Program

(Abstracts below)

Thursday, January 27

Friday, January 28

Abstracts

Grammar as recycling

Ewa Dąbrowska
Northumbria University

According to the usage-based, constructionist theories, knowing a language involves knowing a large number of symbolic units  form-meaning pairings of varying size and degree of specificity. Thus, very general grammatical patterns and various local idiosyncrasies, words, idioms and forumulaic phrases are all represented in the same format; and constructional schemas (symbolic units which are both complex and at least partly schematic) have the same structure as their instantiations and are acquired by generalizing over actual usage events. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that speakers store large numbers of preconstructed phrases and low-level patterns, even when these can be derived from more abstract constructions, and that ordinary language use relies heavily on such relatively concrete, lexically specific units rather than abstract rules or schemas that apply across the board.
One of the advantages of such an aproach is that it provides a straightforward explanation of how grammar can be learned from the input; and in fact, previous work (e.g. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005) has demonstrated that the utterances children produce can be derived by superimposing and juxtaposing lexically specific units derived directly from utterances that they had previously experienced. In this talk, I argue that such a recycling account can also explain adults ability to produce complex fluent speech in real time.
The proposed account has some interesting implications. First, speakers with different usage histories may assemble the same expressions in different ways; and the same speaker may assemble the same expressions in different ways on different occasions. Patterns in language emerge because speakers interact with each other and accommodate to each others speech without necessarily sharing the same grammar. However, because all competent speakers have experienced vast numbers of utterances, the linguistic form of the majority of new utterances is overdetermined by speakers linguistic histories. Thus, individual grammars (I-languages) are different; what is shared between speakers is E-language: the set of expressions that have actually been produced in real usage events.

Cognitive-Semiotic Dynamics of Language: Predicational Language, Norms and Higher-order Behavioural Control

Paul J. Thibault
Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, PR China;
Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

pauljthibault@yahoo.com
pauljthibault@gmail.com

Utterances are always context-dependent. This commonplace observation is often taken to mean that utterances stand in some kind of referential or encoded correspondence relationship to whatever it is they refer to in the world ‘out there’. Such a view, which typically takes the sentence as its upper level unit of analysis, fails to account for grammar as a system of intrinsic functional constraints on language as a form of social action that is embedded in what Goffman called the ‘interaction order’. I take the view that ‘grammar’ is a virtual system of second-order cultural patterns. A natural language is not an input-output system of encodings and decodings for the transmission of contents from one mind to another. Instead, it is a normative and value-realizing resource consisting of semiotically salient differentiation-types for producing, acting on and transforming situation conventions and the cognitive representations and values that people have in the situations in which these conventions operate.
When coupled to the micro-temporal bodily dynamics of first-order languaging in the ‘real time’ of face-to-face interactive encounters, grammar has the power to guide and modulate the behavioural dynamics of first-order languaging. But it does more than this. It shapes not only our perceptions and understandings of the behavioural event (e.g. a vocalization), but also how the action-perception potential of the vocalization links interactants to each other and to their shared worlds in ways that can cognitively transform the agents’ relationships to each other and to their worlds. Moreover, this happens in ways that are motivated by the seeking of values on the part of the participants in interaction (Thibault 2004, Hodges 2007). Grammar is therefore irreducibly normative and suffused with cultural values.  I would suggest that many linguistic phenomena operate according to (interpersonal) constraints that arise from the self-organizing processes whereby persons align to cultural norms. The issue then is not how one uses the symbol system of a given language, but of how persons-in-interaction align to and are constrained by norms that shape the interaction itself and its regularities.

After illustrating and explaining some of the grammatical mechanisms involved, I shall relate these findings to some aspects of the cognitive-interactional dynamics of predicational language and its capacity to operate on and transform shared consensual domains in cognitively and socially salient ways. I hope to show that the lexicogrammatical resources of second-order language can be re-theorized as a means of extending the action-perception potential of agents in ways that llead to high-order behavioural control. I will also discuss some of the ways in which the semantics of languaging, seen as ways of co-acting and co-orienting agents, is distributed. Rejecting the code view (see Love 2007), I argue that the functionality of language can thus be rewritten not so much in terms of ‘language functions’ in language, but in terms of the functions of languaging-agents-in-interaction (Thibault In Press). Text- and discourse-based theories short-circuit true explanation by locating the architecture of language and its functionality in abstract and de-somatized verbal-textual patterns, resulting in explanatory circularity. In actual fact, languaging behaviour cannot be divorced from or adequately explained without reference to human mental and somatic capacities (Cowley 2006; Thibault 2003, 2008). The question to be investigated becomes: how does languaging behaviour extend and enhance the capacities of agents to act on their worlds? How do agents operate on and transform the perceptual, perspectival, cognitive and interactional dynamics of themselves and others in the consensual domains (Maturana 1970) in which they live their lives.

