, is unstable/eroded, while Bà Mambila is stable. Other related languages of the area, also endangered and in one case extinct, fit into our discussion, though with less focus. We argue that an understanding of the language ecology of a region (or of a given language) leads to an understanding of the vitality of a language. Language ecology seen as a multilayered phenomenon can help explain why the four languages of our case studies have different degrees of vitality. This has implications for how language change is conceptualised: we see multilingualism and change (sometimes including extinction) as normative.
By pushing forward my inquiry about Greenberg's Universal 20 on a metatheoretic syntactic level, there are two aspects that I find highly interesting: first, G.K. Pullum’s way of conceiving the term “formalization” overlaps with what K. Hengeveld proposed back in 1999. Second, the original Final-Over-Final syntactic principle is no longer regarded as a “Constraint” by its authors, but rather as a “Condition” applied to a Minimalist framework; hence, Minimalism is departing from its original Generative-Enumerative state, getting (again) towards a hybridization with a Model-Theoretic Approach (see works by S. Müller, G.K. Pullum and B.C. Scholz). However, instead of fostering this process, one could simply ask: is a pure Model-Theoretic Approach the best way to describe the Final-Over-Final-Constraint and to account for my way of explaining U20?
Este artigo apresenta uma análise do comportamento das categorias funcionais de tempo-aspecto-modalidade em construções hipotáticas adverbiais condicionais do português brasileiro escrito. Os dados foram extraídos de uma amostra de 24 cartas pessoais produzidas (escritas ou trocadas) no período de 1970 a 1990 no município de Chapecó, Santa Catarina. Procedeu-se ao levantamento qualitativo das categorias funcionais de temporalidade (tempo e aspecto) e de modalidade intrínsecos às construções hipotáticas condicionais. Com base no aporte teórico da Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso, buscamos compreender a relação entre a perspectiva/atitude do falante e a codificação/expressão do domínio funcional complexo (tempo-aspecto-modalidade) nas construções condicionais da amostra. Os resultados apontam a inerência da tríade funcional ao enunciado condicional, que, normalmente, está imbricada uma na outra, embora, por vezes, o falante dê ênfase a um fator específico. Vimos, portanto, que as categorias de temporalidade e modalidade se localizam em um continuum, sendo a gradualidade apresentada conforme o relevo do falante dado à proposição.
This paper investigates the tendency for verbs to appear alongside their second arguments and the differences found according to the case-marking of those arguments. The data, extracted from some classical era tragedy and comedy works, is analyzed with a Variable Rule Analysis software that shows a greater tendency for genitive arguments to co-occur with their governing verbs, followed by nominative and dative arguments, and, finally, accusative arguments. It is argued that this is a result of both iconicity and frequency of use and it is related to the cognitive effort necessary to parse the different constructions.
The volume provides original research and analyses of the multi-faceted conceptual and verbal process(es) of irony. Key topics explored include interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of irony. Collectively, the papers examine irony from psychology, embodiment studies, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, the connection and impact of irony on culture and (media) communication, different approaches to verbal irony and others—ultimately attempting to model the mechanisms underlying ironic forms and the psycholinguistic motivations for their investigation. The comprehensive treatment of these issues is fundamental for future research on irony and related phenomena, particularly on questions of its usage, the diversity and/or unity of irony and ultimately the interrelationships between figurative thought and language.
This article deals with the ethnolinguistic situation in one of the most archaic areas of language and cultural contact between South Slavic and Eastern Romance populations — the Karashevo microregion in Banat, Romania. For the first time, the lexical-semantic group of kinship terms in the Krashovani dialects from the Slavic-speaking village of Carașova and the Romanian-speaking village of Iabalcea is being analysed in a comparative perspective as two separate linguistic codes which “serve” the same local culture. The main goal of the research was to investigate patterns of borrowing mechanisms which could link lexical (sub)systems of spiritual cultureunder the conditions of intimate language contact in symbiotic communities. It will be shown that, in such situations, the equivalent translation becomes relevant as a specific strategy of linguistic code interrelationships. Even though kinship terminology in closely contacting dialectshas the potential to help linguists trace back the socio-historical conditions and outcomes of language contact (such as marriage patterns), linguistic methods have their limitations in the case of poorly documented vernaculars. These limitations could be overcome by compiling more data on “isocontacting” communities and, possibly, by analysing this data using quantitative tools.
DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2020.9.1.14
O objetivo do presente artigo é explorar as atuações de um grupo específico de marcadores discursivos interacionais, o grupo dos requisitos de apoio discursivo (RADs). Com base em uma perspectiva funcionalista de vertente norte-americana, descrevemos a multifuncionalidade de alguns desses RADs, itens basicamente interacionais, dando ênfase às suas atuações no plano textual, o que tem sido pouco explorado em trabalhos acadêmicos. Para isso, recuperamos os dados de Valle (2014), que examinou amostra de fala composta por 30 entrevistas com falantes da comunidade da Barra da Lagoa – Florianópolis/SC (Amostra Brescancini-Valle), encontrando um total de 1.610 ocorrências. Como resultado, observou-se que os RADs, para além de atuarem no plano interacional, no plano cognitivo, no plano das atitudes do falante e no plano social/identitário, cumprem também funções no plano textual. Tais itens, para além de sua função básica interacional, têm o papel de colocar foco e determinadas porções textuais, contribuindo sobremaneira para a organização do fluxo da fala.
The present book is a selection of papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (Paris 2017). The volume is divided thematically into three parts: I. Notions and categories, II. Representations and receptions, III. Learning, codification and the linguistic practices of social actors. The first part is especially concerned with data not easily handled by extant traditions of linguistic analysis, and with constructs and perspectives which proved difficult to establish in the linguist’s descriptive apparatus. Part II groups six studies dealing with alternative representations of linguistic data, and matters of interpretation and reception regarding the work of three important linguists (Saussure, Jespersen, Chomsky). The scope of part III embraces social and pedagogical practices as well as the involvement of linguists in questions of national identity.
The implicit transmission of contents in a message is one of the most effective means of persuasive communication. In both commercial and political propaganda, discursive strategies such as presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations (which we propose to recast as implicit communicative devices) are frequently used. This trend may hinge on the fact that these strategies conceal the actual communicative intention of the speaker (implicature) or his responsibility for the truth of the content conveyed (presuppositions and topicalisations). The paper proposes a reflection on the use of presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations to achieve persuasive aims in communication. A discussion will be devoted to the cognitive constraints underlying the brain response to the processing of these categories, as well as to their influence on the receiver’s mental representation of the discourse model.
This volume sets out to discuss the role of norms and normativity in both language and linguistics from a multiplicity of perspectives. These concepts are centrally important to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics, and their role and nature need to be investigated in detail. The chapters address a range of issues from general questions about ontology, epistemology and methodology to aspects of particular subfields (such as semantics and historical linguistics) or phenomena (such as construal and code-switching). The volume aims to further our understanding of language and linguistics as well as to encourage further discussion on the metatheory of linguistics. Due to the fundamental nature of the issues under discussion, this volume will be of interest to all linguists regardless of their background or fields of expertise and to philosophers concerned with language or other normative domains.
