From V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk Wed May 3 16:13:14 2006 From: V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk (V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk) Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 17:13:14 +0100 Subject: New MA in English Language/Funding opportunities Message-ID: Dear Colleagues We (The School of English at the University of Liverpool) have developed a new MA programme in English Language and Linguistics which will be up and running in the next academic session (2006-2007). I'd be very grateful if you could pass the information below to students/colleagues who may be interested. Thanks very much in advance for your help. Best wishes, Victorina School of English Chatham St. University of Liverpool L69 7ZR ******************************************************************** MA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL This MA programme is aimed at students who have studied English language and/or linguistics as part of their first degree and are interested in developing their knowledge of the organisation of the English language in its different levels, the ways in which English varies across social, historical and textual boundaries and how successive generations of scholars have approached the issue of how to conceptualise and describe the nature of language. Self-funding International Students who are liable for the full International Fees may be eligible for an International Advancement Award (worth £1,000) and an Accommodation Voucher (worth £500). For further details see: http://www.liv.ac.uk/international/scholarships.htm For further information about the programme, please either see: http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/ma_courses/MA%20English%20Language%20and%20Lingui.htm or contact Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz (v.gonzalez-diaz at liverpool.ac.uk) From bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon May 8 09:35:48 2006 From: bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de (bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de) Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 09:35:48 GMT Subject: 2nd CfP Session on "Lexical Bootstrapping in Early Language and Conceptual Development" - GCLA conference Message-ID: Dear all, Please find below the second call for papers for our theme session on lexical bootstrapping in early language and conceptual development. With best wishes, Susanna Second Call for Papers LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CHILD CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT Theme session To be held at the SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE GERMAN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION, Munich, 5-7 October 2006 PLEASE NOTE: - DEADLINE EXTENSION - CLARIFICATION ABOUT CONTENTS OF SUBMITTED ABSTRACTS - POSSIBILITY OF PUBLICATION Apart from some few exceptions (Brown 1958, Nelson 1973), the research on child lexical development did not receive much attention from students of child language in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to some statements found in the more recent literature (Rothweiler & Meibauer 1999), this fact is not really surprising when one considers the very influential role then played by formal linguistics with its primacy of syntactic structures and the view of lexicon and semantics as something rather epiphenomenal. From the 1980s on, this state of affairs has changed dramatically. For one thing, over the last 25 years or so, there has been more and more interest in topics related to child lexical acquisition. Over these several years, the research has issued many relevant theoretical insights resp. assumptions, and methodologies about lexical development, such as the view of individual differences in early vocabulary composition in terms of a continuum between referential and expressive style (Nelson 1973) and the holophrastic nature of early words (Nelson 1985), the differentiation between expressive and receptive vocabulary, as well as the use of correlational methods (Bates et al. 1988), or the role of domain-general cognitive skills of categorisation and theory of mind (Tomasello 2003), amongst several others. Secondly and most importantly, this body of research (much of which has been done within functionalist-cognitivist frameworks) seems to allow for the formulation of general assumptions concerning child language development in general, as well as the interplay between language and conceptual development. Thus, especially studies focussing on within- and cross-domain developmental correlations seem to provide evidence for a Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Dale et al. 2000, Dionne et al. 2003), i.e., the assumption that early lexical development, as mapping of words to referents or their conceptualisations, and even to whole propositions, is not only prior to, but also pre-requisite for the emergence of morpho-syntactic constructions (which, incidentally, are not fundamentally different from words, in that they are equally form-meaning pairs). The lexical bootstrapping hypothesis presupposes an early stage in lexical development characterized by the learning of archilexemes, a term originally proposed by Zemb (1978), as grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only, here understood as the means by which the child begins to cognize and categorize the world. Such assumption on the fundamental role of early lexical acquisition for later language development as a whole challenges the view about the primacy of syntax over lexicon and semantics that has been postulated in these 50 years of formal linguistics. For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion. Empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions dealing with aspects of word learning in the one-word phase (and perhaps also before) that might predict diverse aspects of later language and conceptual development of typically developing and impaired children may focus on one or more of the following questions and topics (evidently, other suggestions are equally welcome): - How can measures of, and assumptions on, early lexical development (vocabulary size, vocabulary composition, vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary style, vocabulary spurt, critical mass, others?) be correlated to measures of later grammatical emergence and development (emergence and proportion of multi-word utterances, Mean Length of Utterance, development of inflectional paradigms and use of function words, realisation of argument constructions, others?) How reliable are such correlations? - How can the study of early lexical development shed light on the issue of individual variance and developmental language disorders? Can aspects of early word learning (expressive vs. referential style, dissimilar timing of vocabulary development, peculiarities in vocabulary composition, peculiarities in the conceptual mapping, others?) provide criteria for a differentiation between mere individual variance and developmental disorder, as well as for a differentiation between transient and persistent disorders? Can such aspects be used in the context of early diagnosis of such disorders? - Which cognitive processes underlie word learning as both word-to-concept mapping and categorization task? Are there constraints and principles at play? What is the nature of such constraints—are they domain (=language) specific or domain general? How are they related to later language and conceptual development? - Does a notion of lexical bootstrapping in language acquisition preclude other bootstrapping mechanisms in the stages before the emergence of grammar, such as prosodic, semantic, syntactic bootstrapping, or can interplay amongst these types of bootstrapping mechanisms be assumed? - Related to the last question, how does the child construct her mental lexicon? How is it structured—is this structure modular or network-like or anything else? Which processes of reorganisation are at work along development? - Can early words (at least partially) be seen as holophrases in that they (at least partially) refer to whole propositions? Which developmental change(s) takes place in the transition from holophrastic one-word utterances to multi-word utterances? - Which evidences can be drawn from studies of word learning in children with cognitive developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, others?), as well as in blind and deaf children? - Which insights can be drawn from research based on (i) corpora analyses; (ii) computer learning simulations; (iii) neural activation in experimental situations, such as categorisation tasks; (iv) lexical/conceptual processing in adults with and without language disorders (e.g. aphasia)? - Which similarities, differences or peculiarities can be observed when comparing mono- and multilingual word learning, as well as comparing monolingual and cross-linguistic studies? Depending on the number of contributions, the special session will take place at one or two days of the conference. The theme session will be framed by a paper introducing the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development and, again depending on the number of contributions, one or two discussion rounds. BEFORE SENDING IT, MAKE SURE PLEASE THAT YOUR ABSTRACT: - indicates EXPLICITLY how and to which extent YOUR STUDY IS RELATED TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING in child language and conceptual development. Does your study support or refute the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis? If yes, how and to which extent? If not, why not? - is detailed, i.e., it is about 1000 WORDS LONG, not including list of references, tables, diagrams, etc.; - indicates explicitly and in detail the EMPIRICAL BASIS of your study; this holds also for theoretical works, i.e., theoretical work might rely, for instance, on empirical studies of other researchers, but please NOT SOLELY ON INTROSPECTIVE METHODS; - contains a LIST OF THE REFERENCES mentioned. DEADLINE EXTENSION The deadline for abstract submission was extended to 31 May 2006. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 1 July 2006. Participants should send us an updated abstract of their papers by 21 September 2006. Please send your abstracts exclusively as email attachments (doc- or rtf-files) to: Susanna Bartsch Dagmar Bittner bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de The conference languages are German and English. The organizers are preparing a PROPOSAL FOR PUBLICATION of the presented papers in the series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH (CLR) (Mouton de Gruyter) edited by Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and René Dirven. REFERENCES Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dale, P. S., Dionne, G., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. 2000. Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language, 27/3, 619-642. Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., Boivin, M., & Plomin R. 2003. Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development, 74, 394-412. Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London & New York: Routledge. Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass. Journal of Child Language, 21/2, 339-366. Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: Univ. Press. Nelson, K. 1985. Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Developmental psychology series. Orlando: Academic Press. Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Rothweiler, M. & Meibauer, J. (eds.) 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Ein Überblick. In: Meibauer, J., & Rothweiler, M. (eds.). 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb. UTB für Wissenschaft;Mittlere Reihe, 2039. Tübingen: Francke. Rescorla, L., Mirak, J., & Singh, L. 2000. Vocabulary growth in late talkers: Lexical development from 2;0 to 3;0. Journal of Child Language, 27, 293-311. Zemb, J. M. 1978. Vergleichende Grammatik Französisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux systèmes. Mannheim et al.: Bibliographisches Institut. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Susanna Bartsch Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZaS) Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research Jägerstr. 10-11 10117 Berlin Germany From lavelle at unm.edu Tue May 9 13:55:00 2006 From: lavelle at unm.edu (Andrew LaVelle) Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 07:55:00 -0600 Subject: Semiotic Society of America: 2006 Annual Meeting -- Second Call for Papers (Extended deadline: May 30th) In-Reply-To: <20060508175625.89989.qmail@web33511.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Semiotic Society of America: 2006 Annual Meeting Second Call for Papers (Extended deadline: May 30th) The 2006 Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America will be held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, from noon on Thursday, September 28, through noon on Sunday, October 1, 2006. The meetings will be held in the Stewart Center and the adjoining Purdue Memorial Union which also includes the Union Club Hotel where a block of rooms has been reserved The Union Club Hotel is located at the corner of State and Grant Streets in the Memorial Union complex. For reservations call 1.800.320.6291 or contact www.hotel.purdue.edu and ask for conference rates. The theme for the 2006 conference is ³The Future of Semiotics.² We encourage papers that address semiotics as a diverse but unified field of study and that consider its future prospects within the academy. Following tradition, our theme is non-exclusive and, indeed, we welcome submissions addressing any topic within our diverse discipline, whether theoretical or applied. Please submit abstracts of 100 to 350 words carefully composed to give a clear sense of your proposal. Please also include a short list of keywords for our program index and be sure to state specifically any AV requirements Participants will have thirty minutes for their presentations, including time for questions and discussion. Abstracts should be sent to the Chair of the Program Committee, Nathan Houser, at nhouser at iupui.edu. Send your abstracts both in the body of your email and in an attachment (do not use special fonts or graphics). The deadline for submission has been extended to 30 May 2006. The program committee welcomes proposals for symposia. Participants must be paid up members of the Society and must register for the 2006 Annual Meeting. Annual SSA dues are $50 for regular membership or $25 for student membership and may be paid online at www.pdcnet.org/member-ssa.html. (International participants and participants in special symposia may request a waiver of membership dues.) The meeting registration fee is $75 or $35 for students. Optional fees are $15 for a Plenary Luncheon on Saturday, 30 September, and $30 for the Banquet that evening. Meeting registration and banquet fees can be sent in advance to SSA 2006, Professor Nathan Houser, Institute for American Thought, IUPUI, 902 New York Street, ES 0010, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5157. Annual dues can be included but with a separate check made out to SSA. For more information about the program and about registering and traveling to West Lafayette visit the SSA website: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/SSA.htm. 2006 Program Committee Nathan Houser, Chair, Myrdene Anderson (Chair of local arrangements committee), Mary Susan Ashbourne, Sean Day, Jason M. Kelly, Terry J. Prewitt, and Inna Semetsky. From andrea.schalley at une.edu.au Thu May 11 05:48:55 2006 From: andrea.schalley at une.edu.au (Andrea Schalley) Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 15:48:55 +1000 Subject: ALI 2006 Winter School Message-ID: Dear FUNKNETlers, Below you'll find information about the Australian Linguistics Institute to be held in Brisbane in early July 2006. See the full course listing below - ALI has a focus on language and cognition, and there's a lot here to meet the wide range of interests that FUNKNET members have. Note the Earlybird Deadline of May 26th - that's just 2 weeks away! We look forward to seeing you there Andrea Schalley ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Full Title: Australian Linguistics Institute 2006 Location: University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Date: 10-14 July 2006 URL: http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/ Early Bird Registration Deadline: 26 May 2006 (There is no general registration deadline, you can register up to the start of ALI.) Contact:    Andrea Schalley Email: andrea.schalley at une.edu.au ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ALI 2006 is a selection of 12 short intensive courses presented by world experts in their fields. It's a unique opportunity for graduate students, advanced undergraduates, professional linguists, and language professionals to upgrade their knowledge and skills in key areas of linguistics. Many courses in ALI 2006 are on the theme 'Language and Cognition', while others focus on language typology, acquisition, and aspects of linguistic theory. Each course consists of five 90 minute sessions, running Monday through Friday. Three sets of courses will be running in parallel, so participants can attend a maximum of four courses. Confirmed topics and presenters are as follows.     * Bilingualism: cognitive aspects       Istvan Kecskes (State University of New York, Albany)     * Cognitive linguistics       John Taylor (University of Otago)     * Combinatory grammar and natural cognition       Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh)     * L2 syntax: Age dependent effects       Bonnie Schwartz (University of Hawai'i)     * Language and genetics       Brian Byrne (University of New England)     * Language and thought       Lera Boroditsky (Stanford University)     * Logic in child language acquisition       Stephen Crain (Macquarie University Centre for Cognitive Science)     * Morphology and lexical representations       Andrew Spencer (University of Essex)     * NonPamaNyungan languages of Northern Australia       Nicholas Evans (Melbourne University)     * Papuan languages       William Foley (University of Sydney)     * Semantics masterclass       Anna Wierzbicka (Australian National University)     * Understanding typological distribution       Balthasar Bickel (University of Leipzig) ALI 2006 is organised by the Language and Cognition Research Centre of the University of New England. For more information, contact Cliff Goddard cgoddard at une.edu.au, Andrea Schalley andrea.schalley at une.edu.au, or Nick Reid nreid at une.edu.au . From jleitao at ci.uc.pt Sun May 14 22:58:58 2006 From: jleitao at ci.uc.pt (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jos=E9_Leit=E3o?=) Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 23:58:58 +0100 Subject: 1st Cfp : The 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC'2007) Message-ID: FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS The 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC'2007) Lagos (Algarve), Portugal hosted by University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences March 29 - 30, 2007 http://daarc2007.di.fc.ul.pt/ Anaphora is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines such as theoretical, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. On the other hand, the correct interpretation of anaphora has played an increasingly vital role in real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. As a result, the processing of anaphora has become one of the most productive topics of multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and has enjoyed increased interest and attention in recent years. In this context, the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquia (DAARC) have emerged as the major regular forum for presentation and discussion of the best research results in this area. Initiated in 1996 at Lancaster University and taken over in 2002 by the University of Lisbon, the DAARC series established itself as a specialised and competitive forum for the presentation of the latest results on anaphora processing, ranging from theoretical linguistic approaches through psycholinguistic and cognitive work to corpus studies and computational modelling. The sixth Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC’2007) will take place in Lagos (Algarve), Portugal, in March 29-30, 2007. We would like to invite anyone currently researching in the areas of discourse anaphora and anaphor resolution, from any methodological perspective or framework, to submit a paper to DAARC'2007. The closing date for submission is October 16, 2006. Notification of acceptance will be sent by December 15, 2006. Final versions of selected papers to be included in the proceedings are expected by January 19, 2007. Submissions (extended abstracts) must be anonymous and at most 3 pages in length. For further details on the submission procedure, and other relevant info on the colloquium visit its website at: http://daarc2007.di.fc.ul.pt/ Program Committee: Mira Ariel, Tel Aviv Univ Sergey Avrutin, OTS Amit Bagga, Ask.com Peter Bosch, Univ Osnabrueck António Branco, Univ Lisbon Donna Byron, Ohio State Univ Francis Cornish, Univ Toulouse-Le Mirail Dan Cristea, Univ Iasi Robert Dale, Macquarie Univ Richard Evans, Univ Wolverhampton Martin Everaert, OTS Lyn Frazier, MIT Claire Gardent, LORIA Jeanette Gundel, Univ Minnesota Sanda Harabagiu, Univ Texas at Dallas Lars Hellan, Norwegian Univ of Science and Technology Erhard Hinrichs, Univ Tuebingen Graeme Hirst, Univ Toronto Yan Huang, Univ Reading Andrew Kehler, Univ California San Diego Andrej Kibrik, Russian Academy of Sciences Emiel Krahmer, Tilburg Univ Shalom Lappin, King's College Tony McEnery, Lancaster Univ Ruslan Mitkov, Univ Wolverhampton Constantin Orasan, Univ. Wolverhampton Maria Mercedes Pinango, Yale Univ Costanza Navarretta, CST Massimo Poesio, Univ Essex Eric Reuland, OTS Jeffrey Runner, Univ of Rochester Antonio Fernandez Rodriguez, Univ Alacant Tony Sanford, Glasgow Univ Roland Stuckardt, Univ Frankfurt am Main Joel Tetreault, Univ. Rochester Renata Vieira, Unisinos Organisers: Antonio Branco, Univ Lisbon Tony McEnery, Lancaster Univ Ruslan Mitkov, Univ Wolverhampton Fátima Silva, Univ Oporto From a.m.koskela at sussex.ac.uk Wed May 17 12:42:52 2006 From: a.m.koskela at sussex.ac.uk (Anu Koskela) Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 13:42:52 +0100 Subject: The First UK PG Conference in Cognitive Linguistics Message-ID: The First UK Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics is to take place on Saturday 27th May at the University of Sussex at Brighton, UK. The conference will feature talks by postgraduate researchers, addressing a wide range of topics from a broadly Cognitive Linguistic perspective. In addition, the programme includes the following plenary sessions: Vyvyan Evans (University of Sussex): The cognitive linguistics enterprise: An overview Gilles Fauconnier (University of California San Diego): Blending theory workshop Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth): Language as a biocultural niche For more details of the conference, including the full programme, please visit the conference website at www.cogling.org.uk/pgccl Best regards, Anu Koskela DPhil Candidate and Associate Tutor Dept. of Linguistics and English Language/ Centre for Research in Cognitive Science University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN UK From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Wed May 24 09:52:37 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 05:52:37 -0400 Subject: Gray Codes and diagrammatic iconicity in language? Message-ID: For those of you who may have been interested in the symbolism-connectionism wars of a few years back, the notion of the Gray code seems to fill an important gap between pure binary/digital and more iconic ways of representing meaning (at least from the perspective of diagrammatical iconicity). Somehow I managed to wander from reading up on how such coding conventions have possible relevance to the biological genetic code and its evolution into possible linguistic applications (to which I can find NO references on the WWW). I guess ideally I should bring this up on the cognitivist discussion, but I've seen their reactions to anything coming from my mind, so on second thought maybe here is better. Less scratching of nails on blackboards. Any takers? Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 25 07:08:47 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 03:08:47 -0400 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: Dan Everett's recent challenges to orthodoxy regarding the interpretation of grammatico-lexical oddities in Piraha~ has had me thinking quite a lot about the language's place in typology. A recent posting in LanguageLog brought this to mind once again (the post links to this paper:http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/culturalgrammar.pdf).The emphasis on prosody, singing, humming, whistling, its de-emphasis on segments (having the lowest phoneme count of any language on earth, with huge variation of what there is), focus on the here-and-now aspects of reality, etc., lack of many grammatical distinctions, all seem to point the way towards a very different language type than those usually encountered. Some of the grammatical findings- no numbers, no number contrasts on lexical items. Individuable versus mass contrast exists- but not actual count. No quantifiers, but there are forms for 'whole' or 'part', which are not used in the abstract. Simplest pronoun inventory in the world, forms may be borrowings- and a much reduced set of roles for them in any case. No nominal morphology. No embedding. Verbal complexity high. Only two tense-like morphemes (remote versus proximate), no perfect. Lexical- no color terms, only 90 verb roots in entire language (less than Kalam/Kobon family!), very few words for time at all. Perhaps the simplest kinship system known (reduced gender distinctions), and only to known relatives. Cultural/discourse- no indigenous creation myths or fiction- everything is and always was like it is hear and now, no individual or collective memory more than two generations long. No art (at least drawing for decoration), but stick figures made representing spirit world directly experienced here, now. Everett's treatment appears aimed at challenging assumptions (especially Chomskyan) about what needs to be considered necessary for language, and he posits cultural reasons to explain the above facts. However, I have found little or no discussion of typology or typological change by the author. I cannot believe that the language has always been as it is today (despite the probability that speakers themselves might believe it). Thus it must have arrived in this state from some other. The question that I'm concerned with here is whether such change is somehow unusual in in type, or just in its extremity. As many of you are aware (though getting constructive criticism seems tantamount to extracting blood from stone- what, worried the men in black will come for you??), my later work on correlating language type with ideophone numbers leads to some interesting conclusions with regard to cyclic change and where iconicity versus symbolicity is expressed in the entire linguistic system. We are all aware of grammaticalization out of the lexicon, the processes evolving grams undergo, their functions, etc. I've hypothesized that ideophones and other more pragmatically oriented forms constitute a kind of 'antigrammar', which stands in diametric opposition to closed-class grammatical morphology on many fronts. It is becoming increasingly apparent (among those linguists who actually care to look further than purely left-hemisphere effects, thank you very much) that ideophone roots can, with the same sort of attrition and selection we see in the evolution of lexical items canalized towards morphology, move towards lexical status. We thus have three stations in a chain relation. Ideophones to lexemes to grams (likely multiple hops are not much sanctioned- reduced numbers limit such in any case). Grams then wear away to Cheshire Cat smiles (but not without first affecting prosody which has effects on syntax). Straight interjections may be the sources of many ideophone roots. There is implicit in all of this a re-prioritization of prosody versus segmentality in a Yin/Yang mandala-style cycle. Where languages are 'at' in this never-ending game is strongly linked to language type, as many people are slowly learning (though I doubt the interjection/ideophone connection has been made by them). OK, then, what does this have to do with Piraha~? It is obviously very heavy on the prosody, light on segmentality. And although Everett hasn't looked I'll bet a lot of the variation of the existing segments is pragmatically oriented (and not merely automatic, though it might be hard to tell if both go hand in hand). You see such variation in ideophones in many languages- in Africa, in Korean, etc., but there is much more of it in interjections in many other languages- one of the reasons they are often so hard to phonetically render in a consistent and satisfying way. If one thinks of the type cycle as a circle, and arbitrarily label the antigram-heavy state as zero degrees, then lexeme heavy types are at 90, gram-heavy types at 180, and syntax-heavy types at 270. Segmentalism is (roughly) more pronounced in the upper half of the figure (0 to 180), while prosody is in the lower half (180 to 360/0). It may not be as simple as this, but this is I feel a good first approximation. Piraha~ would be a 'syntax' heavy sort of language- where all sorts of nonsegmental phenomena take center stage and pragmatics is king. I believe there to be a good possible link, in general, between prosody and pragmatics, just as there may be between segmentality and grammar (at least the morphological kind). Certainly studies of the brain demonstrate that segments prefer the left (home of the lexicon and morphology) and nonsegments prefer the right (home of much that is pragmatic, interjections, and possibly also ideophones, though nobody has looked for the latter relation). Cyclic changes in language type would correlate with changes in how speakers view and interact with their world. Strong Whorfian argument (though I doubt he would have agreed with my particular take on the matter). Also changing might be WHICH hemisphere is in charge of language. As hinted at above, things might not be so simple or cut-and-dried. For instance the DEGREE to which languages change may depend on other factors, such as how fast or slow the change happens (thus either dragging the past with it and muddling the synchronic picture, or allowing slow 'recrystallization' to use geological/chemical metaphor that allows one to purify the system, and work out the bugs). According to Everett, Piraha~ speakers are for the most part monolingual in the language and have been for hundreds of years. Time enough? Anyway, it is my hope that my above tirade will generate some interest at the least, and discussion (but I won't bet that the heavy-hitters will want to dirty their fingers here...). I feel that Dan Everett, if his observations hold up, has found some VERY interesting data that pertain far more to the diachrony of language, typology, grammaticalization (versus antigrammaticalization!), etc. than they do to beating particular (un)dead Cambridge horses (even if such continue to rise every night to suck the blood of young and unsuspecting linguists). A horse is a horse, of course- eh Count Ed? BTHUH! Jess Tauber From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 14:22:57 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 07:22:57 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <13439845.1148540927520.JavaMail.root@elwamui-ovcar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): "As languages change over time, they tend -- very roughly -- to move around a typologiocal circle: isolating to agglutinating, to fusional, back to isolating, and so on. If we place the isolating type at four o'clock position, agglutinative at eight o'clock and fusional at twelve o'clock, around a clock face, it is possible to describe recent movements in various language families. Proto-Indo-European was at twelve o'clock but modern branches of the family have moved at different rates, toward a more isolating position." (pp. 41-42) The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has undergone previously. Undoubtedly Piraha~ has not always been exactly as it currently is constituted, but there might conceivably be clues here to which position is more likely to have been the starting point for all of us. Without stating it directly, most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point, since they see movement in the direction of agglutinazation/ and or fusion as an indication of higher degrees of change than movement in the direction of isolation. (Bybee, for instance, actually counts degree of fusion as an indicator of degree of grammaticlaization.) An endless cycle as Dixon describes, though, would imply that the starting point is key. If you started out already fusional, a movement toward isolating typology indicates a higher degree of grammatical innovation. To solve the riddle, we have to look to extralinguistic factors. Piraha~ fits into an already existing pattern whereby most isolated cultures living in sociologically primitive situations (hunter gatherers with no external contact or commerce, for instance) have languages with surprisingly complex morphosyntactic typologies. Assuming that these people were not previously members of highly complex trading societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, we would conclude that complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From nrude at Ballangrud.com Thu May 25 16:10:59 2006 From: nrude at Ballangrud.com (Noel Rude) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 09:10:59 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: But of course the study of pidgins and creoles comes in here--left to themselves children will create a more isolating system (A. Katz: "most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point"). So there are two questions: 1) what are the categories and operations of Language? and 2), how did Language get here in the first place? The cycle of grammaticalization may tell us a lot in regard to the first question, I'm afraid the second question is much the most difficult. Piraha may be somewhat analogous to blind cave fish. It may say a lot about what can happen in an environment of deprivation, perhaps less about how Language got here. ----- Original Message ----- From: "A. Katz" To: "jess tauber" Cc: Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 7:22 AM Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): "As languages change over time, they tend -- very roughly -- to move around a typologiocal circle: isolating to agglutinating, to fusional, back to isolating, and so on. If we place the isolating type at four o'clock position, agglutinative at eight o'clock and fusional at twelve o'clock, around a clock face, it is possible to describe recent movements in various language families. Proto-Indo-European was at twelve o'clock but modern branches of the family have moved at different rates, toward a more isolating position." (pp. 41-42) The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has undergone previously. Undoubtedly Piraha~ has not always been exactly as it currently is constituted, but there might conceivably be clues here to which position is more likely to have been the starting point for all of us. Without stating it directly, most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point, since they see movement in the direction of agglutinazation/ and or fusion as an indication of higher degrees of change than movement in the direction of isolation. (Bybee, for instance, actually counts degree of fusion as an indicator of degree of grammaticlaization.) An endless cycle as Dixon describes, though, would imply that the starting point is key. If you started out already fusional, a movement toward isolating typology indicates a higher degree of grammatical innovation. To solve the riddle, we have to look to extralinguistic factors. Piraha~ fits into an already existing pattern whereby most isolated cultures living in sociologically primitive situations (hunter gatherers with no external contact or commerce, for instance) have languages with surprisingly complex morphosyntactic typologies. Assuming that these people were not previously members of highly complex trading societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, we would conclude that complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Thu May 25 16:19:06 2006 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 18:19:06 +0200 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Aya, dear Funknetters >The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF >LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): > Let me first add that the Linguistic Cycle (or: Grand Cycle, as we usually term it) is well described already in the tradition of 19th centruy German grammarians. Here, I do not want to turn to the question of which position Proto-Indo-European did take in this cycle (I think that Dixon referred to that layer of Proto-IE that is reconstructed by external evidence. The internal reconstruction of IE clearly opens the option for a position more close to four o'clock (isolating via agglutination)). Still, one should note that Dixon's clock can go into both directions: For instance, Ossetian and Tokharian both show clear evidence for the re-agglutination of a former fusional paradigm *without* pasing through the isolating stage. In fact, the Grand Cycle is just a tendency (with massive recursions), not a *must* for the dynamics of language paradigms. >The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is >likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at >any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has >undergone previously. > I admit that I have diffculties to understand what Aya means by 'language' in this context. Perhaps, it is better to term it a 'linguistic-communcative tradition', because this would help us to avoid terming e.g. French and Indo-European 'one [and the same] language'. In this sense, the seemingly endless Grand Cycle goes together with the fact that language always is always is the reflex of a foregoing stage: A 'linguistic-communicative tradition' hence has only *one* starting point, that is 'language origin'. Note that here, I do not mean that all languages are genetically related - this seems not to be provable (out of methodological and theoretical considerations). But what we can say is that all language-based communicative systems are originally (!) related. The same logically holds for the Grand Cycle: It's starting point is immediately related to language origin. However, just as we can hardly say anything safe about the early seconds of language origin, we cannot describe the position, which language took on Dixon's clock at the period of language origin. In other words: The Grand Cycle is nothing but a heuristic approach to language change in the period of observable and reconstructable historical stages. I think that it will be difficult ever to describe how language looked like in its first stages (in the first seconds of language origin). From a modern point of view, it sounds logical to assume that in these seconds, language had been 'word-based' (or: isolating), but this is nothing but a projection of current linguistic thinking and categorization. Maybe that language was (by that time (!)) totally different from what we today know about linguistic 'types'. For instance, if we start from a phrase-based model, linguistic categories as we know them today would have emerged from massive processes of re-analysis and paradigmatization of more 'iconic' (or: idiosyncratic) utterances. If this is true, the Grand Cycle would have started to become a 'tendency' in language change at a later stage. Maybe that the Cycle was - in its first run - fed by a number of factors different from those we use to describe for the Cycle itself. Turning to the Piraha~ case, I do not see the necessity to set up a new type of the (fortunately dismissed) Stadial Theory (N. Marr) as suggested by Aya's wordings. There is no proof that a sociological habitus can be immediately related to a linguistic type. There is no convincing evidence that growing interactional complexity favors linguistic complexity. Nor does exist evidence for the contrary. Linguistic complexity is primarily a question of phenomonology. We linguists are used to describe something as complex, because we are trained in thinking in building blocks and in modeling the world thereafter. But we cannot say that a language is 'by itself' (or: ontologically) more complex than another (the assumption of complexity is immediately coupled with (more or less scientific) perception). In other words: Complexity bascially is a meta-linguistic criterion, which should be very carefully referred to in terms of a tertium comparationis when relating world 'objects' (such as a sociological habitus and a language type). Finally, I think that it is rather dangerous to start from the assumption that >these people were not previously members of highly complex trading >societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, > and to conclude that >complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This >indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. > Maybe that say 15.000 years ago, the complexity rate of languages was much higher than thousands of years later, but this does not necessarily imply that massive complexity was given for the many earlier years, too. 15.000 years is a little bit of nothing in the history of mankind and (perhaps) in the history of language change. Best, Wolfgang -- ############################# Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut für Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft (IATS) [General Linguistics and Language Typology] Department für Kommunikation und Sprachen / F 13.14 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 München Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 E-mail: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.ats.lmu.de/index.php From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 18:15:17 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:15:17 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <4475D8FA.2020403@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> Message-ID: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > For instance, Ossetian and Tokharian both show clear >evidence for the re-agglutination of a former fusional paradigm *without* >pasing through the isolating stage. In fact, the Grand Cycle is just a >tendency (with massive recursions), not a *must* for the dynamics of >language paradigms. I find this very interesting, since it flies in the face not only of the "grand Cycle" but also of the Unidirectionality Hypothesis of grammaticalization (assuming this de-fusional process applied to specific lexemes and not just the language as a whole). What is the evidence for not having an intermediary isolating stage? I don't know much about Ossetian or Tokharian, so citations to recommended reading would be greatly appreciated. Are we talking about the entire language or just one paradigm? Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 18:32:23 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:32:23 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <001301c68015$d2d52390$3b3c0a0a@mailcomm.ctuir.com> Message-ID: Noel Rude wrote: >But of course the study of pidgins and creoles comes in here--left to >themselves children will create a more isolating system More isolating than a pidgin? I thought creolization went the other way, creating a less isolating structure. >somewhat analogous to blind cave fish. It may say a lot about what can >happen in an environment of deprivation, perhaps less about how Language >got here. Not being in contact with other groups is not necessarily "an environment of deprivation" for human beings. T. Givon, for instance, suggests that our ancestors were used to living in a society of intimates, and that when language emerged, that's how all humans were living. (BIOLINGUSITICS, John Benjamins 2002). The massive populations that we are used to now are a result of agriculture (not to speak of industrialization.) Most humans, not too long ago, lived in very small, mostly isolated groups. Their society was less complex, but it's quite possible that their language might have been synthetic, rather than isolating. A smaller lexicon with tighter fusion is characteristic of languages used by hunter gatherers, as opposed to urban traders. (of course, there are exceptions, but they have historical explanations.) Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk Thu May 25 19:49:50 2006 From: phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk (Philippe De Brabanter) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 20:49:50 +0100 Subject: conference announcement + CFP Message-ID: Call for papers / Appel à communications under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, international conference on: « The notion of commitment in linguistics » « La notion de prise en charge en linguistique » January 11-13, 2007 / 11-13 janvier 2007 / University of Antwerp (Belgium) / Université d’Anvers (Belgique) Organisateurs / Organizers : Patrick Dendale (Universiteit Antwerpen) Danielle Coltier (Université du Maine, Le Mans) Abstract Deadline : June, 20 2006 Date limite de soumission : 20 juin 2006 The notion of commitment (Non-)Commitment ((non-)prise en charge in French) is a notion which is fairly often used in the analysis of certain types of linguistic phenomena (sometimes under the guise of other labels, such as performativity) – e.g. in the analysis of speech acts, of semantic categories such as modality, evidentiality and subjectivity, of different forms of reported speech, and of certain tenses and moods. But it is hardly ever the subject of explicit investigation in its own right. Goal of the conference The aim of this conference is to bring together research which crucially draws on the notion of (non-)commitment in one or another way, in an attempt to achieve a better understanding of the nature and the extension of the notion itself. It welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the issue in its own right or in terms of its role in any relevant linguistic or conceptual phenomenon, using any kind of methodological approach, and coming from any kind of theoretical background. One section of the conference will be devoted to typological contributions, next to other sections dealing with grammatical or lexical markers or strategies of (non-)commitment in the Romance and Germanic languages. Theoretical problems pertaining to the notion The theoretical issues addressed in this conference can be summarized in terms of five central questions: A) To what does (non-)commitment apply? What are possible objects or (aspects of) objects of (non-)commitment (elements of form, of meaning)? B) Who commits him/herself? Who is the agent of the commitment (which instance of the speaker)? C) When does (non-)commitment apply? Only at the moment of speech, or also at other times? D) What is the nature of (non-)commitment? Are there different forms or degrees of it? E) How is (non-)commitment taken? Under which conditions and by means of which forms, mechanisms or strategies is it signalled? Conference languages In view of the fact that the notion of (non-)commitment or (non-)prise en charge ((non‑)res­ponsibilité) is quite manifestly present in the French linguistic tradition (especially in the aftermath of the work of Benveniste), more so than in the Anglo-American tradition, the present conference also explicitly aims to establish communication on the issue between these ‘geographical’ research traditions. Therefore, the conference will feature presentations in French as well as in English. Deadline for abstract submissions is June 20, 2006 Format and evaluation of abstracts Abstracts will be refereed anonymously. Abstracts are to be submitted as an attachment in Word or Rich Text Format to an email sent to commitment2007 at ua.ac.be. Your abstract should be in French or in English (please use the language of the actual presentation). It should not exceed 500 words (references not included). Please include the title but do not mention the name of the author(s). Use Times Roman 12 and single spacing, and make sure to embed TrueType Fonts for special characters (cf. typological studies). The email accompanying the abstract should contain the title of the presentation (identical to the title indicated on the abstract in the attachment), the name of the author(s), and their full coordinates (affiliation, postal address, email address). Notification of acceptance/rejection: late August 2006. Conference registration Registration fee: 80 Euro Special registration fees apply to members of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, please check the website (www.bkl-cbl.be) for details. Important dates Abstract deadline: June 20, 2006 Notification: late August 2006 Registration deadline: September 15, 2006 Second circular: September 2006 Conference dates: January 11-13, 2007 at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) Conference website: www.ua.ac.be/commitment For further information, please contact Patrick Dendale Université d'Anvers Department of Linguistics Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Anvers-Wilrijk Belgium Email: patrick.dendale at ua.ac.be Web : webhost.ua.ac.be/dendale Tél : +32 3 820 28 13 Fax : +32 3 820 28 23 UFR anglais-Paris4 1, rue Victor Cousin 75005 Paris Institut Jean Nicod 1bis, avenue de Lowendal 75007 Paris --------------------------------- Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. Do it now... From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 25 23:34:11 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 19:34:11 -0400 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: One can have a rough unidirectional cycle as a default, deflections from it resulting from a variety of factors, not least of which is arealism. But it might be better to imagine the cyclic relation in a larger scheme, so for instance by adding another dimension (say through the center of the cycle) you end up with a spiral. One might also consider allowing for subcycles within the larger supercycle which are still unidirectional, but don't encompass the entire set of possibilities. This would let a language 'backslide' typologically without violating unidirectionality. Getting back to parts of my original post, I'm wondering whether its possible that lateralization and shared linguistic responsibilities cognition-wise could explain some of what has been found in Piraha~. Now while I don't KNOW for a fact, it will be my guess that the vast majority of brain-scan work and stroke studies (etc.) aimed at unlocking the neural basis of language have been done on a rather limited sample of subject languages. Of course if one assumes that all languages are processed in exactly the same way this shouldn't matter, and the Chomskyan tradition hasn't really bothered to challenge this assumption. Thus we have (with a nod to Scott Delancey's 'physics envy') our very own linguistic 'Standard Model': Left hemisphere language processing (and we can safely ignore the right). Of course more and more evidence has been cumulating that the right does most things pragmatic, but since when does the Cambridge tradition care too much about that? Not really 'language'. The left hemisphere seems to like to concern itself with sequences of smallish manipulations and behavioral automaticizations, which of course is perfect for the development of grammatical morphology, creating simple symbol strings (at several levels) , etc. I'm kidding of course that things are this clean. But the trend is definitely there. Objectification of the world, into orderly patterns of small, easily chewable bites. Fixed particles as opposed to wildly dynamic force fields. Crystals. Yet the idea of the right hemisphere as somehow more interested in global/holistic perspectives, in larger, clumsier manipulations also seems to have some merit. Here is the realm of give and take (perhaps more the latter), action and reaction (especially subjective/emotional), of discourse continuity, and humor, music, etc. Continually shifting contexts. Fields over particles. Effects can be spread over many individual manipulable objects, and the objects may themselves be partially broken down and spread out (and perhaps unrecognizable for anyone fixed on self-contained forms smaller than the whole). Solutes. Now obviously it takes the usual processes of both hemispheres to make language work, but there are questions about hemispheric dominance, either in absolute terms, or ordering, etc. Men tend to have more hemispheric laterization than women statistically- perhaps this comes into play in language structure as well? For instance in more synthetic languages we see left-hemisphere grammaticalization gone wild, and syntactic ordering 'relegated' more and more to pragmatic interpretations. This sounds a bit like increased lateral functional polarization- left gets grammar, right gets antigrammar, with much less crossover than 'middle ground' languages. Note that polysynthetic languages tend to have relatively few ideophones- another indication that segmentality is being segregated to the grammatical side of the equation. Polarization is left/right. But what about isolating and/or analytical languages? Here grammatical and lexical class relations depend much more on prosody, larger ordering, negotiation. Much more crossover between the prosodic and the segmental, between the pragmantic and the grammatical. Much less polarization, at least between left and right. How about polarization between front/back (motor versus sensory halves of the brain)? The verb/noun distinction is often the last to go? Here I'm delving into relatively uncharted territory. In addition to left/right and front/back polarization, there could also be top/bottom. Different pathways (used linguistically how?) have already been found along this axis, so it is possible. The homuncular mappings on the cortex have the feet on top, and the head on the bottom. I've already found in many languages of the 'bipartite construction' (involving instrument/bodypart and pathway/location affixation) there is often implicit in stem structure order a bias that splits the upper body (home of most of the instrument-relatable body parts) from the lower (home of those effectors that relate to path and location). Perhaps increased polarization of brain structure and processing in this dimension is involved in some way? The last gross dimension to deal with (that I'm aware of- are there more?) is depth. Cortex versus deeper layers and centers. The cortex is a differentiation device (literally where I have to lay/spell it out for you). Integration for the cortex seems to depend on long-distance connections which vary over evolutionary time, including the corpus callosum linking the two hemispheres (which exhibits great variability in humans). Interestingly the right hemisphere seems to have much grosser division into functional units versus the left, which may go towards its more holistic functioning. Lower centers less finely differentiate, are more integrated. So for instance temporarily disabling the cortex seems to be an effective way to experience synaesthesia. Given the way humans seem to operate (note how we lump certain body-centered spatial axes together- right/front/up versus left/down/back), one might try to do the same with the brain. So up (homuncular feet= down)/right (body left)/front (motor cortex- for most of evolutionary history body actions have been geared to pull or push things in the rearward direction- whether food (into us), mates (towards us), ground (away back), wastes, etc. We move forward, but the world moves the other way). Does the grosser/holistic versus finer/individuated distinction hold in each of these dimensions of the brain? How would increased or decreased functional polarity between them affect language structure and use? Can prioritizations between the poles be reversed (Alphonse versus Anatole)? Is there some sort of ordered sequence between the axes and poles that might help explain the linguistic cycle? And within each of these larger patternings are there smaller ones? For instance in the human arm gross but powerful motions get the arm moving ballistically, and finer and weaker ones are found as one moves distally (the hand itself has another axis of its own from thumb to pinkie finger)- similarly with most of the effectors of the external body (internally it may be the other way round- how does this affect how we view for instance phonological ontogeny in first language acquisition, and the actual sound symbolic values of the phonemes, which seem to follow?). Piraha~ may simply be a relatively rare (in TODAY'S world) extreme form of allowed language variation. It might be that in times past many more languages were like it. What other variations have we missed because of sample errors beyond our control (diachronically, or probabilistically)? Beyond what counts as human language as-we-know-it, how can we reconcile other species' communication systems with our own? Is the gap unbridgeable, or are we just not taking a large enough view. Chomskyan thinking has tended to ignore the right hemisphere, and completely ignore the other possibly relevant structural/functional polarities in the brain. Certainly our brains are different to some extent from those of other animals, but theirs are also different from each other as well. How much goes to phylogeny and genes, and how much can be ascribed to socialization and personality? What are the limits of variation, and how are they fixed? Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From Salinas17 at aol.com Fri May 26 16:38:51 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 12:38:51 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. Message-ID: In a message dated 5/25/06 12:20:23 PM, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: << There is no proof that a sociological habitus can be immediately related to a linguistic type. There is no convincing evidence that growing interactional complexity favors linguistic complexity. Nor does exist evidence for the contrary. >> But perhaps there is some evidence that English lost inflection because of a mixed populations of bi-lingual speakers. (And perhaps Bulgarian is another case.) It makes sense to expect that differences in developed structure are the result of differences in function. But it may be a bit too general to look for "sociological habitus" or "complexity" to account for differences in morphological typology. If we stick with communication as the variable, we might see analytical/isolating languages as a natural reaction by speakers to clashing inflectional systems as an obstacle to communication. While synthetic languages reflect a more mature development where speakers have found a Gouldian/Dixonian equilibrium. Perhaps the Grand Cycle is mainly a reflection of varying exposure of a working language to non-native speakers. With regard to the first language(s), a question to ask is whether we'd expect such languages to include nuanced concepts of tense, case and relationship. Did the first language automatically distinguish in a comprehensible way between present, past or the future? Did it disambigulate between singular and plural, near and far, genders or definitiveness? We can certainly imagine a language where such distinctions are omitted. And we can imagine how language might have been gradually tuned to reflect such concepts, as their importance to precise communication became apparent. This kind of approach gives us a better idea of how a complex language -- representing the complexity of the world we live in -- might have looked when it started. It also possibly supplies us with a sense of what order languages must be built in. Regards, Steve Long From jrubba at calpoly.edu Fri May 26 18:34:27 2006 From: jrubba at calpoly.edu (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 11:34:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. In-Reply-To: <463.1b8a395.31a8891b@aol.com> Message-ID: I haven't been following this discussion -- sorry -- but I'm stumped by this statement by Steve Long: "synthetic languages reflect a more mature development" What does "mature" mean? Is Steve trying to say that synthetic languages are capable of expressing more-nuanced meanings than analytic languages? What would lead one to believe this? Languages heavy with fusional or agglutinative morphology are often full of redundancy -- even English's simple plural suffix is redundant enough to be omitted in some dialects when context makes the plurality clear. Is "five shoes" more "mature" than "five shoe"? Creoles that grow out of impoverished pidgins often develop analytic means of expressing nuanced tenses and aspects, as African American English has done with words like "do" and "be", expressing things like immediate vs. remote past, durativity, and so on. Is doing this with analytic morphology less "mature" than doing it with suffixes and bound roots? Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba From Salinas17 at aol.com Fri May 26 20:22:33 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 16:22:33 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (2) Message-ID: I wrote: <> Dr. Johanna Rubba replied: << What does "mature" mean? Is Steve trying to say that synthetic languages are capable of expressing more-nuanced meanings than analytic languages? What would lead one to believe this?>> Well, I did not intend "mature" to mean better or more capable of "expressing more-nuanced meanings." My point was that, if inflection gets in the way of communication, then a less inflected language would be one obvious solution. At least some scholars think this kind of explanation can account for the loss of inflection in English. It's not that analytic languages can't carry a large amount of information. It's more that synthetic languages might have difficulty carrying the required minimum amount of information. When you strip down to a bare minimum of "markedness" for communications' sake, perhaps a high degree of inflection simply gets in the way? <> And perhaps redundancy -- in the bad sense -- is the extra baggage that "maturity" brings? Again, maturity isn't necessarily a good thing. Perhaps it overstructures a language and therefore makes it less flexible, in terms of certain kinds of communication? <> Yes, it might be. Perhaps that is a sign of "maturity" -- a lot of semi-vestigial forms whose original independent meanings have been forgotten. For a verb to turn into a preposition and then an affix would seem sometimes to be a unidirectional, simply because there's no way to reverse the process. See e.g., Carol Lord's Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions. If the English possessive arose out of , then listeners and speakers without historical knowledge of the process have no way of knowing that the original was truncated down to , so there's no path left for going back to the isolating form. Perhaps a language needs a "history" in order to get to the point where enough independent forms are collapsed down to affixes to be "synthetic." Perhaps relatively recent creoles support that idea. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Fri May 26 21:41:09 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 14:41:09 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (2) In-Reply-To: <43b.1fe61ed.31a8bd89@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Well, I did not intend "mature" to mean better or more capable of >"expressing more-nuanced meanings." > >My point was that, if inflection gets in the way of communication, then a >less inflected language would be one obvious solution. At least some >scholars think this kind of explanation can account for the loss of >inflection in English. While it is clear from what you've written that you did not intend a value judgment on communicative effectiveness of a language by labeling its typology "mature", exactly what you did mean still remains somewhat obscure. You seem to be using "mature" in the way biologists would label an animal in its prime as "mature": adult, no longer in its infancy and not yet in its dotage. Is that what you intended? It is true that as we watch synthetic languages age, they tend to lose inflection. It is also true that as we watch a pidgin mature into a creole, it tends to become more synthetic. But the "Grand Cycle" is potentially endless, and unless we have some other criterion to measure by, we have no way of knowing that any of these languages emerged from an isolating "first language". It could be that all isolating languages became isolating due to stressful contact situations, where, as you noted, inflection became more of a hindrance to communication than a help. When you call synthetic languages "mature", do you assume they must necessarily have evolved from more analytical ones? Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 03:31:00 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 23:31:00 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/26/06 5:41:23 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: << But the "Grand Cycle" is potentially endless, and unless we have some other criterion to measure by, we have no way of knowing that any of these languages emerged from an isolating "first language". It could be that all isolating languages became isolating due to stressful contact situations, where, as you noted, inflection became more of a hindrance to communication than a help.>> "IF" a language can move away from inflection when inflection becomes a hindrance, then the "Grand Cycle" is a superficial description -- like describing the application of a car's brake and gas pedals as "cyclic" -- all it tells us is that there are two negatively correlatable variables. What we are seeing as a cycle would be instead the relative presence or absence of extrinsic factors -- which represent nothing regular enough to be called a cycle. A. Polikarpov has suggested that the analytic-synthetic continum is the product of two different "economies" that speakers lean towards -- the need to reduce the memory load required by a language and the need to reduce the size of speech messages. When we switch this perspective to that of the listener, comprehension might demand a reduction in inflection, but efficency in communication might be aided by an increase in inflection. This puts the speaker in the position of a balancing act that may vary from listener to listener. Early language is a different question. If you imagine a language with the minimal possible use of grammatical differentiation -- one case, one tense, one voice, etc. -- you are essentially imaging a language with little need for inflection or fusion or any other synthetic feature. It may be that such a language would need some modicum of syntax and some minimal number of prepositions to be comprehensible. But its fundamental character would be recognizable as analytic. And if such a language were to move in the direction of differentiating out the grammatical features we recognize in modern languages, it would be moving towards the synthetic. <> Unless an affix is entirely arbitrary and not a re-working of an earlier stand-alone word or phrase, one would have to conclude that such affixes could only be supplied by a prior, "more" analytic stage. (If an affixes is truly arbitrary, then one might conclude that the synthetic feature was original and by design.) In that sense, synthetic typology needs to be "mature" compared to an earlier analytic typology, in order to be supplied with its working parts. But, once again, we would expect the process of going synthetic to be forgotten, so that a language that goes to analytic is NOT going back to its earlier state. We would not expect English speakers to recognize that the possessive "s" was once "his" and to go back to the old usage. So it's also not really a "cycle" in that sense. You can't go back to an old analytic state. You can only go on to a new one. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sat May 27 06:05:42 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 23:05:42 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) In-Reply-To: <4b6.89eb9.31a921f4@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Early language is a different question. If you imagine a language with >the minimal possible use of grammatical differentiation -- one case, one >tense, one voice, etc. -- you are essentially imaging a language with >little need for inflection or fusion or any other synthetic feature. It >may be that such a language would need some modicum of syntax and some >minimal number of prepositions to be comprehensible. But its fundamental >character would be recognizable as analytic. And if such a language were >to move in the direction of differentiating out the grammatical features >we recognize in modern languages, it would be moving towards the >synthetic. Why prepositions and syntax? It still seems as if you are imagining early language as a pidgin working its way up to a creole. But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, as is the case in the most synthetic of human languages. Imagine the minimal set of messages to be divided into two categories: (1) warnings (about predators) and (2) invitations (to feast on specific foods.) The coding possibilities could be something like this: predicate ----------- warning invitation argument ---------- bird snake mammal fruit The warning or invitation effect would be created by pitch and frequency of repetition effects superimposed on formant combinations -- that is combinations mostly of different vowels the animal is capable of making. How did such a system arise? Partially, it came about through genetically transmitted compulsions. The animal making the cry does not gain from making it -- its surviving relatives are the ones who transmit the system to the next generation. The system is autonomous and requires no theory of mind for its interpretation. On seeing a predator, the speaker feels compelled to make the corresponding cry. On seeing food, it cannot help but declare it. (More evolved individuals of the group may realize the danger to themselves and try to stop their mouths with their hands, to keep the involuntary cry from coming out.) But as unplanned as this system may be in terms of the individuals who use it to encode and decode information, it is surprisingly autonomous as a code, in the sense that sentences which have never been spoken would immediatley be understood. "Warning: fruit" would be a possible sentence whose meaning might be something like the attack of the killer tomatoes. (The creatures are omnivores, so it is possible that some animals in their list of arguments can serve as both predator and prey.) As theory of mind develops gradually in more evolved descendants of this group, they gain voluntary control of the inbred communicative system, may add vocabulary, and even learn to lie. As the system becomes more complex, sentences will become less tightly bound, less holistic, more polysynthetic. In human languages, the larger the lexicon, the more isolating the language is. Yet most linguists imagine an isolating starting point, where people talk in something resembling a pidgin. Having separate words for predicates and arguments is something that doesn't happen until a language has acquired a very extensive lexicon. >But, once again, we would expect the process of going synthetic to be >forgotten, so that a language that goes to analytic is NOT going back to >its earlier state. We would not expect English speakers to recognize >that the possessive "s" was once "his" and to go back to the old usage. So >it's also not really a "cycle" in that sense. You can't go back to an old >analytic state. You can only go on to a new one. We don't need to confuse the re-cycling of particular morphemes with the recycling of typologies. It is possible to fall into an older typology without having the original morphemes performing their original function. This is consistent with a unidirectional cycle of typologies. That said, I would like to point out that sometimes the same morphemes do return to roughly the same function through a series of changes. This does not require speakers to know the history of the language. Sometimes they just accidentally stumble into an older usage. My 1996 dissertation showed that copulas turn into pronouns and pronouns turn into copulas through a normal process of grammaticalization in many unrelated languages. In Hebrew, there is even a full cycle from a third person singular version of an inflected copula to a third person singular pronoun to a third person singular copula once more. (The same word was interpreted as a copula when the third person pronouns were null, and as a pronoun when null pronouns came into disuse, and then back to a copula when null copulas were in disfavor.) Not knowing the history of your language can sometimes doom you to repeat it. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sat May 27 08:46:21 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 04:46:21 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) Message-ID: Aya Katz k-i:kama:n-ude: >But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, as is the case in the most synthetic of human languages.< Not so fast... Single phonological 'word' yes, but still morphologically complex, to the analyst (even if the speaker is unaware of the constructive pre-packaging of the finished product). Let's also consider the good number of historically fusional but synchronically isolating/analytical languages exist (such as in Tibeto-Burman) where ancient derivational affixes have first merged with other phonemes sometimes creating consonantal contrasts, which then were lost to tonal development, and so on. No longer synchronically analyzable. There are many languages where morphemes are at the level of individual distinctive features, so worn down are the original forms. In some of the San languages, despite a monosyllabizing tendency, a number of ancient morphemes still appear to be present. Then in many analytical/isolating monosyllable languages you need larger collocational context in order to pin down which lexeme you're actually dealing with, because too many of its old features have been lost or rendered unrecognizable- it might be a little odd from the POV of usual thinking, but one might argue that in such cases the morphological word is in some way obligatorily larger than the phonological word (even when not dealing with 'affixes' per se). This would be the flip side of the situation in polysynthetic languages. So the phonological and morphological word are in an endless struggle to try to contain each other. Embedding versus serialization, etc, might also be part of the same type of struggle, in the larger arena. Sometimes you get the tiger.. sometimes the tiger gets you. Animal cries seem to display the same sort of typological variations, along certain parameters, that human languages do- some are more synthetic and 'holistic', but others seem much more analytical. One size doesn't fit all. Research done in animal communicative ethology shows the same sorts of automatizing processes we see in human languages- bits and pieces of pre-existing behavior, often anticipatory or initial movements ('Modal Action Patterns', or MAP's), get shortened, fused, etc. Eventually shorter still, the older pieces may no longer be evident. In other cases its the final products (glandular, wastes, etc.- which by the way are the origins of the vast majority of body pigments) or terminal motions in an action. Some chains are serializations (normally sequential motions a, b, c, d become much reduced chain a'b'c'd')- I don't know if others are 'embedded', or there are head/dependent relations that would determine which old signal gets 'inflected' or otherwise modified. The researchers aren't thinking along these lines, since they slavishly follow Old Chomsky, and have not kept up so far as I know with later developments or movements in linguistics- for those in the 'animal language' biz the only focus seems to be on what counts as *syntax*, which is unfortunate. All human languages have phonemes- ranging from the minimum (with compensatory or substitutive prosody and large allophonic variation) in Piraha~ to maximum in San languages (@120-140 depending on what counts as a contrast) or Ubykh with 80+. With only so many distinctive features to play with, we get the higher numbers by piling them onto each other. It's something we're able to do, yet not that many languages have the highest or lowest numbers. Obviously there is a preference zone (IIRC somewhere between 20-40 phonemes). But that's us humans. Animals may have different preferences. Interestingly, if one extrapolates either up or down, one ends up with a near continuum featurally, from the perspective of signal quantization. If we go below the Piraha~ phoneme number we leave recognizable segmentality altogether, and end up with a multidimensional continuum of prosodic effects. If packaged properly, with lots of context to help you along, the system may still be communicatively viable- it just takes a bit of effort to imagine it from the human perspective. In the other direction imagine how many phonemes one could generate if one used all human contrasts maximally. The resulting system might leave click languages in the dust in terms of jawbreaking articulations. Now vary the number (and form) of feature contrasts we're allowed to use and you end up with an even larger playing field. Each species will have its own, limited by its anatomy and neurology in absolute terms, and to a probable subset of the possible for actual communicative purposes. Interestingly, the articulators themselves (and this goes beyond vocalism to ALL possible signal generators) often shift their own forms and motional possibilities in order to increase the effectiveness of the signaling. It may be hard for us to recognize some of the signals we are looking at as being 'phonemic', 'morphemic', 'phrasal', or 'clausal' if we limit ourselves to seeing through the blinders of human norms. Or looking only at vocal signals (versus more global communication). I'm not saying that what animals are doing is 'language', but perhaps what humans do is just a special case of a more generalized set of communicative behavioral norms. Jess Tauber From amnfn at well.com Sat May 27 13:21:52 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 06:21:52 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) In-Reply-To: <25427048.1148719582232.JavaMail.root@elwamui-huard.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Quoth Jess Tauber: >Aya Katz k-i:kama:n-ude: > >>But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, >> in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, >>as is thecase in the most synthetic of human languages.< > >Not so fast... Single phonological 'word' yes, but still morphologically >complex, to the analyst (even if the speaker is unaware of the >constructivepre-packaging of the finished product). That's right -- single phonological word, but still morphologically complex. That's precisely what I meant. My point was that in all likelihood, early human language was tightly bound on the phonological level, while exhibiting a certain degree of morphological complexity. This is in sharp contrast to a pidgin, where morphologically simplex words are phonologically isolated, so that each morpheme is uttered separately. It's time to stop assuming that early human language resembled the speech of Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein's Monster in American movies and certain SNL sketches. Meaning abides in contrast. The idea that we could have amassed a language out of individual monomorphemic words, one word at a time, is unworkable. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 21:56:16 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 17:56:16 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 2:06:07 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << Why prepositions and syntax? It still seems as if you are imagining early language as a pidgin working its way up to a creole.>> If by "pidgin" you mean a human language with the simplest possible grammar, that would be a good place to start. In theory at least, what you have in a pidgin is humans building a language from scratch. The forms that a pidgin takes would apparently indicate what steps are the first steps in establishing a comprehensible language among a human group. Those first steps do not show full blown grammar. Tense, for example, is often left out of the communication. ("nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") From that we might conclude that concepts like tense are on the next level of discrimination, after a basic common reference is established. Whether they are later injected into the language by way of affixes or compounding or by way of syntax is another matter. <> Why start with animal cries? Why not start with the rather sophisticated communal cooperation and communication that bees need to build a bee hive? If anyone needs to communicate in "sentences," they do. There are many better examples of animal communication than "cries." There are many instances where a single signal can trigger all by itself a whole bevy of elaborate behaviors. These "single words" must embed very, very complex sentences indeed! Whether or or not primates are speaking in synthetic languages and capable of expressing complex sentences in a single word, it looks pretty clear that humans, when they start languages from scratch, speak in something somewhat akin to what are called "analytic" languages. The obvious reason for this is that common reference must be established first. Before we can communicate, we need to be confident that the words we use refer to the same things for both of us. This is a condition precedent to all the nuances we find in modern human languages -- it is certainly a condition precedent to the situation we find in the highly synthetic Latin verb structure, in which a single verb can take 118 different forms. As far as animal cries go, whether I'm yelling "Tiger!" or "Fire!," the shorthand really doesn't have too much to do with implied or encoded whole sentences. The obvious use of the "word" is intended to have immediate behavioral consequences, not to mark tense, mood or aspect. Analytic versus synthetic is really irrelevant. Crying "tiger!" or "fire!" is simply making use of language's representational power. The words are symbols standing in for the real things. From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 22:24:29 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 18:24:29 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (5) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 9:22:51 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << This is in sharp contrast to a pidgin, where morphologically simplex words are phonologically isolated, so that each morpheme is uttered separately. It's time to stop assuming that early human language resembled the speech of Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein's Monster in American movies and certain SNL sketches. >> On the other hand, I should point out that Tarzan's and Tonto's pidgins are very easy to understand, compared to Cicero or chimps or other synthetic speakers. Perhaps elite early humans spoke a synthetic language and the rest of us spoke a pidgin. Perhaps that explains the Grand Cycle -- two different starting points. <> Come on. Day and night is a contrast. You don't need affixes or even compounds to discriminate in plain words between two things. Regards Steve Long From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sat May 27 23:01:03 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 19:01:03 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >In theory at least, what you have in a pidgin is humans building a language from scratch.< With all due respect, pidgin speakers do not start from scratch. The words they use COME from other languages, with their own individual evolutionary histories. And combinational habits from these languages may effect what the pidgin ends up with. Even signed languages 'from scratch' use pre-existing movements and gestures. Sure, in all cases invention may occur, but I doubt that it is purely creative and inspired, and it never totally replaces bits and pieces coapted from other functions. Twin-speech might come close, but then twins may be more easily able to come to mutual understanding, being clones, than the average genetically mixed population. Unless one believes in TOTAL form/meaning arbitrariness, one must suspect that forms drawn into pidgins will have subtle effects on the developing system, even when the lexical mapping has shifted radically. If this is so then the nascent pidgin is in some sense 'pre-chewed' by all that went into it. As for animal 'cries', depending on what species you look at, what particular signal, function it is used for, etc., there are quite radical variations in the complexities involved (which I was trying to point out in my last post). How much information, for instance, is in the signal? How much is still separable (analytically extractable by receiver)? How compressed is it? Does it need repeating (enhancing signal/noise ratio for discrimination/reception purposes)? And what about the receiver? Does he/she need to respond with a back-communication, or by other behavior? How simple or complex are these? In hormonal signaling systems a single molecule can release a wave of increasingly complex responses, if the receiving system is set up to do this. A single word can mobilize an army, but only if prior arrangements have been made. Otherwise one might need to lay out exactly what needs doing responsewise. I don't think bee communication is all that sophisticated compared to many communications of higher animals- for instance the growing known number of chimp food calls. We have no idea how many calls there are ultimately, how they can be internally or externally modified, etc. Chimps do coordinated hunting- are there signals there we've missed? The problem with terms like 'cries' is that they are somewhat dismissive in import. Lastly, I'll bet that the animal signals are often a bit less symbolic and far more iconic representationally. Eugene Morton (National Zoo) with his 'Motivation Structure Theory' showed that many (most?) calls used in intraspecific conflicts and their resolutions were part of the same system of signal modulation, across quite a few different vertebrate species. Some had more, some fewer, but they fit the same pattern. Interestingly frequency ranges and timings changed radically between species, but the pattern persisted. Threat calls such as in monkeys for predators may also be iconically representing the overall SHAPES of the threats, allowing the receivers to quickly home in on the threat through the connotational connection (but without unambiguously denoting it). Food calls may well be similarly structured (shape, size, texture, ripeness/food value, etc.). Can't assume English human as the standard reference model. Jess Tauber From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun May 28 03:28:42 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 23:28:42 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 7:01:33 PM, phonosemantics at earthlink.net writes: <> Very true. But for the purposes of this discussion re typology -- in theory -- pidgins represent the closest thing with we have to a language with the bare minimum of grammatical features. ("...nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") That is close enough to the form I'd suspect early languages would have taken. The point is that form is more in the direction of analytic languages. <> There's no real scientific evidence for any such thing and I'd suggest its just another expression of genomania. <> Bee communication is extremely sophisticated -- especially because it is truly representational -- especially in terms of mapping distance and direction. Wild chimps exhibit nothing as sophisticated in terms of intricate spatial representations. Bird calls are far more intricate than any communications by chimps that has been credibly reported in the wild (in captivity, chimps have far outperformed their wild cousins). The use of the term "higher animals" is just not good scientific terminology. The efficency or effectiveness of exchange of communal information is not correlateable to the relatedness to humans as the crowns of creation. Nor does it seem to be relateable to a species brain size. If a species -- particularly communal species -- specializes in communication, it will demonstrate features that are very similar to human speech. The underlying mechanisms are of course quite different. <> No reason to attribute this to heredity between species. The environment will select the same formulas either as species specific adaptions or learned behavior. However, I would like to see evidence that cats, dogs and rats share the "same system of signal modulation" -- I'm pretty sure they don't. <> Nevertheless, any model that excludes English in terms of human language functioning is bound to be wrong. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sun May 28 06:53:09 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 23:53:09 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <4a9.231717.31aa72ea@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > But for the purposes of this discussion re typology -- in >theory-- pidgins represent the closest thing with we have to a language >with the bare minimum of grammatical features. ("...nouns, verbs, >adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological >form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or >aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this >aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") That is close enough to >the form I'd suspect early languages would have taken. The point is that >form is more in the direction of analytic languages. The fact that you "suspect" early languages would have taken a form with "a bare minimum of grammatical features" is very much influenced by the typology of the language you speak. Babies learning English start out with a very isolating beginning. Monolingual English speakers, when they start talking, do sound like Tarzan. But this is not universal. According to Dan Slobin, Turkish speakers start out with inflectional morphology at the one word level. As soon as they start speaking, it's inflected all the way. In the present, all humans are capable of speaking isolating languages if they are exposed to them, but isolating languages are not necessarily easier to understand or to come up with from scratch. Evidence from home sign shows that systematicity tends to get built into early systems of communication, because it's easier to remember a sign if it patterns with another contrasting one. Isolating languages are more context dependent. For sophisticated urbanites, that's not a problem, But do you assume early man already had a theory of mind as developed as that of the average modern day Chinese or English speaker? Grammar allows language to become autonomous from theory of mind. While no language is context free, grammar allows us to spend less of our resources on mind-reading. >Bee communication is extremely sophisticated -- especially because it is >truly representational -- especially in terms of mapping distance and >direction. >Wild chimps exhibit nothing as sophisticated in terms of intricate >spatial >representations. >Bird calls are far more intricate than any. >The underlying mechanisms are of course quite different. I'm not sure what your point is in bringing up the commmunicative abilities of bees and birds. If it's meant to dispel the notion that only our close relatives have sophisticated systems of communication, I take no issue with that. Bees -- if their dance language is to be credited (and there apparently is some controversy about that among the bee experts) -- are communicating accurately without a theory of mind, in a highly structured way. If bees can do this, do you think early man couldn't? Is that your point? ><language out of individual monomorphemic words, one word at a time, is >unworkable.>> > >Come on. Day and night is a contrast. You don't need affixes or even >compounds to discriminate in plain words between two things. Now imagine a language with only two words. How likely is it that the contrast chosen would be "night" and "day"? Of what use would this two word language be to anyone? Given a single binary contrast to begin with, one might suppose that "yes" and "no" would be good candidates, but in reality, they're not. Try getting a chimp to use "yes" and "no." It's very hard, because the concepts are extremely abstract. (I speak from experience.) It's easier to teach the three part contrast of "banana", "grape" and "apple", than the single binary contrast of "yes" and "no." But you have to be very careful when you introduce choices such as "grapes" or "apple." You might think you are teaching nouns. But the chimp will interpret it as "give me a grape" or "give me an apple", more often than not. You can't teach separate nouns as nouns until you have a much bigger lexicon. Until that time, each word stands for a full proposition. This is not due to mental limitations of the subject. It's due to the way information theory works. The meaning of words is determined by the contrasts available. It would come out the same way if the research subject were an uneculturated human. My point is that a single contrast isn't enough to make a language out of. A bigger inventory is required. But you'll never get to a bigger inventory, if you try adding one word, or even one contrast at time. Speakers will refuse to use them, because they won't seem meaningful. "Yes" and "NO" make sense only in the context of a very rich system of already available propositions. You have to start with propositions first, then work your way back to names for single items. Once you have a meaningful array of relevant (to the speakers) choices, then it makes sense to build a grid, a paradigm, based on the types of signaling devices availabe to you. It's easier to remember contrasts this way. When I say that early language was probably highly structured, I'm not suggesting it was anything like Latin. Tense may not have been one of things coded for. But it's unlikely there were any monomorphemic phonological words. That would have been too inefficient to function, given a small lexicon. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun May 28 16:27:41 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 12:27:41 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/28/06 2:53:20 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << The fact that you "suspect" early languages would have taken a form with "a bare minimum of grammatical features" is very much influenced by the typology of the language you speak. Babies learning English start out with a very isolating beginning. Monolingual English speakers, when they start talking, do sound like Tarzan. But this is not universal. According to Dan Slobin, Turkish speakers start out with inflectional morphology at the one word level. As soon as they start speaking, it's inflected all the way. >> I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers starting out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have for the most part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers have tried hard to find grammar in very early development, but I believe that a disciplined, objective review will show that it is just not there. We do see mimicry and association, and that will have children mimicking inflected words, but without any kind of grammatical sense. The key I believe is when children pass the threshold into understanding the representational, symbolic nature of language. Judy DeLoache and others have done very important work in identifying the borderline in development where children begin to realize the relationship between a symbol and the real object. (see, e.g., J.S. DeLoache, Mindful of Symbols, Sci Am August 2005) When children begin to understand language as a descriptive tool, grammar begins to make sense -- because grammar plainly enhances descriptive power. A child struggling with describing one block or many blocks, or something that happened in the past versus something happening in the present is still figuring out how changing the shape or position of words promotes accuracy - and approval. Before a child starts understanding the symbolic nature of words, language is at best mimicry and association, and so the manipulation of grammatical elements is out of reach. What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty certain that a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech have? I see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina that somehow implanted grammar full-blown in the form of a Chomskayan language mechanism, which I believe violates the naturalistic assumption of science. Pidgins do function for mutual comprehension and, more importantly, for the effect they have on human behavior. If the first real words were shared neologisms (they had to be neologisms), then what was acheived was the beginning of a communal representational system that mirrored the world. Naming things in the world is a prerequisite for what we call human speech. There can be no communication without common reference. The lexicon would grow either by what you call "contrast" (discrimination) or by generalization. Only then would grammar in the modern sense be possible. <> I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that grammar more accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between things in time and space. But just because early languages did not have much grammar did not mean they had not developed into distinctively human language. <> Again, I don't know what theory of mind means. But the point with bees is th at communication techniques have appeared and disappeared many times in the course of evolution on this planet. Humans fly but did not inherit that trait from bees, birds or bats. The fact that chimps communicate may have little relationship to the ways humans communicate. Animal cries may carry all kinds of implication, but that is no reason to conclude that wild chimps speak in sentences. Bees on the other hand have been shown to communicate using representative behavior that accurately maps and communicates location and distance (there's really no credible challenge to this) -- which bespeaks of some kind of an in-born grammar that we humans only acquire by hard learning and taking too many wrong exits off the turnpike. <> The big cats only hunt at night. The fact that night is coming would be a valuable piece of information to spread around. A very good occasion for language to start. <> Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which only reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more centered in the listener than the speaker. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sun May 28 22:02:23 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 15:02:23 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <38e.4424113.31ab297d@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to >believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional >morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers starting >out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have for the most > part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers have tried >hard to find grammar invery early development, but I believe that a >disciplined objective review will show that it is just not there. Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one word stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any significance if there isn't another category to contrast it with. >I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that grammar more >accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between things in >time and space. But just because early languages did not have much >grammar did notmean they had not developed into distinctively human >language. Theory of Mind refers to an individual's awareness of the minds of others, their context, desires, beliefs and motivations. Humans are known for their unusually well-developed theory of mind, but not all humans are equally endowed with this ability. Autistics are said to have considerable deficits in theory of mind, regardless of how high their IQ may be in other areas. Deficits in theory of mind make language acquisition very difficult, because mind-reading is a good way to jump start first language learning. However, later in life, autistics often catch up in language ability, despite lingering deficits in theory of mind. Shifting between 1st and second person is something that come naturally to speakers with a normal theory of mind. If you don't have TOM, it's much harder to guess when to use first and when to use second person. >Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. >Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which only >reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more >centered in the listener than the speaker. Really? Does your dog answer yes/no questions? I have yet to meet a dog who can. When I ask my dog if she wants to go out, it's clear that she understands the question. But if she doesn't want to go out, she never gives any signal to say so. She just stands there glumly and won't follow me to the door. If she wants to go out, she wags her tail excitedly and goes to the door before I do. That is not answering "yes" and "no." That is involuntarily showing her emotional states using body language. She has no volitional control over that wagging tail. There is nothing to keep her from nodding her head "yes" or shaking it "no," as she sees me doing. But she never does. In what context has your dog used "yes" and "no"? >What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty certain that >a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" >ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech have? I >see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least >grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina >that somehow implanted grammar full-blown inthe form of a Chomskayan language > mechanism, which I believe violates the >naturalistic assumption of science. No, there are other conclusions that do not require us to adopt Chomskyan mechanisms or violate the naturalistic assumptions of science. The idea of individual words carrying meaning without a system of contrasts is not naturalistic. When you imagine people talking in nouns, verbs and prepositions, and you think of them building up their grammatical system gradually, one word at a time, that is not naturalistic. How long do you imagine our primitive ancestors spent at the one word -- or rather, one morpheme stage? How long a period from the use of the "first" word to the discovery of the second word? There is a critical mass required before a language can be useful. A one word language serves no function, and nobody will wait around to learn the second word. Our ancestors, before they were truly human, already had a communication system much like that of present-day primates. Do you think they would discard it for something whose communicative function was much weaker, in the hopes of one day working their way up to modern language? --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon May 29 12:16:10 2006 From: bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de (bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 12:16:10 GMT Subject: 3rd CfP - Session on Lexical Bootstrapping - GCLA conference Message-ID: Dear all, Please find below the third and final call for papers for our theme session on lexical bootstrapping in early language and conceptual development. DEADLINE: May 31, 2006 With best wishes, Susanna Third and Final Call for Papers LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CHILD CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT Theme session To be held at the SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE GERMAN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION, Munich, 5-7 October 2006 PLEASE NOTE: - CLARIFICATION ABOUT CONTENTS OF SUBMITTED ABSTRACTS - POSSIBILITY OF PUBLICATION Apart from some few exceptions (Brown 1958, Nelson 1973), the research on child lexical development did not receive much attention from students of child language in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to some statements found in the more recent literature (Rothweiler & Meibauer 1999), this fact is not really surprising when one considers the very influential role then played by formal linguistics with its primacy of syntactic structures and the view of lexicon and semantics as something rather epiphenomenal. From the 1980s on, this state of affairs has changed dramatically. For one thing, over the last 25 years or so, there has been more and more interest in topics related to child lexical acquisition. Over these several years, the research has issued many relevant theoretical insights resp. assumptions, and methodologies about lexical development, such as the view of individual differences in early vocabulary composition in terms of a continuum between referential and expressive style (Nelson 1973) and the holophrastic nature of early words (Nelson 1985), the differentiation between expressive and receptive vocabulary, as well as the use of correlational methods (Bates et al. 1988), or the role of domain-general cognitive skills of categorisation and theory of mind (Tomasello 2003), amongst several others. Secondly and most importantly, this body of research (much of which has been done within functionalist-cognitivist frameworks) seems to allow for the formulation of general assumptions concerning child language development in general, as well as the interplay between language and conceptual development. Thus, especially studies focussing on within- and cross-domain developmental correlations seem to provide evidence for a Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Dale et al. 2000, Dionne et al. 2003), i.e., the assumption that early lexical development, as mapping of words to referents or their conceptualisations, and even to whole propositions, is not only prior to, but also pre-requisite for the emergence of morpho-syntactic constructions (which, incidentally, are not fundamentally different from words, in that they are equally form-meaning pairs). The lexical bootstrapping hypothesis presupposes an early stage in lexical development characterized by the learning of archilexemes, a term originally proposed by Zemb (1978), as grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only, here understood as the means by which the child begins to cognize and categorize the world. Such assumption on the fundamental role of early lexical acquisition for later language development as a whole challenges the view about the primacy of syntax over lexicon and semantics that has been postulated in these 50 years of formal linguistics. For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion. Empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions dealing with aspects of word learning in the one-word phase (and perhaps also before) that might predict diverse aspects of later language and conceptual development of typically developing and impaired children may focus on one or more of the following questions and topics (evidently, other suggestions are equally welcome): - How can measures of, and assumptions on, early lexical development (vocabulary size, vocabulary composition, vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary style, vocabulary spurt, critical mass, others?) be correlated to measures of later grammatical emergence and development (emergence and proportion of multi-word utterances, Mean Length of Utterance, development of inflectional paradigms and use of function words, realisation of argument constructions, others?) How reliable are such correlations? - How can the study of early lexical development shed light on the issue of individual variance and developmental language disorders? Can aspects of early word learning (expressive vs. referential style, dissimilar timing of vocabulary development, peculiarities in vocabulary composition, peculiarities in the conceptual mapping, others?) provide criteria for a differentiation between mere individual variance and developmental disorder, as well as for a differentiation between transient and persistent disorders? Can such aspects be used in the context of early diagnosis of such disorders? - Which cognitive processes underlie word learning as both word-to-concept mapping and categorization task? Are there constraints and principles at play? What is the nature of such constraints—are they domain (=language) specific or domain general? How are they related to later language and conceptual development? - Does a notion of lexical bootstrapping in language acquisition preclude other bootstrapping mechanisms in the stages before the emergence of grammar, such as prosodic, semantic, syntactic bootstrapping, or can interplay amongst these types of bootstrapping mechanisms be assumed? - Related to the last question, how does the child construct her mental lexicon? How is it structured—is this structure modular or network-like or anything else? Which processes of reorganisation are at work along development? - Can early words (at least partially) be seen as holophrases in that they (at least partially) refer to whole propositions? Which developmental change(s) takes place in the transition from holophrastic one-word utterances to multi-word utterances? - Which evidences can be drawn from studies of word learning in children with cognitive developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, others?), as well as in blind and deaf children? - Which insights can be drawn from research based on (i) corpora analyses; (ii) computer learning simulations; (iii) neural activation in experimental situations, such as categorisation tasks; (iv) lexical/conceptual processing in adults with and without language disorders (e.g. aphasia)? - Which similarities, differences or peculiarities can be observed when comparing mono- and multilingual word learning, as well as comparing monolingual and cross-linguistic studies? Depending on the number of contributions, the special session will take place at one or two days of the conference. The theme session will be framed by a paper introducing the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development and, again depending on the number of contributions, one or two discussion rounds. BEFORE SENDING IT, MAKE SURE PLEASE THAT YOUR ABSTRACT: - indicates EXPLICITLY how and to which extent YOUR STUDY IS RELATED TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING in child language and conceptual development. Does your study support or refute the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis? If yes, how and to which extent? If not, why not? - is detailed, i.e., it is about 1000 WORDS LONG, not including list of references, tables, diagrams, etc.; - indicates explicitly and in detail the EMPIRICAL BASIS of your study; this holds also for theoretical works, i.e., theoretical work might rely, for instance, on empirical studies of other researchers, but please NOT SOLELY ON INTROSPECTIVE METHODS; - contains a LIST OF THE REFERENCES mentioned. DEADLINE EXTENSION The deadline for abstract submission was extended to 31 May 2006. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 1 July 2006. Participants should send us an updated abstract of their papers by 21 September 2006. Please send your abstracts exclusively as email attachments (doc- or rtf-files) to: Susanna Bartsch Dagmar Bittner bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de The conference languages are German and English. The organizers are preparing a PROPOSAL FOR PUBLICATION of the presented papers in the series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH (CLR) (Mouton de Gruyter) edited by Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and René Dirven. REFERENCES Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dale, P. S., Dionne, G., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. 2000. Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language, 27/3, 619-642. Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., Boivin, M., & Plomin R. 2003. Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development, 74, 394-412. Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London & New York: Routledge. Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass. Journal of Child Language, 21/2, 339-366. Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: Univ. Press. Nelson, K. 1985. Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Developmental psychology series. Orlando: Academic Press. Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Rothweiler, M. & Meibauer, J. (eds.) 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Ein Überblick. In: Meibauer, J., & Rothweiler, M. (eds.). 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb. UTB für Wissenschaft;Mittlere Reihe, 2039. Tübingen: Francke. Rescorla, L., Mirak, J., & Singh, L. 2000. Vocabulary growth in late talkers: Lexical development from 2;0 to 3;0. Journal of Child Language, 27, 293-311. Zemb, J. M. 1978. Vergleichende Grammatik Französisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux systèmes. Mannheim et al.: Bibliographisches Institut. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Susanna Bartsch Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZaS) Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research Jägerstr. 10-11 10117 Berlin Germany From Salinas17 at aol.com Mon May 29 15:37:03 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:37:03 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function (6) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/28/06 6:02:35 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: << Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one word stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any significance if there isn't another category to contrast it with. >> If all the child says is "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" and he does not connect those words with anything in particular, yeah, he's just imitating sounds. If however he correctly identifies a dog, a ball and Mommy and does not apply these words to the kitchen cabinets or the trash can, then we have a clear "contrast" -- there is Mommy and there is all that is not Mommy. There is a ball and all that is not a ball. This is the most basic kind of definition that we can give any item x -- x is all that is not y. This kind of "contrast" is at the very core of perception and logic - the discrimination of stimuli so that they achieve a less then ephemeral identity. These words -- "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" -- may or may not be "nouns," but they are certainly "nominative" in the classic Aristotelian sense of a naming. Animals, right down to amoebas, are able to perceptually distinguish modalities in their field of perception, to "contrast" some shape or form or sound against others, to discriminate. But most non-human animals are simply not very adroit at creating observable symbolic equivalencies of those perceptual modalities, whether made by sound or some other form of communal signal. What "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" are doing is giving those objects a NAME -- a label, a symbolic equivalency, an independent representation made with specific sounds. If I hide the ball and ask the child to find it and he looks for it, that shows he has grasped the symbolic nature of the word versus the object. This is something that some animals can do, but compared with even very young human children, their repetoire appears to be small. If the same child points out a running dog to me and says "run," he's probably not using a verb, he's probably naming an action. Before the child can start constructing noun-verb formations, he must also be able to name actions, processes or relationships as well as objects. Otherwise there is no contiguous material to build grammar with. Theorists have been prone to jump to grammar and syntax in setting the boundary of human language lately. (I'm reminded of what Frans de Waal said about the reaction after Washoe learned ASL -- ""The linguists then came up with a definition that emphasised syntax much more than symbols," says de Waal. "Sometimes we feel it's a bit unfair that they move the goal posts as soon as we get near.") The basic mistake in this I believe is the artificial discontinuity created between the grammatical and vocabulary. Grammar is actually a more subtle and intricate form of naming, but it is naming none the less. Marked features are actually shorthand descriptions of relationships in time and space that could also be "worded-out", but are adopted for their economy. The core of human language is a common symbolic system that approximates (to varying degrees of accuracy) objects, processes and relationships in the real world. Any "model" that diminishes this core nature at any point is going to be faulty. <> A one word language may not get you far. But a vocabulary of about ten words helped me survive in southeast asia -- so I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this. <> So you are saying a human pidgin with the barest minimum of grammar is "weaker" in communicative function than the "communication system" of present day apes? I don't think you have that quite right. Regards, Steve Long From lise.menn at colorado.edu Mon May 29 16:19:56 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 10:19:56 -0600 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ok, a few notes on child language here, though this is tangential to the issue of the theoretical cycle of typologies, and problematic in its relations to pidgins. [And on the topic of pidgins, remember that - definitionally! - speakers of pidgins have some OTHER language as their native language. They are not naive as to how languages are constructed - e.g. that they have embedding - even though the various speakers of the pidgin - again by definition - have different native languages to draw on. Sociologically it seems very weird to assume - as the old bioprogram claims apparently do - that a substantial fraction of children growing up surrounded by a pidgin (and thus on their way to becoming the first generation of creole speakers) do not also hear parents and parents' friends speaking a fully-developed human language, even if they themselves do not become fully able to speak that language.] First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. Ann Peters has been publishing on this since 1977; go to http:// www2.hawaii.edu/~ann/ A detailed diachronic study of one case is a dissertation (available via University Microfilms) by my student Andrea Feldman, Colorado; a portion of her data are in Feldman, Andrea, & Lise Menn (2003). Up close and personal: the development of filler syllables. Journal of Child Language, 30:4, 735-768. Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. Suppose she also says 'byebye' (an extremely common first word) when people are leaving her house. And 'no' when she pushes things away that she doesn't want to eat. You've got a contrast now, but that's still not sufficient; 'dog' doesn't become a noun just because 'bye- bye' and 'no' aren't nouns, and adding a verb to the mix won't do it either. Again, consider all the properties you expect a word to have before you call it a noun or a verb. Whatever your list is, evidence that children's early words have the full set of properties that you want will not be forthcoming - but evidence for SOME of them will be there. People working in the tradition of Martin Braine - now, most visibly, Michael Tomasello & colleagues - argue for a gradual development of language-wide 'parts of speech' from very local privilege-of-occurrence classes. Try Veneziano's 'The Emergence of Noun and Verb Categories in the Acquisition of French', pdf at http:// cogprints.org/3044/01/Veneziano.pdf for one well-articulated approach. Lise Menn On May 28, 2006, at 4:02 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Steve Long wrote: > >> I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to >> believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional >> morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers >> starting >> out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have >> for the most >> part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers >> have tried >> hard to find grammar invery early development, but I believe that a >> disciplined objective review will show that it is just not there. > > Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one > word > stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or > "ball" > or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any > significance if > there isn't another category to contrast it with. > >> I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that >> grammar more >> accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between >> things in >> time and space. But just because early languages did not have much >> grammar did notmean they had not developed into distinctively human >> language. > > Theory of Mind refers to an individual's awareness of the minds of > others, > their context, desires, beliefs and motivations. Humans are known for > their unusually well-developed theory of mind, but not all humans are > equally endowed with this ability. Autistics are said to have > considerable deficits in theory of mind, regardless of how high > their IQ may be > in other areas. Deficits in theory of mind make language > acquisition very > difficult, because mind-reading is a good way to jump start first > language > learning. However, later in life, autistics often catch up in language > ability, despite lingering deficits in theory of mind. > > Shifting between 1st and second person is something that come > naturally to > speakers with a normal theory of mind. If you don't have TOM, it's > much > harder to guess when to use first and when to use second person. > >> Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. >> Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which >> only >> reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more >> centered in the listener than the speaker. > > Really? Does your dog answer yes/no questions? I have yet to meet a > dog > who can. > > When I ask my dog if she wants to go out, it's clear that she > understands > the question. But if she doesn't want to go out, she never gives any > signal to say so. She just stands there glumly and won't follow me > to the > door. If she wants to go out, she wags her tail excitedly and goes > to the > door before I do. > > That is not answering "yes" and "no." That is involuntarily showing > her > emotional states using body language. She has no volitional control > over > that wagging tail. > > There is nothing to keep her from nodding her head "yes" or shaking it > "no," as she sees me doing. But she never does. > > In what context has your dog used "yes" and "no"? > > >> What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty >> certain that >> a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" >> ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech >> have? I >> see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least >> grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina >> that somehow implanted grammar full-blown inthe form of a >> Chomskayan language >> mechanism, which I believe violates the >> naturalistic assumption of science. > > No, there are other conclusions that do not require us to adopt > Chomskyan > mechanisms or violate the naturalistic assumptions of science. > > The idea of individual words carrying meaning without a system of > contrasts is not naturalistic. When you imagine people talking in > nouns, > verbs and prepositions, and you think of them building up their > grammatical system gradually, one word at a time, that is not > naturalistic. How long do you imagine our primitive ancestors spent > at the > one word -- or rather, one morpheme stage? How long a period from > the use > of the "first" word to the discovery of the second word? There is a > critical mass required before a language can be useful. A one word > language serves no function, and nobody will wait around to learn the > second word. > > Our ancestors, before they were truly human, already had a > communication > system much like that of present-day primates. Do you think they would > discard it for something whose communicative function was much > weaker, in > the hopes of one day working their way up to modern language? > > --Aya > > > > ================================================================ > Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO > 65542 USA > (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 > http://www.well.com/user/amnfn > ================================================================= > Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ From amnfn at well.com Mon May 29 18:18:27 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:18:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lise Menn wrote: >First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix >of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. Yes. And sometimes unanalyzed phrases stand for whole propositions, from which names for participants are identified only later in the development of the child's speech. In such cases, the unanalyzed phrase describes the whole event holisitically. >Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- >way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to >having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally >monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things >they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is >doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - >and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the >noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun >use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous >here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. Agreed. >Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is >not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that >she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for >it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. Sometimes children don't use "Mommy" to name a concrete object. Sometimes they use it to mean "come here!" I have anecdotal evidence. When my daughter was 18 months old, we were living in Taiwan. I spoke Hebrew to her, and her nanny spoke Mandarin. When my daughter wanted one of us to come help her with something, she would call out: "Mama! Mama!" It didn't matter if it was the nanny who was there or me. She called for both of us the same way. (She learned to do this by observing the nanny's daughter.) However, she did not use "Mama" to refer to either of us. If I showed her a picture of the nanny, she would point at it and say "A Yi" (which is how the nanny referred to herself: Auntie.) If my daughter saw a picture of me, she would point and say "Ani". "Ani" is the Hebrew 1st person nominative pronoun. I referred to myself in first person, so my daughter used the first person pronoun to refer to me, too. It doesn't matter what the nanny or I originally thought "Mama" meant. It doesn't matter that most people use that word as a nominal or participant reference. For my daughter, it was the way to summon help. It was not a way to refer to anyone, because she never pointed at any person and said Mama. Regardless of their derivation, words mean only what they are used for by the particular speaker at a particular place and time. That was my point. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From amnfn at well.com Mon May 29 18:31:27 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:31:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function (6) In-Reply-To: <486.14d9f94.31ac6f1f@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >What "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" are doing is giving those objects a NAME >-- a label, a symbolic equivalency, an independent representation made >with specific sounds. My point with regard to the development of early human language is that using a symbol to stand for a concrete object which is stable through time and space is a very late development in language, both in ontology and phylogeny. Before we break down a sentence into its component parts and figure out which parts refer to which participants, we have to first understand what event the whole sentence referred to. It's true that in second language acquisition, especially under formal teaching, the parts are presented to us already broken down. However, for someone who has never had language comprehension, getting to that point is a very big deal. It's not the first thing that happens for infants, and it was probably not the first step we took as a species on the road to modern language. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue May 30 01:16:35 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 19:16:35 -0600 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: One more caution, then: while conclusions derived from multiple observations such as Aya gives at the end of her reply are very strong, very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by saying it. The notion of the 'holophrase' - the single utterance that supposedly means a whole proposition - is to be regarded with considerable suspicion; it arose in child language 40- odd years ago, before linguists in general, Austin's lessons having sunk in, began to routinely distinguish semantics (what this form means) from semantics plus pragmatics (what this person means by producing this form in this context), and it has hung around in child language since then. I have never been convinced that there is any such thing. A claim that a particular child means a whole proposition by producing 'horsie' or 'banana' in a given situation is of course often quite reasonable, as judged by the child's actions and reactions. But claiming that the form itself 'means' a whole proposition is very dicey indeed. If I yell 'fire', I mean a whole lot of things at once, including warnings as well as propositions, but the word 'fire' itself does not mean those things. I may yell for my husband, but the name 'Bill' does not then mean 'Where are you, can you hear me, if you can would you please yell back to let me know where you are?'; it's my calling his name that has this meaning. We all know this about adult language, but forget it too easily in dealing with child language. Yet the call 'yoo-hoo', which has the same functions as calling a name, is similar to Aya's 'mama' example below. 'Ouch' and 'hello' are two more examples of words whose meaning can only properly be described as 'what you say in situation X (if you want to produce effect Y)'. This kind of meaning is very observable to kids who want to do things with words, and it is often present much earlier than referential meaning. Liz Bates wrote good stuff about this years ago, though her terminology, derived directly from Austin, was not transparent enough to catch on widely. Lise On May 29, 2006, at 12:18 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Lise Menn wrote: > >> First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix >> of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. > > Yes. And sometimes unanalyzed phrases stand for whole propositions, > from > which names for participants are identified only later in the > development > of the child's speech. In such cases, the unanalyzed phrase > describes the > whole event holisitically. > > >> Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- >> way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to >> having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally >> monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things >> they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is >> doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - >> and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the >> noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun >> use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous >> here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. > > Agreed. > >> Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is >> not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that >> she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for >> it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. > > Sometimes children don't use "Mommy" to name a concrete object. > Sometimes > they use it to mean "come here!" I have anecdotal evidence. > > When my daughter was 18 months old, we were living in Taiwan. I spoke > Hebrew to her, and her nanny spoke Mandarin. When my daughter > wanted one > of us to come help her with something, she would call out: "Mama! > Mama!" > It didn't matter if it was the nanny who was there or me. She > called for > both of us the same way. (She learned to do this by observing the > nanny's > daughter.) > > However, she did not use "Mama" to refer to either of us. If I > showed her > a picture of the nanny, she would point at it and say "A Yi" (which > is how > the nanny referred to herself: Auntie.) If my daughter saw a > picture of > me, she would point and say "Ani". "Ani" is the Hebrew 1st person > nominative pronoun. I referred to myself in first person, so my > daughter > used the first person pronoun to refer to me, too. > > It doesn't matter what the nanny or I originally thought "Mama" > meant. It > doesn't matter that most people use that word as a nominal or > participant > reference. For my daughter, it was the way to summon help. It was > not a > way to refer to anyone, because she never pointed at any person and > said > Mama. > > Regardless of their derivation, words mean only what they are used > for by > the particular speaker at a particular place and time. That was my > point. > > Best, > > > > --Aya > > > ================================================================ > Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO > 65542 USA > (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 > http://www.well.com/user/amnfn > ================================================================= Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 02:17:49 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:17:49 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 9:19:41 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: << very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by saying it. >> Let's start with two categories of "meaning": -- what an utterance means to the speaker -- what an utterance means to the listener(s) Somehow, we've got a third kind of meaning described here -- "what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what a child means by saying it" What makes us think there is such a thing as "what an utterance means in itself"? Regards Steve Long From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 03:33:55 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 23:33:55 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (8) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 2:18:53 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: <> I'm not sure what this proves. The child wanted help but did not have a word for help? Or were her words for "help me with something" less effective than saying "Mama." What if she said "Mama! Mama! and nobody came? Obviously, the listeners did not care about what she said, because they came anyway. This is not special to human language. Sound draws attention and aimed at the right audience will draw a response. If "mama" has been effective on mother, it may be effective on others. If "bobo" is more effective than "mama" at drawing a response, start using "bobo." Of course, if "Mama" works, use it. It's the real world consequence that drives language, cognition is only an intermediary. Once again, a man touring a candy factory falls into a vat of chocolate. He yells "Fire! Fire!" After being rescued he is asked why he yelled, "Fire! Fire!" He answers, "If I yelled, 'Chocolate, Chocolate', do you think anyone would have come?" All this is a completely different issue than common reference. If Aya's child started calling her Taiwanese nanny, "Queen Mary" or asking for help by saying "leg of lamb," the anecdote was have been quite different in the point it was making. Where common reference is clearly off the track, that is categorized as a serious language problem. The reason we even have a guess at what a child or an adult "means" by spoken word is based on an assumption of commonality of reference. If a child says "ya ya" to indicate that he needs to go to the bathroom, we have to learn that reference and incorporate it into our own set of references for communication to be effective. If a child says "bathroom" to indicate that he needs to go to the bathroom, that is within our common reference, and it takes less work on the LISTENER's part to understand the intended result the child is after -- assuming the listener is interested in what the child is after. <> That's true and that is because -- before sounds become symbolic -- they were merely auditory attempts to manipulate the environment. Yelling "Mama! Mama!" where "Mama" has no connection to any particular object, process or relationship, is equivalent to yelling "Bobo" -- the sound may elicit a response just because it is a sound. What separates human language is the extent of common reference. The other sounds we make are not really different than those made by cicadas and chimps. <<...the parts are presented to us already broken down. However, for someone who has never had language comprehension, getting to that point is a very big deal. It's not the first thing that happens for infants, and it was probably not the first step we took as a species on the road to modern language.>> The "parts" of language are merely representations of the "parts" of the world. There are many folks out there who never really thought about the world being separable into objects and actions, despite the fact that it is easy for them to distinguish the two for the most part, once they think about it. There are many folks out there who never really thought about language being separable into nouns and verbs, despite the fact that it is easy for them to distinguish the two for the most part, once they think about it. This correspondence between symbol and the real world, when it is made common by a common language, is what makes human language particularly effective. Most examples of the "holistic" nature of language are either deducible shorthand versions of complete statements, or examples of arbitrary sound-generation that acts as a simple discriminative stimulus -- whether the sound is a bell, a buzzer, a child shouting an ambiguous "mama" or a mating songbird repeating tweets and warbles in a consistent pattern. The fact that the sound is not symbolic does not keep it from being effective. But it is not distinctively human speech. Regards Steve Long From david_tuggy at sil.org Tue May 30 03:50:34 2006 From: david_tuggy at sil.org (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:50:34 -0500 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: <4a0.13a5a40.31ad054d@aol.com> Message-ID: It could perhaps be defined as "what the speaker and listeners think the utterance would mean to other people, apart from the particular context". At least I judge that's what most people mean when they say "that word(/phrase/etc.) means X". I.e. it is the conventional meaning. --David Tuggy Salinas17 at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 5/29/06 9:19:41 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: > << very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a > child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by > saying it. >> > > Let's start with two categories of "meaning": > -- what an utterance means to the speaker > -- what an utterance means to the listener(s) > > Somehow, we've got a third kind of meaning described here -- > "what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what a child means > by saying it" > > What makes us think there is such a thing as "what an utterance means in > itself"? > > Regards > Steve Long > > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 03:58:08 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 23:58:08 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 12:23:10 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: << [And on the topic of pidgins, remember that - definitionally! - speakers of pidgins have some OTHER language as their native language. They are not naive as to how languages are constructed - e.g. that they have embedding - even though the various speakers of the pidgin - again by definition - have different native languages to draw on. >> The point was not that pidgin speakers were not naive to how language works, but rather the description of certain pidgins as a language with the bare minimum of grammatical features -- "...nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context." Unless "pidgin" does not match this discription, speaker familiarity with other languages is irrelevant. Steve Long From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 04:12:51 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 00:12:51 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 11:50:39 PM, david_tuggy at sil.org writes: << It could perhaps be defined as "what the speaker and listeners think the utterance would mean to other people, apart from the particular context". At least I judge that's what most people mean when they say "that word(/phrase/etc.) means X". I.e. it is the conventional meaning. >> Well, there's a big difference between "what an utterance means in itself" and "conventional meaning." Human languages are built on common reference, and common reference is a matter of statistical probabilities. If a child says "mama," we feel confident he is referring to his mother. If we discover he is calling his dog, we treat that reference as an oddity -- a low probability occurence -- and it does not affect our interpretattion of "mama" when other children say the word. However, if we look up "mama" in the New Speech Dictionary and see a picture of a dog next to it, we know the chances are that the common reference -- "conventional meaning" -- has shifted. Regards, Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Tue May 30 05:19:39 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:19:39 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: <4a0.13c3826.31ad2043@aol.com> Message-ID: Speculation about what beginning speakers "mean" by words they use was initiated by Steve Long earlier in this thread when he questioned whether the use of inflectional morphology by Turkish children in the one word stage was really to be taken as inflection. If every word uttered is to be taken for its conventional meaning, then there is no point in asking that question. Accusative case is accusative case, and never mind what the child was using it for. If it is appropriate to question the function played by case marking morphology in the communicative behavior of beginning speakers, it is equally appropriate to question whether a conventional noun is really a noun in the usage of a particular child. The real problem in trying to maintain an intelligent, sustainable discussion of this issue is to remember that the point of view of the speaker may be very different from our own and that deviations from convention are not necessarily manipulative acts. An adult crying "fire" in order to attract attention, when he knows full well the conventional meaning of the term "fire" is being manipulative. A child who has no idea what the conventional meaning of "mama" is, and who may not have realized yet that every person has a mother, nor that what we call someone depends on our relationship with that person, nor for that matter, that mama is a noun rather than a verb, is not being manipulative, when using "mama" as a general summoning device. I think the same problem of not paying attention to the speaker's context may also be at the base of some of the misunderstandings about pidgins. Take this sentence from p.514 of Hock's PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (Mouton 1991): (9) Number two cop catch him pass finish. `The subordinate official received the letter.' We tend to think of pidgins as using only substantive words, with hardly any function words at all. And if we take every English word in (9) for its standard dictionary meaning, that would be true. But isn't it clear that the word "him" is serving as an indicator that the verb "catch" has an object "pass"? Isn't it equally obvious that the word "finish" is marking completive aspect? Is the pidgin speaker being "manipulative" when using English substantives as unconventional grammatical markers? --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From hartmut at ruc.dk Tue May 30 09:15:50 2006 From: hartmut at ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 11:15:50 +0200 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What about loans? Take the Greek dish called mousakás, whose name has been borrowed into several languages as moussaka (spelling can vary). (Never mind that the Greek word probably is a loan itself; cultural flows suggest that the word has been borrowed from Greek.) The borrowed form is 'actually' the genitive or accusative singular, but does this matter? We can consider the foreign tourist as an incipient speaker of Greek (although he or she never might sample more than a few words), and we may speculate why they picked the form (maybe they heard it in contexts like "I'd like one_______"), but it is or course neither genitive or accusative since they have no Greek inflection in their English, German, Danish Swedish, etc. You couldn't even say they reanalyzed it wrongly as a feminine noun (which would have identical nominative and accusative singulars). Only if one of these incipient speakers becomes a full-flegded learner and finally speaker of Greek and still uses mousaka for the nominative, you could correct them (or talk about a reanalysis as a feminine). (There are loads more of examples like this with loans from inflecting languages.) Do I have to spell out the analogy to children's language acquisition? Hartmut Haberland A. Katz wrote: >Speculation about what beginning speakers "mean" by words they use was >initiated by Steve Long earlier in this thread when he questioned whether >the use of inflectional morphology by Turkish children in the one word >stage was really to be taken as inflection. > >If every word uttered is to be taken for its conventional meaning, then >there is no point in asking that question. Accusative case is accusative >case, and never mind what the child was using it for. > >If it is appropriate to question the function played by case marking >morphology in the communicative behavior of beginning speakers, it is >equally appropriate to question whether a conventional noun is really a >noun in the usage of a particular child. > >The real problem in trying to maintain an intelligent, sustainable >discussion of this issue is to remember that the point of view of the >speaker may be very different from our own and that deviations from >convention are not necessarily manipulative acts. > >An adult crying "fire" in order to attract attention, when he knows full >well the conventional meaning of the term "fire" is being manipulative. A >child who has no idea what the conventional meaning of "mama" is, and >who may not have realized yet that every person has a mother, nor that >what we call someone depends on our relationship with that person, nor >for that matter, that mama is a noun rather than a verb, is not >being manipulative, when using "mama" as a general summoning device. > >I think the same problem of not paying attention to the speaker's context >may also be at the base of some of the misunderstandings about pidgins. >Take this sentence from p.514 of Hock's PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL >LINGUISTICS (Mouton 1991): > >(9) Number two cop catch him pass finish. > `The subordinate official received the letter.' > >We tend to think of pidgins as using only substantive words, with hardly >any function words at all. And if we take every English word in (9) for >its standard dictionary meaning, that would be true. But isn't it clear >that the word "him" is serving as an indicator that the verb "catch" has >an object "pass"? Isn't it equally obvious that the word "finish" is >marking completive aspect? > >Is the pidgin speaker being "manipulative" when using English substantives >as unconventional grammatical markers? > > --Aya > >================================================================ >Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO >65542 USA >(417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 >http://www.well.com/user/amnfn >================================================================= > > > > > From dorgeloh at mail.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de Wed May 31 07:46:18 2006 From: dorgeloh at mail.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de (Heidrun Dorgeloh) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 09:46:18 +0200 Subject: Syntactic Variation and Emerging Genres - Section of the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society Message-ID: Date: 28-Feb-2007 - 02-Mar-2007 Location: Siegen, Germany Contact Person: Anja Wanner Meeting Email: awanner at wisc.edu Web Site: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner/dgfs2007.htm Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics Call Deadline: 31-Jul-2006 Meeting Description: This workshop, co-organized by Heidrun Dorgeloh (Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf) and Anja Wanner (University of Wisconsin-Madison), is an integral part of the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). It will explore the question of how syntactic variation is linked to the context of genre and, more specifically, how such variation can be studied with view to contexts of constantly changing and emerging genres. The conference includes plenary talks and parallel thematic workshops. Workshop description: Modern genre theory emphasizes the importance of genres as typified utterances that share a set of communicative purposes, emerging and developing through repeated use in similar situations. For some registers a trend towards ''genrefication'' has been observed. Cases in point are the standardization of review processes and other performance assessments in academic and administrative discourse, or the emergence of new patterns of style in newspaper language. We would like to explore in this workshop the question of how syntactic variation is linked to the context of genre and, more specifically, how such variation can be studied with view to contexts of constantly changing and emerging genres. How and when do new genres emerge, and how does syntactic variation reflect or contribute to that process? Studies that fall into the scope of this proposal include: - sociolinguistic studies of different registers - corpus studies of emerging genres or constructions - studies focusing on the link between syntax and pragmatics We primarily invite empirical work, but there should also be space for discussing more theoretical issues, in particular of how to incorporate variation according to genre into theories of grammar. We hope to bring together insights from different approaches to syntactic variation (corpus linguistics, construction grammar, historical and synchronic pragmatics, genre theory), unified by the connection they make between linguistic form and communicative purpose. One-page abstracts (max. 500 words) should be sent by e-mail to the coordinators by July 31, 2006 (as attachment in .doc or .pdf format). Contributors should indicate their name, affiliation, e-mail address under which they can be contacted over the summer, and their DGfS membership status. Please send your abstract to both coordinators at the same time (dorgeloh at phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de and awanner at wisc.edu). For more information and for updates please visit the workshop website: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner/dgfs2007.htm -------------------- Dr. Heidrun Dorgeloh Institut fuer englische Sprachwissenschaft - Anglistik III Universitaet Duesseldorf Universitaetsstr.1, D-40229 Düsseldorf Tel.49-(0)211-81-13774, Fax -13026 From dcyr at yorku.ca Wed May 31 15:31:40 2006 From: dcyr at yorku.ca (dcyr at yorku.ca) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:31:40 -0500 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <4FF743E9-A735-4571-B838-517FE800698A@colorado.edu> Message-ID: A propositional example, yet showing the same principles Lisa and Aya mentioned is a whole proposition uttered by a two-year old and that hardly has the meaning of a single word. In French the form for "please" is still the whole proposition "s'il vous plait" ('if it pleases you'). Children are trained to use that proposition as a necessary word or sound sequence to get what they want. Parents call it "the magic word" and of course toddlers have no idea of what they are uttering except that it makes them get what they ask for. So indeed it is a magic word! Similarly, my grandson Ulysse, at the age of two and a half asked his dad to play a video tape for him. Just as my son was introducing the tape in the machine Ulysses said: "D'abord il faut le rembobiner! (First we have to rewind it!)" And my son replied: "You're right, first we have to rewind it." And immediately Ulysses asked his dad: "Daddy what does it mean "First we have to rewind it?" Which indicates that Ulysses was not conscious of uttering a proposition. For him it was only a ritual word, another magical word, necessary to be uttered if one wanted the video tape to played. Regards to all, Danielle E. Cyr From macw at cmu.edu Wed May 31 16:07:50 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 12:07:50 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <1149089500.447db6dca7223@mymail.yorku.ca> Message-ID: My take on Danielle's example is that, by the age of 2;6, Ulysse recognizes and produces the items "d'abord" and "il faut" and that he understands the item-based positional patterning of "le" before the verb. I would argue that the reason he is citing the full utterance is not because he is processing it as a unit, but rather because he is unsure about the morphemic status of the unknown word "rembobiner." Perhaps this is one morpheme, perhaps two. To make matters clearest, he cites the whole sentence. This whole sentence is indeed a loosely assembled chunk in short term memory, but I very much doubt that it is an unanalyzed lexical chunk in long-term memory. This is not to say that there may not be some long-term trace of many common sentences, but there is no reason to expect that to be more true here than with something like "D'abord il faut le changer." I could cite gobs of psycholinguistic analyses and experiments in support of this overall analysis, but perhaps you folks already know this literature. Lise cited some materials in a previous posting. I could add my work on linguistic analysis of child language corpora from the period of 1975-1987 and then additional experimental evidence from 1987-1997 on rote vs analytic storage in short and long-term memory. I totally agree with the important of ritualized chunks in early child language about the age of 1;6.