References

Cowley, Stephen 2006. ‘Distributed language: biomechanics, functions and the origins of talk.’ In: Lyon, C., Nehaniv, C. & Cangelosi, A. (eds.) The Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication, Springer: London, pp. 105-129.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. Introduction to Functional Grammar. 1st ed. London and Melbourne: Arnold.
Hodges, Bert 2007. ‘Good prospects: ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation’. Language Sciences 29: 584–604.
Kravchenko, Alexander 2003. Sign, Meaning, Knowledge. Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Peter Lang.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Love, Nigel 2007. ‘Are languages digital codes?’. Language Sciences 29: 690–709.
Maturana, H. R. Biology of Cognition. BCI Report 9.0: University of Illinois, Urbana,
Martin, James R. 1992. ‘Macro-proposals: meaning by degree’. In W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson (eds.), Discourse Description: Diverse analyses of a fund raising text, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 359-396
McGregor, William M. 1997. Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Thibault, Paul J. 2003. 'Body dynamics, social meaning-making, and scale heterogeneity: re-considering contextualization cues and language as mixed-mode semiosis', in Discussing John J. Gumperz, Susan Eerdmans, Carlo Prevignano, and Paul J. Thibault (eds.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 127-147.
Thibault, Paul J. 2004. Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-other Dynamics as a Complex System. London and New York: Continuum.
Thibault, Paul J. 2005. ‘What kind of minded being has language: Anticipatory dynamics, arguability, and agency in a normatively and recursively self-transforming learning system, Part 1’. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1, 2: 261-335.
Thibault, Paul J. 2008. ‘Face-to-face communication and body language’. In Handbooks of Applied Linguistics (HAL) Linguistics for Problem-Solving: Perspectives on Communication Competence, Language and Communication Problems, and Practical Solutions, Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos (eds.),  Volume 2: Interpersonal Communication. Gerd Antos &  Eija Ventola (eds.). Berlin. Mouton, pp. 285-330.
Thibault, Paul J. In Press. ‘Grammar as System of Second-order Cultural Constraints on Action and Perception: intrinsic functional constraints on language as system of action and representation’ Journal of Ecological Psychology.

Relation between a grammatical feature and objects’ description: theoretical framework and empirical results

Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
University of Warsaw and Polish Academy of Sciences

This work represents approach to language study which attempts to reconcile its symbolic and dynamic nature. The relation of symbols to dynamics is specified by processes of similar to the processes of measurement and control in biological systems (Pattee 1969. 1982). In such a framework, stable configurations of symbols (grammar) arise under the pressure of many diverse forces. To name a few crucial ones, the structures of language reflect: 1) the structure of the „measured world” (as it enters human co-action); 2) the structure of the measuring device – which in this case are the cognitive properties of an individual (Deacon, 1997); 3) the culturally dependent function of regulating socially appropriate interactions (e.g., Schegloff, 1996) – i.e., adaptation to co-construction of meaning in dialogue, 4) adaptation to acquisition and transmission processes (e.g., Smith et al., 2003; Kirby et al., 2008) and to the medium in which symbols are realized (Galantucci et al, 2010).
This framework for understanding the sources of structure in language has guided our research on the relation between a syntactic feature (grammatical gender) and semantic aspects (conceptualization of objects). By using quite traditional psycholinguistic methods we show that this relation must be considered on several different time-scales on which the grammatical feature constrains the cognitive and developmental dynamics and, in turn, is shaped as a carrier of valuable constraints. Thus, qualitatively different mechanisms, operating on at least three different time-scales might be responsible for the pattern of results we observe in a single experimental task. This may explain why studies that limit their explanatory framework to one system (individual cognition) and one time-scale (on-line interaction) may experience difficulties accounting for their results.