The problem of categorization in mind and language has always been a topical subject of massive studies, among which cross-discipline research is gaining particular importance in the era of technological and scientific development. The article presents a lingvo-philosophical analysis of the category of secondary potentiality traditionally referred to as subjunctive mood or counterfactuality. Language as a phenomenon of human cognition predetermined by the functioning of distributed neural networks in the two operational modes, actuality and potentiality, allows secondary, recursive circumscriptions to emerge in the referential domain of a languaging organism. These circumscriptions, or markers (units of organism-environment interactions) as purely interior semantic entities lay a basis for, or rather concur with lingvo-cognitive categories (categories of mind), one of which is the category of secondary potentiality. Its epistemic nature consists in the description of accumulated cognitive experience in relation to potential behavior within one and the same referential state. Perceiving time as a “rupture’ of spatial isotropy (G. Auletta), the organism experiences (represents) the past as a reference that does not coincide with the current, actual state of the living system. Cognitively abled to enter and newly enter into causal interactions with the inner semantic images as if they were independent entities and recursively form new, secondary descriptions, the organism generates a conceptually new epistemic unit making it possible to “convert” (reconsider) non-actuality into potentiality. The once experienced past as a cause becomes a teleonomically anticipated future effect, concurring with it in one semantic entity. As a result, the organism comes to generate a secondary potentiality - potentiality causally mediated by the subjective experience of its own realization/actualization. The findings of the lingvo-cognitive modelling of the category of secondary potentiality, first conducted in terms of lingvophilosophy and guided by the data of natural sciences, offer an apparent theoretical and applied research prospect for subsequent studies into its form-content structure.
The introduction of the perspective or viewpoint of the speaker/writer involves the expression of their attitudes, assessments and value judgements with regard to the described situation and the communicated proposition. Linguistic resources for the expression of viewpoint choices include modal, evidential and attitudinal expressions, as well as expressions of speech and thought representation. In addition to their semantic content, these expressions are indexical of the speaker/writer's subjective construal of the event (Langacker 1991a, 1991b, 2002), and reflect the extent to which the speaker/writer assumes personal responsibility for their evaluation or whether the assessment is 'potentially' shared by others (Nuyts 2001). On the basis of these notions, my own proposal considers the interaction of two parameters: 'degree of salience and explicitness of the role of the conceptualizer' and 'personal vs. shared responsibility'. In this paper I present a model for the analysis of speaker/writer's subjectivity/intersubjectivity in discourse (Marín Arrese 2006, 2007a, 2007b, in press).
Many researchers have advocated a gradualist view of language evolution, and syntax in particular, although not necessarily natural selection, including, but certainly not limited to: Givón (e.g. 1979, 2002a, b, 2009), Pinker and Bloom (1990) (see Sect. 1.3); Newmeyer (1991, 1998, 2005), Gil (2005), Jackendoff (1999, 2002), Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), Tallerman(2014, 2016), Heine and Kuteva (2007), Hurford (2007, 2012), Jӓger (2007), Progovac (2008, 2009, 2015a, 2016) [the reader is also referred to the introductory chapter of Heine and Kuteva (2007) for a good characterization and classification of a variety of earlier approaches to language evolution; see also Tallerman and Gibson (2012)]. In this chapter I consider in some detail a selection of such gradualist approaches to language evolution, looking for points of contact, and for potential for synergy, among these approaches. For each approach, I consider how it addresses the Five Problems established in Chap. 1.
This research seeks alternatives to Latin teaching in the context of higher education courses of Portuguese in Brazil before the institutional crisis that Latin and all other classical humanism icons face in modernity and in particular in Brazil. The results point to the need of proposing an object of study that resonates in the identity of the student for the learning is meaningful. From this, and assuming that Brazilian Portuguese (PB) is part of the identity of this student, the author proposes a set of Latin permanencies or recurrences of PB as a way to bring the student to meet Latin in a relevant and significant way. Those Latin permanencies or recurrences are: permanent vocalism; final /s/ and nasal deletion; generalized proclisis of unstressed clitics; use of em with motion verbs; variation of grammatical gender and thematic nominal classes; double emphatic negation; continuative gerund; analytical conditional with ir; rhizotonic participles; undeterminer se; definite demonstrative; dative with infinitive contruction. Finally, practical application alternatives of that proposal are presented in the form of didactic paths, based on the Latin permanencies and recurrences of PB toward topics of a basic Latin program in the context of higher education courses of Portuguese in Brazil.
Every human activity including language is part of a teleonomic hierarchy, where subordinate processes serve superordinate goals. The goals are pursued consciously; the processes run automatically. A teleonomic hierarchy is, at the same time, a scale between the poles of control and automation. Automation is the downgrading of an action to the level of an uncontrolled process. Regain of control over a process that has been automatized is hard or impossible.