References

Galantucci, B., Kroos, C., Rhodes, T. (2010). The effects of rapidity of fading on communication systems. Interaction studies, 11(1), 100-111.
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., and Smith, K. (2008) Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. PNAS, 105(31),10681--10686.
Pattee, H.H. (1969). How does a molecule become a message? Developmental Biology Supplement, 3, 1-16.
Pattee, H.H. (1972). Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H.Waddington (Ed.), Towards a theoretical biology 4, Essays (pp. 248-258). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pattee, H.H. (1982). Cell psychology: An evolutionary approach to the symbol-matter problem. Cognition and Brain Theory, 5, 325-341.
Schegloff, E.A. (1996). Turn organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In: Ochs, E., Schegloff, E.A. & Thompson, S. (eds.). Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge University Press.
Smith, K., Brighton, H., & Kirby, S. (2003). Complex systems in language evolution: The cultural emergence of compositional structure. Advances in Complex Systems, 6(4), 537–558.

Action formation – an interactional view on the relation between use and structure

Jacob Steensig
Aarhus University

Our daily lives are made up of actions that we do through talk. This makes “action formation”, that is, the process of performing communicative actions through sounds, words, gestures etc. – or How to Do Things with Words as Austin (1962) terms it – a core factor of human life.

Austin and many other researchers have taken the basic “conduit metaphor” of communication (Reddy 1979) as their ontological point of departure. According to this view, a “speaker” starts out with an intended meaning, encodes it in language (making use of the existing structures of the language), sends the resulting utterance to a “hearer”, whose task it is to decode the utterance and get at the intended meaning.

This decontextualized and de-socialized view on language use has been challenged by 45 years of research on talk-in-interaction. This research approach takes recordings of naturally occurring social interactions as its empirical basis and the interactive construction of meaning as its main object of analysis.

The present talk will present an interactional view on the relation between language use and language structure by looking at instances of action formation in social interaction. It will be argued that the construction and negotiation of social action is basic to our use of linguistic structures. Some thoughts and arguments will be offered on the third problem that is announced as central for the symposium: Language as a system must, in my view, be understood in relation to systematic features of socially and temporally organized patterns of interaction.

References
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to do things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon.
Reddy, M. J. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In A. Ortony (ed.): Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 284-324.

Usage-patterns: a deflationary view

Stephen J. Cowley
University of Hertfordshire

Interaction links the sub-atomic, physico-chemistry and living-systems within the changing ecosphere. While dynamics dominate nature, biology self-organizes parameters that constrain the time evolution of physical processes. There is, however, little reason to think that such boundary conditions are sufficient to account for syntax, grammar and/or word-meaning (sgwm). Indeed, given its discontinuous nature, the verbal is biologically anomalous. Recognising this, the paper’s thesis is that usage-patterns stand outside the biophysical domain. Rather, like numbers, words and their derivatives are cultural constructs that rely on us to connect biology with the artificial.
Humans are skilled in detecting and exploiting sgwm. Indeed, beyond a certain age, sgwm are ‘perceived’, ‘realized’ and ‘known’. For the observer, they are real: to clarify their status, we need phonetics. I present evidence that: (a) where words contribute to language-activity, sgwm can be marginal; (b) making/tracking phonetic gestures complements embodied sense-making. Humans exploit phonosemantics or events that are, at once, dynamic and phenomenal. In short, we take a language stance (Cowley, in press). In its verbal aspect, language consists in ‘real-patterns’ (Dennett, 1991; Ross, 2000; Ladyman & Ross, 2007): usage gains traction from  – not individual brains – but bodies that are charmed into acting as collectives.
Usage-patterns link virtual constraints with self-organizing boundary-conditions. As humans learn to talk (and write), we acquire habits that, given who we are, can be over-ruled. Language skills prompt us to misunderstand, imagine and confabulate; the verbal becomes woven into objects, institutions and traditions. We encourage belief in imaginary objects: sgwm stabilize communities whose practices link traditions with artifacts. This shapes coevolutionary dynamics and, eventually, gives rise to history. Usage-patterns are fictions and, by implication, language results from human swarming.  

References

Cowley, S.J.  (In press). Taking a language stance. To appear Ecological Psychology.
Dennett, D.C. (1991b). Real patterns. The Journal of Philosophy, 88 (1), 27-51.
Ladyman, J. & Ross, D. (2007). Every Thing Must Go. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, D. 2000. Rainforest realism: a Dennettian theory of existence. In D. Ross, A, Brook and D. Thompson (Eds.) Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment. MIT Press: Cambridge MA, pp. 147-168.

Emergence, Umiversality and Stability of Linguistic Structures: Clues from Color Categorization Modeling

Andrea Baronchelli
UPC, Barcelona
http://sites.google.com/site/andreabaronchelli

The study of color naming patterns provides crucial insights into the nature of language dynamics. Color systems vary in fact hugely over different populations and shift their meaning in time but nonetheless they exhibit universal properties shared across different languages. Here we address these issues in the framework of a numerical model describing a population of communicating agents that face a continuum environment (as it is the case for color categorization). We show (i) that purely cultural interactions are able to trigger the emergence of a shared categorization system [1], (ii) that linguistic interaction can induce universal patterns in categorization provided that human perceptive system is taken into account [2] and (iii) that in the framework of the model the emerging asymptotic categorization corresponds to a metastable state where global shifts are always possible but become progressively more unlikely [3]. We point out that this aging mechanism exhibits striking quantitative analogies to what is observed in the statistical physics of glassy systems, and we speculate that this might be a general scenario in language dynamics where shared linguistic conventions would not emerge as attractors, but rather as metastable states.

References

[1] A. Puglisi, A. Baronchelli and V. Loreto. "Cultural route to the
emergence of linguistic categories". PNAS 105, 7936 (2008).
[2] A. Baronchelli, et al. "Modeling the emergence universality in
color naming patterns". PNAS 107, 2403 (2010).
[3] A. Mukherjee, et al. "Aging in language dynamics". (Submitted for
publication, 2010).

Discourse events and their influence on the use of metaphors:
The case of anger and love conceptualization

Anke Beger
Flensburg University

Metaphor research has developed from making general claims about our conceptual structures expressed in metaphorical language use (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980) to acknowledging the importance of the particularities of discourse events when researching metaphors (e.g. Cameron 2010). The present study shows how different discourse events influence metaphor use when communicating concepts of anger and love.
We conducted two studies in different genres and with different discourse settings. The first study analyzes metaphors for anger and love in psychology guides, the second in academic discourse. The corpus of the psychology guides consists of short written conversations between experts and laypersons. The corpus of academic discourse comprises six filmed psychology classes at an American college. Although we have the same topics in both discourse settings, the application of metaphors differs. Instead of having certain concepts or even models (cf. Kövecses 1988; Lakoff & Kövecses 1987) of anger and love that are observable in metaphorical language use, the participants express very specific emotion concepts that vary between the different discourse settings with respect to the discourse goals and the discourse structure.

References

Cameron, Lynne (2010) “The Discourse Dynamics Framework for Metaphor”, in: Cameron, Lynne & Malsen, Robert (eds.) Metaphor Analysis: Research in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities. London: Equinox, 77-97.
Kövecses, Zoltán (1988) The Language of Love: The Semantics of Passion in Conversational
English. Lewisburg/London/Toronto: Bucknell University Press.
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George & Kövecses, Zoltán (1987) "The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English", in: Holland, Dorothy & Quinn, Naomi (eds.) Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195-221.

Acceptability judgments, frequency,
and the problem of 'free variation' in morphosyntax

Neil Bermel
University of Sheffield, UK

Keywords: Czech, frequency, corpus, grammaticality, morphology

Emergentist models (e.g. Langacker 2000, Goldberg 2009) have provided an empirically and theoretically satisfying model of how language structures arise in a speaker's grammar. The most frequently discussed examples (e.g. the English ditransitive) nonetheless leave some puzzling questions unanswered. I will draw on the results of a recently completed study on variation in Czech morphosyntax, in which two competing desinences in each of two different cases are shown to be in variation, and reference to external factors - such as the syntactic environment - can explain only part of.  Our data consist of soundings in the Czech National Corpus on a select group of nouns, compared with the results of an acceptability survey of three hundred Czech adults.  Our findings support the general outlines of an emergentist perspective in confirming the link between high frequency in a corpus and high acceptability to native speakers (cf. Divjak 2008, Kempen & Harbusch 2008, Bader & Häussler 2009), but the persistence of low-frequency items with high acceptability ratings poses a challenge for models of statistical pre-emption.   At issue is the role acceptability judgments play in illuminating - or traducing? - how we define "grammaticality".