Language activity, too, is controlled or automatic in different aspects and to different degrees. The speaker’s freedom is realized at two logical levels:
1. At the lower level, his use of grammatical operations and formatives is not free, but determined by rules of the linguistic system.
2. At the higher level, he can choose the components of his activity which he wants to control, leaving the rest to automatisms of the system.
Grammaticalization subjects operations and items to constraints of the system. This creates a uniform relation between conditioning factor and construction formed. This relation, together with frequency of use, is responsible for the automation of grammar. Since processes once automated are withdrawn from control, degrammaticalization is all but impossible.
La grammaire cognitive a commencé par s’appeler « grammaire de l’espace » et ce n’est donc pas un hasard si la cognition spatiale a joué un rôle majeur dans le développement de la théorie générale. De nos jours encore, des termes dénotant des entités spatiales comme domaine, région, espace, scène, zone, cadre, ancrage, repère sont appliqués à un très grand nombre de phénomènes.Les prépositions sont fondamentalement considérées par les grammairiens cognitivistes comme des marqueurs spatiaux dont le sens premier a été étendu à d’autres domaines. À ce titre, les prépositions révèlent de façon remarquable les mécanismes de représentation qui sous-tendent la représentation symbolique des relations spatiales. Elles sont également des indices fiables des phénomènes de transfert conceptuel entre domaines. Il est d’usage d’attribuer à chaque préposition une forme schématique abstraite, figurée au moyen d’un diagramme. Ce processus spontané de représentation permet de faire comprendre le caractère signifiant de la morphologie grammaticale, de mettre en évidence les figures et les images mentales associées au sens grammatical, de faire ressortir l’écologie et l’ancrage expérientiel des mécanismes de conceptualisation humains, de révéler l’articulation entre motivations notionnelles et fonctionnelles dans le processus de grammaticalisation.
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 the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice, since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance, explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions, such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure), grammatical relations and relational control, clause union, finiteness and governed constructions. At the same time, the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored, and the interplay between grammar, cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded, now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly, Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that — as in biology — synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development, and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.
Recent times have seen a marked growth of interest in historical linguistics, as well as an increased role for diachronic factors within synchronic theory. This suggests that a fundamental re-assessment of the relationship between synchrony and diachrony in linguistic theory is in order, particularly with regard to its role in linguistic explanation. A number of ways are indicated in which diachronic factors enter at various levels as integral and at least equal partners in the over-all explanatory structure of linguistic science.
The distance between linguistic expressions may be an iconically motivated index of the conceptual distance between the terms or events which they denote. But the length of an utterance may also correspond to the extent to which it conveys new or unfamiliar information. Reduced form may thus be an economically motivated index of familiarity. Much of the arbitrariness of grammatical structure arises where equally plausible motivations such as iconicity and economy are, in effect, competing for expression on the same linguistic dimension.
Although linguistic signs in isolation are symbolic, the system or grammar which relates them may be diagrammatically iconic in two ways: (a) by isomorphism, a bi-unique correspondence tends to be established between signans and signatum; (b) by motivation, the structure of language directly reflects some aspect of the structure of reality. Isomorphism is so nearly universal that deviations from it require explanation. Motivation, although widespread, establishes a typology of languages, as indicated in Saussure's Cours. The evidence of artificial taboo languages suggests that degree of motivation co-varies inversely with the number of 'prima onomata' in the lexicon.
To account for the large demands on working memory during text comprehension and expert performance, the traditional models of working memory involving temporary storage must be extended to include working memory based on storage in long-term memory. In the proposed theoretical framework cognitive processes are viewed as a sequence of stable states representing end products of processing. In skilled activities, acquired memory skills allow these end products to be stored in long-term memory and kept directly accessible by means of retrieval cues in short-term memory, as proposed by skilled memory theory. These theoretical claims are supported by a review of evidence on memory in text comprehension and expert performance in such domains as mental calculation, medical diagnosis, and chess.
Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a ‘natural logic’, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43819/1/11229_2004_Article_BF00413602.pdf
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