References:

Bader, Markus & Jana Häussler. 2009. Toward a model of grammaticality judgments. Journal of Linguistics45. 1-58.

Czech National Corpus - SYN2005.  Available on the web at www.korpus.cz.

Divjak, Dagmar. 2008. On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability. In Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.),Corpus linguistics, computer tools and applications – State of the art, 213-233. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Goldberg, Adele.  2009.  The nature of generalization in language. Cognitive Linguistics 20 (1), 93–127

Kempen, Gerard & Karin Harbusch. 2005. The relationship between grammaticality ratings and corpus frequencies: A case study into word order variability in the midfield of German clauses. In Stephan Kepser & Marga Reis (eds.), Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical and computational perspectives, 329-349. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kempen, Gerard & Karin Harbusch. 2008. Comparing linguistic judgments and corpus frequencies as windows on grammatical competence: A study of argument linearization in German clauses. In Anita Steube (ed.), The discourse potential of underspecified structures, 179-192. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald. 2000. A dynamic usage-based model. In Michael Barlow & Suzanne Kemmer (eds.),Usage-based models of language, 1–63. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications

Acquiring an unstable structure: Danish complement clause constructions

Ditte Boeg Thomsen
KU

The status of cognitive predicates taking finite sentential complements has been central in discussions of the ways in which language systems may be shaped by recurring communicative needs. Thus, speakers’ habit of using matrix clauses with e.g. think or guess for evidential modification more frequently than for reference to mental processes supposedly causes speakers to reinterpret the original complement clause constructions as simple clauses with the matrix clause grammaticalizing into an adverbial element, losing compositionality on the way. When children acquire this structurally ambiguous construction, one might expect their ontogenetic development to mirror the diachronic process, so that they initially treat the matrix clauses as unanalyzed modifying elements and only later come to recognize their components, and this is the hypothesis I explore by examining the spontaneous speech of 58 Danish children aged 1;10-6;7. I subject constructions with tro (‘think’, ‘believe’) to analyses of distribution and phonetic reduction before comparing this acquisitional pattern with the ones found with other complement-taking predicates. I conclude that Danish children do not treat clauses with complement-taking predicates as unanalyzed formulas, but that the tro clauses display the same formal signs of ambiguity between status as main clause and background element as in adult language.

Bibliography
Boye, Kasper, & Peter Harder. 2007. Complement-taking predicates. Usage and linguistic structure. Studies in Language 31, no. 3: 569-606.

Diessel, Holger, & Michael Tomasello. 2001. The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: A corpus-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 12, no. 2: 97-141.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2010. What conversational English tells us about the nature of grammar: A critique of Thompson’s analysis of object complements. In Language usage and language structure, ed. Kasper Boye and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, 3–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Thompson, Sandra A. 2002. “Object complements” and conversation. Studies in Language 26, no. 1: 125-164.

Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Grammar and idea-orientation

Steven Breunig
SDU

In this talk, I explore the thesis that writing contributes to the emergence of a stable language structure, in which the cognitive and social dynamics of use and structure are oriented towards engaging with ideas [5]. Specifically, grammatical principles [4] provide for the coordination, subordination and modification of ideas during writing at the micro-level for creating cohesion and coherence within and between sentences [2] and at the macro-level for the discourse topic [13]. Thus I propose that the manipulation of written vehicles [11] has an idea-orientation, compared to oral communication with an other-orientation [10] for socio-generative [9] and communicative ends [12]. The analysis is based on a survey of process approaches to writing [3, 6], as well as data from University students involved in composition and revision exercises and from corpora of oral language for comparative purposes. Various grammatical constructions are examined to explore these dynamics. The analysis shows that, like talk, initial linguistic production in writing is “ungrammatical”, though not unstructured [8]. Yet it is mainly during revision that grammatical principles serve as cultural scaffolding for developing ideas. The results of the analysis and its implications are interpreted from the perspective of distributed language [1] and cognition [7].

Key words: idea-orientation, grammar and distributed cognition

[1] Cowley, Stephen. 2007. The cognitive dynamics of distributed language. Language Sciences. Vol. 29. 575-583.

[2] Faigley, Lester and Stephen Witte. 1981. Analyzing Revision. College Composition and Communication. Vol 32. No. 4. 400-414.

[3] Flower, Linda and John R. Hayes. 1981. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 32. No. 4. 365-387.

[4] Frogner, Ellen. 1939. Grammar Approach versus Thought Approach in Teaching Sentence Structure. The English Journal. Vol. 28. No. 7. 518-526.

[5] Goody, Jack and Ian Watt. 1963. The Consequences of Literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 5. No. 3. 304-345.

[6] Hayes, John R. 1996. A New Framework for Understanding Cognition and Affect in Writing. In The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences and Applications. C. Michael Levy and Sarah Ransdell, eds. LEA: New Jersey. 1-27.

[7] Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. London: MIT Press.

[8] Kaufer, David S. and John R. Hayes, Linda Flower. 1988. Composing Sentences. Research in the Teaching of English. Vol. 20. No. 2. 121-140.

[9] Kravchenko, Alexander V. 2009. The experiential basis of speech and writing as different cognitive domains. Pragmatics & Cognition. Vol. 17. No. 3. 527-548.

[10] Linell, Per. 2007. Dialogicality in languages, minds and brains: is there a convergence between dialogism and neuro-biology? Language Sciences. Vol. 29. tk

[11] Menary, Richard. 2007. Writing as Thinking. Language Sciences. Vol. 29. 621-632.

[12] Nichols, Johanna. 1984. Functional Theories of Grammar. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol 13. 97-117.

[13] Witte, Stephen P. 1983. Topical Structure and Revision: An Exploratory Study. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 34. No. 3. 313-341.

Partonomic segmentation as a factor of language change

Gabriela Sauciuc
Aarhus University

In cognition studies, the notion of event structure accounts for the fact that humans, during perception, break down the continuous flow of stimuli into smaller, more easily manipulable chunks. This phenomenon, termed partonomic segmentation, is also reflected in event conceptualization. European philologists and diachronic linguists have long ago noticed a recurrent pattern of meaning extension where chunks of events come to designate the entire event; this type of semantic change was labelled metonymic conversion. But their observations would never go beyond descriptive inventories and never crossed the borders of purely linguistic explanations in an attempt to find the mechanisms that may account for such patterns.

In this talk I would like to focus on partonomic segmentation and situational binding as two of the processes (together with others at work in the attentional-affective and memory systems) that allow for these well documented patterns of semantic change. In order to do so, I will rely on extensive cross-linguistic data showing that affective concepts are accessed and structured partonomically (in terms of antecedents, concomitants and consequences) and etymological conjectures for affective lexical labels indicating that semantic change exploits partonomic segmentation and situational binding.

If you want to learn about language, forget about language

Sune Vork Steffensen
SDU

Any definition of the ontological status of syntax, grammar and word meaning depends on an a priori definition of language. Linguistics has for centuries built upon the ontological fallacy that language is a phenomenon in its own right, i.e. it can be ‘used’, has a ‘structure’, or there are patterns ‘in’ it [2].
This paper takes a starting point in the distinction between first order languaging, i.e. the dynamics of human co-action and interaction, and second order language, i.e. the structural ‘patterns’ that are assumed to underlie or stabilize dynamical interaction [1, 3].
It is argued that most usage-based models commit a functional fallacy, because they ascribe grammatical patterns to a reified ‘communicative event’. They ignore that “the role played by extra-grammatical systems in communication means that grammar per se is not always going to tailor itself to our communicative needs” [4].
As a radical alternative, it is argued, that language is a non-local phenomenon [8]. Thus, Grammatical patterns do not (just) stabilize linguistic interaction, but human existence in a broader ecosocial reality [10], i.e. in an extended ecology [6] constrained by physical, social and moral obligations. This hypothesis is elaborated with grammatical, deictic and phonetic examples [5, 7, 9].

References
[1] Cowley, S.J. (ed.). 2009. Distributed Language. Spec. issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(3).

[2] Linell, P. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations. London: Routledge.

[3] Love, N. 2007. Are languages digital codes? Language Sciences, 29(5) (special issue on Distributed Language, ed. S.J. Cowley), 690-709.

[4] Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2003): Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage. Language, 79(4), 682-707.

[5] Steffensen, S.V. 2008. The Ecology of Grammar. Dialectical, Holistic and Autopoietic Principles in Ecolinguistics. In: M. Döring, H. Penz and W. Trampe (eds.): Language, Signs and Nature. Ecolinguistic dimensions of environmental discourse. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 89-106.

[6] Steffensen, S.V. 2009. Language, Languaging and the Extended Mind Hypothesis. Pragmatics & Cognition 17(3), 677-697.

[7] Steffensen, S.V. In press. Care and Conversing in Dialogical Systems. Language Sciences (special issue: Caring and conversing: The distributed dynamics of dialogue, ed. by Bert Hodges, Jim Martin and Sune Vork Steffensen).

[8] Steffensen, S.V. and Cowley, S.J. 2010. Signifying bodies and health: a non-local aftermath. In: S.J. Cowley, J.C. Major, S.V. Steffensen and A. Dinis (eds.). Signifying Bodies: Biosemiosis, Interaction and Health. Braga: Catholic University of Portugal. 331-356.

[9] Steffensen, S.V., Thibault P.J. and Cowley, S.J. 2010. Living in the social meshwork: the case of health interaction. In: S.J. Cowley, J.C. Major, S.V. Steffensen and A. Dinis (eds.). Signifying Bodies: Biosemiosis, Interaction and Health. Braga: Catholic University of Portugal. 207-244.

[10] Thibault, P.J. 2004. Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body. An Ecosocial Semiotic Theory. London and New York: Continuum.

Meaning Change in Spatial Concepts

Martin Thiering
Humboldt Universitaet Berlin

This paper focuses on the change of spatial concepts in two rather unfamiliar languages. It explores the degree to which environmental experience and spatial orientation is reflected in language. Non-linguistic information has its impact upon spatial language and categorization, i.e., reference to space and its relation to semiotic systems. Data will be presented showing the influence and constructive process of environmental landmarks and cultural heritage upon shaping of spatial categorization in the two languages. Eipo is spoken in the central mountains of the Province of Papua, West New Guinea and Dene Chipewyan is spoken in Cold Lake, Alberta. The general aim is to survey some of the very fundamental spatial notions based on environmental or regional landmarks. These landmarks shape and determine a detailed topographical map of the environment as represented via language and transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Indeed, the data indicate a dense linguistic system of topographical maps. This system is not only about to change, but it is fair stating a loss of spatial concepts and hence a reduction of spatial language use. This is due to the drastic cultural changes in the two languages.

Coming to terms: an experimental perspective on dialogical meaning making

Riccardo Fusaroli & Kristian Tylén
Aarhus University

This paper focuses on the reciprocal relationship between social coordination and linguistic meaning making. Reviewing a number of studies within experimental pragmatics and semiotics, we propose an account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by the way local dialogical dynamics realize and profile meaning potentialities in our shared biology, culture and environment (Tylén, Fusaroli et al. accepted). We then present data from an experiment in which dyads freely negotiated joint decisions related to a psychophysical visual discrimination task. Linguistic analyses suggest that performance in the task critically depend on the participants’ abilities to reciprocally adapt to each other’s ways of talking about confidence. Such adaptations are found both in terms of 1) local alignment: a participant’s inclination to repeat confidence expressions used by the other participant in the preceding trial (i.e. ‘the principle of precedence’, Garrod and Doherty 1994), and 2) global convergence: the tendency that dyads converge on a single set of confidence expressions rather than indecisively drift between numerous types of expressions. Thus, the more the participants come to “speak the same language”, the stronger they seem to benefit from their cooperation.  We argue this is a circular process: Through iterated social interactions, language is gradually carved into a tool fit to the local contextual needs (in the particular experimental case; a shared scale for comparison of individual confidences). And, as a shared, task related language evolves, participants optimize their social coordination and thus increase their performance in the task at hand.

Garrod, S. and G. Doherty (1994). "Conversation, co-ordination and convention: an empirical investigation of how groups establish linguistic conventions." Cognition 53(3): 181-215.
Tylén, K., R. Fusaroli, et al. (accepted). "Making Sense Together: a dynamical account of linguistic meaning making." Semiotica xxx(xxx).

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