* However, by the age of 2;6, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. -- Brian MacWhinney *One of my favorite papers on this is: Ninio, A., & Snow, C. (1988). Language acquisition through language use: The functional sources of children's early utterances. In Y. Levy, I. Schlesinger & M. Braine (Eds.), Categories and processes in language acquisition (pp. 11-30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. On May 31, 2006, at 11:31 AM, dcyr at yorku.ca wrote: > A propositional example, yet showing the same principles Lisa and > Aya mentioned > is a whole proposition uttered by a two-year old and that hardly > has the > meaning of a single word. > > In French the form for "please" is still the whole proposition > "s'il vous plait" > ('if it pleases you'). Children are trained to use that proposition > as a > necessary word or sound sequence to get what they want. Parents > call it "the > magic word" and of course toddlers have no idea of what they are > uttering > except that it makes them get what they ask for. So indeed it is a > magic word! > > Similarly, my grandson Ulysse, at the age of two and a half asked > his dad to > play a video tape for him. Just as my son was introducing the tape > in the > machine Ulysses said: "D'abord il faut le rembobiner! (First we > have to rewind > it!)" And my son replied: "You're right, first we have to rewind > it." And > immediately Ulysses asked his dad: "Daddy what does it mean "First > we have to > rewind it?" Which indicates that Ulysses was not conscious of > uttering a > proposition. For him it was only a ritual word, another magical > word, necessary > to be uttered if one wanted the video tape to played. > > Regards to all, > Danielle E. Cyr > From V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk Wed May 3 16:13:14 2006 From: V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk (V.Gonzalez-Diaz at liverpool.ac.uk) Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 17:13:14 +0100 Subject: New MA in English Language/Funding opportunities Message-ID: Dear Colleagues We (The School of English at the University of Liverpool) have developed a new MA programme in English Language and Linguistics which will be up and running in the next academic session (2006-2007). I'd be very grateful if you could pass the information below to students/colleagues who may be interested. Thanks very much in advance for your help. Best wishes, Victorina School of English Chatham St. University of Liverpool L69 7ZR ******************************************************************** MA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL This MA programme is aimed at students who have studied English language and/or linguistics as part of their first degree and are interested in developing their knowledge of the organisation of the English language in its different levels, the ways in which English varies across social, historical and textual boundaries and how successive generations of scholars have approached the issue of how to conceptualise and describe the nature of language. Self-funding International Students who are liable for the full International Fees may be eligible for an International Advancement Award (worth ?1,000) and an Accommodation Voucher (worth ?500). For further details see: http://www.liv.ac.uk/international/scholarships.htm For further information about the programme, please either see: http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/ma_courses/MA%20English%20Language%20and%20Lingui.htm or contact Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz (v.gonzalez-diaz at liverpool.ac.uk) From bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon May 8 09:35:48 2006 From: bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de (bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de) Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 09:35:48 GMT Subject: 2nd CfP Session on "Lexical Bootstrapping in Early Language and Conceptual Development" - GCLA conference Message-ID: Dear all, Please find below the second call for papers for our theme session on lexical bootstrapping in early language and conceptual development. With best wishes, Susanna Second Call for Papers LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CHILD CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT Theme session To be held at the SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE GERMAN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION, Munich, 5-7 October 2006 PLEASE NOTE: - DEADLINE EXTENSION - CLARIFICATION ABOUT CONTENTS OF SUBMITTED ABSTRACTS - POSSIBILITY OF PUBLICATION Apart from some few exceptions (Brown 1958, Nelson 1973), the research on child lexical development did not receive much attention from students of child language in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to some statements found in the more recent literature (Rothweiler & Meibauer 1999), this fact is not really surprising when one considers the very influential role then played by formal linguistics with its primacy of syntactic structures and the view of lexicon and semantics as something rather epiphenomenal. From the 1980s on, this state of affairs has changed dramatically. For one thing, over the last 25 years or so, there has been more and more interest in topics related to child lexical acquisition. Over these several years, the research has issued many relevant theoretical insights resp. assumptions, and methodologies about lexical development, such as the view of individual differences in early vocabulary composition in terms of a continuum between referential and expressive style (Nelson 1973) and the holophrastic nature of early words (Nelson 1985), the differentiation between expressive and receptive vocabulary, as well as the use of correlational methods (Bates et al. 1988), or the role of domain-general cognitive skills of categorisation and theory of mind (Tomasello 2003), amongst several others. Secondly and most importantly, this body of research (much of which has been done within functionalist-cognitivist frameworks) seems to allow for the formulation of general assumptions concerning child language development in general, as well as the interplay between language and conceptual development. Thus, especially studies focussing on within- and cross-domain developmental correlations seem to provide evidence for a Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Dale et al. 2000, Dionne et al. 2003), i.e., the assumption that early lexical development, as mapping of words to referents or their conceptualisations, and even to whole propositions, is not only prior to, but also pre-requisite for the emergence of morpho-syntactic constructions (which, incidentally, are not fundamentally different from words, in that they are equally form-meaning pairs). The lexical bootstrapping hypothesis presupposes an early stage in lexical development characterized by the learning of archilexemes, a term originally proposed by Zemb (1978), as grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only, here understood as the means by which the child begins to cognize and categorize the world. Such assumption on the fundamental role of early lexical acquisition for later language development as a whole challenges the view about the primacy of syntax over lexicon and semantics that has been postulated in these 50 years of formal linguistics. For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion. Empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions dealing with aspects of word learning in the one-word phase (and perhaps also before) that might predict diverse aspects of later language and conceptual development of typically developing and impaired children may focus on one or more of the following questions and topics (evidently, other suggestions are equally welcome): - How can measures of, and assumptions on, early lexical development (vocabulary size, vocabulary composition, vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary style, vocabulary spurt, critical mass, others?) be correlated to measures of later grammatical emergence and development (emergence and proportion of multi-word utterances, Mean Length of Utterance, development of inflectional paradigms and use of function words, realisation of argument constructions, others?) How reliable are such correlations? - How can the study of early lexical development shed light on the issue of individual variance and developmental language disorders? Can aspects of early word learning (expressive vs. referential style, dissimilar timing of vocabulary development, peculiarities in vocabulary composition, peculiarities in the conceptual mapping, others?) provide criteria for a differentiation between mere individual variance and developmental disorder, as well as for a differentiation between transient and persistent disorders? Can such aspects be used in the context of early diagnosis of such disorders? - Which cognitive processes underlie word learning as both word-to-concept mapping and categorization task? Are there constraints and principles at play? What is the nature of such constraints?are they domain (=language) specific or domain general? How are they related to later language and conceptual development? - Does a notion of lexical bootstrapping in language acquisition preclude other bootstrapping mechanisms in the stages before the emergence of grammar, such as prosodic, semantic, syntactic bootstrapping, or can interplay amongst these types of bootstrapping mechanisms be assumed? - Related to the last question, how does the child construct her mental lexicon? How is it structured?is this structure modular or network-like or anything else? Which processes of reorganisation are at work along development? - Can early words (at least partially) be seen as holophrases in that they (at least partially) refer to whole propositions? Which developmental change(s) takes place in the transition from holophrastic one-word utterances to multi-word utterances? - Which evidences can be drawn from studies of word learning in children with cognitive developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, others?), as well as in blind and deaf children? - Which insights can be drawn from research based on (i) corpora analyses; (ii) computer learning simulations; (iii) neural activation in experimental situations, such as categorisation tasks; (iv) lexical/conceptual processing in adults with and without language disorders (e.g. aphasia)? - Which similarities, differences or peculiarities can be observed when comparing mono- and multilingual word learning, as well as comparing monolingual and cross-linguistic studies? Depending on the number of contributions, the special session will take place at one or two days of the conference. The theme session will be framed by a paper introducing the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development and, again depending on the number of contributions, one or two discussion rounds. BEFORE SENDING IT, MAKE SURE PLEASE THAT YOUR ABSTRACT: - indicates EXPLICITLY how and to which extent YOUR STUDY IS RELATED TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING in child language and conceptual development. Does your study support or refute the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis? If yes, how and to which extent? If not, why not? - is detailed, i.e., it is about 1000 WORDS LONG, not including list of references, tables, diagrams, etc.; - indicates explicitly and in detail the EMPIRICAL BASIS of your study; this holds also for theoretical works, i.e., theoretical work might rely, for instance, on empirical studies of other researchers, but please NOT SOLELY ON INTROSPECTIVE METHODS; - contains a LIST OF THE REFERENCES mentioned. DEADLINE EXTENSION The deadline for abstract submission was extended to 31 May 2006. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 1 July 2006. Participants should send us an updated abstract of their papers by 21 September 2006. Please send your abstracts exclusively as email attachments (doc- or rtf-files) to: Susanna Bartsch Dagmar Bittner bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de The conference languages are German and English. The organizers are preparing a PROPOSAL FOR PUBLICATION of the presented papers in the series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH (CLR) (Mouton de Gruyter) edited by Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and Ren? Dirven. REFERENCES Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dale, P. S., Dionne, G., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. 2000. Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language, 27/3, 619-642. Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., Boivin, M., & Plomin R. 2003. Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development, 74, 394-412. Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London & New York: Routledge. Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass. Journal of Child Language, 21/2, 339-366. Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: Univ. Press. Nelson, K. 1985. Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Developmental psychology series. Orlando: Academic Press. Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Rothweiler, M. & Meibauer, J. (eds.) 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Ein ?berblick. In: Meibauer, J., & Rothweiler, M. (eds.). 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb. UTB f?r Wissenschaft;Mittlere Reihe, 2039. T?bingen: Francke. Rescorla, L., Mirak, J., & Singh, L. 2000. Vocabulary growth in late talkers: Lexical development from 2;0 to 3;0. Journal of Child Language, 27, 293-311. Zemb, J. M. 1978. Vergleichende Grammatik Franz?sisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux syst?mes. Mannheim et al.: Bibliographisches Institut. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Susanna Bartsch Zentrum f?r allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZaS) Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research J?gerstr. 10-11 10117 Berlin Germany From lavelle at unm.edu Tue May 9 13:55:00 2006 From: lavelle at unm.edu (Andrew LaVelle) Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 07:55:00 -0600 Subject: Semiotic Society of America: 2006 Annual Meeting -- Second Call for Papers (Extended deadline: May 30th) In-Reply-To: <20060508175625.89989.qmail@web33511.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Semiotic Society of America: 2006 Annual Meeting Second Call for Papers (Extended deadline: May 30th) The 2006 Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America will be held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, from noon on Thursday, September 28, through noon on Sunday, October 1, 2006. The meetings will be held in the Stewart Center and the adjoining Purdue Memorial Union which also includes the Union Club Hotel where a block of rooms has been reserved The Union Club Hotel is located at the corner of State and Grant Streets in the Memorial Union complex. For reservations call 1.800.320.6291 or contact www.hotel.purdue.edu and ask for conference rates. The theme for the 2006 conference is ?The Future of Semiotics.? We encourage papers that address semiotics as a diverse but unified field of study and that consider its future prospects within the academy. Following tradition, our theme is non-exclusive and, indeed, we welcome submissions addressing any topic within our diverse discipline, whether theoretical or applied. Please submit abstracts of 100 to 350 words carefully composed to give a clear sense of your proposal. Please also include a short list of keywords for our program index and be sure to state specifically any AV requirements Participants will have thirty minutes for their presentations, including time for questions and discussion. Abstracts should be sent to the Chair of the Program Committee, Nathan Houser, at nhouser at iupui.edu. Send your abstracts both in the body of your email and in an attachment (do not use special fonts or graphics). The deadline for submission has been extended to 30 May 2006. The program committee welcomes proposals for symposia. Participants must be paid up members of the Society and must register for the 2006 Annual Meeting. Annual SSA dues are $50 for regular membership or $25 for student membership and may be paid online at www.pdcnet.org/member-ssa.html. (International participants and participants in special symposia may request a waiver of membership dues.) The meeting registration fee is $75 or $35 for students. Optional fees are $15 for a Plenary Luncheon on Saturday, 30 September, and $30 for the Banquet that evening. Meeting registration and banquet fees can be sent in advance to SSA 2006, Professor Nathan Houser, Institute for American Thought, IUPUI, 902 New York Street, ES 0010, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5157. Annual dues can be included but with a separate check made out to SSA. For more information about the program and about registering and traveling to West Lafayette visit the SSA website: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/SSA.htm. 2006 Program Committee Nathan Houser, Chair, Myrdene Anderson (Chair of local arrangements committee), Mary Susan Ashbourne, Sean Day, Jason M. Kelly, Terry J. Prewitt, and Inna Semetsky. From andrea.schalley at une.edu.au Thu May 11 05:48:55 2006 From: andrea.schalley at une.edu.au (Andrea Schalley) Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 15:48:55 +1000 Subject: ALI 2006 Winter School Message-ID: Dear FUNKNETlers, Below you'll find information about the Australian Linguistics Institute to be held in Brisbane in early July 2006. See the full course listing below - ALI has a focus on language and cognition, and there's a lot here to meet the wide range of interests that FUNKNET members have. Note the Earlybird Deadline of May 26th - that's just 2 weeks away! We look forward to seeing you there Andrea Schalley ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Full Title: Australian Linguistics Institute 2006 Location: University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Date: 10-14 July 2006 URL: http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/ Early Bird Registration Deadline: 26 May 2006 (There is no general registration deadline, you can register up to the start of ALI.) Contact:????Andrea Schalley Email: andrea.schalley at une.edu.au ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ALI 2006 is a selection of 12 short intensive courses presented by world experts in their fields. It's a unique opportunity for graduate students, advanced undergraduates, professional linguists, and language professionals to upgrade their knowledge and skills in key areas of linguistics. Many courses in ALI 2006 are on the theme 'Language and Cognition', while others focus on language typology, acquisition, and aspects of linguistic theory. Each course consists of five 90 minute sessions, running Monday through Friday. Three sets of courses will be running in parallel, so participants can attend a maximum of four courses. Confirmed topics and presenters are as follows. ??? * Bilingualism: cognitive aspects ????? Istvan Kecskes (State University of New York, Albany) ??? * Cognitive linguistics ????? John Taylor (University of Otago) ??? * Combinatory grammar and natural cognition ????? Mark Steedman (University of Edinburgh) ??? * L2 syntax: Age dependent effects ????? Bonnie Schwartz (University of Hawai'i) ??? * Language and genetics ????? Brian Byrne (University of New England) ??? * Language and thought ????? Lera Boroditsky (Stanford University) ??? * Logic in child language acquisition ????? Stephen Crain (Macquarie University Centre for Cognitive Science) ??? * Morphology and lexical representations ????? Andrew Spencer (University of Essex) ??? * NonPamaNyungan languages of Northern Australia ????? Nicholas Evans (Melbourne University) ??? * Papuan languages ????? William Foley (University of Sydney) ??? * Semantics masterclass ????? Anna Wierzbicka (Australian National University) ??? * Understanding typological distribution ????? Balthasar Bickel (University of Leipzig) ALI 2006 is organised by the Language and Cognition Research Centre of the University of New England. For more information, contact Cliff Goddard cgoddard at une.edu.au, Andrea Schalley andrea.schalley at une.edu.au, or Nick Reid nreid at une.edu.au . From jleitao at ci.uc.pt Sun May 14 22:58:58 2006 From: jleitao at ci.uc.pt (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jos=E9_Leit=E3o?=) Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 23:58:58 +0100 Subject: 1st Cfp : The 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC'2007) Message-ID: FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS The 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC'2007) Lagos (Algarve), Portugal hosted by University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences March 29 - 30, 2007 http://daarc2007.di.fc.ul.pt/ Anaphora is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines such as theoretical, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. On the other hand, the correct interpretation of anaphora has played an increasingly vital role in real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. As a result, the processing of anaphora has become one of the most productive topics of multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and has enjoyed increased interest and attention in recent years. In this context, the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquia (DAARC) have emerged as the major regular forum for presentation and discussion of the best research results in this area. Initiated in 1996 at Lancaster University and taken over in 2002 by the University of Lisbon, the DAARC series established itself as a specialised and competitive forum for the presentation of the latest results on anaphora processing, ranging from theoretical linguistic approaches through psycholinguistic and cognitive work to corpus studies and computational modelling. The sixth Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC?2007) will take place in Lagos (Algarve), Portugal, in March 29-30, 2007. We would like to invite anyone currently researching in the areas of discourse anaphora and anaphor resolution, from any methodological perspective or framework, to submit a paper to DAARC'2007. The closing date for submission is October 16, 2006. Notification of acceptance will be sent by December 15, 2006. Final versions of selected papers to be included in the proceedings are expected by January 19, 2007. Submissions (extended abstracts) must be anonymous and at most 3 pages in length. For further details on the submission procedure, and other relevant info on the colloquium visit its website at: http://daarc2007.di.fc.ul.pt/ Program Committee: Mira Ariel, Tel Aviv Univ Sergey Avrutin, OTS Amit Bagga, Ask.com Peter Bosch, Univ Osnabrueck Ant?nio Branco, Univ Lisbon Donna Byron, Ohio State Univ Francis Cornish, Univ Toulouse-Le Mirail Dan Cristea, Univ Iasi Robert Dale, Macquarie Univ Richard Evans, Univ Wolverhampton Martin Everaert, OTS Lyn Frazier, MIT Claire Gardent, LORIA Jeanette Gundel, Univ Minnesota Sanda Harabagiu, Univ Texas at Dallas Lars Hellan, Norwegian Univ of Science and Technology Erhard Hinrichs, Univ Tuebingen Graeme Hirst, Univ Toronto Yan Huang, Univ Reading Andrew Kehler, Univ California San Diego Andrej Kibrik, Russian Academy of Sciences Emiel Krahmer, Tilburg Univ Shalom Lappin, King's College Tony McEnery, Lancaster Univ Ruslan Mitkov, Univ Wolverhampton Constantin Orasan, Univ. Wolverhampton Maria Mercedes Pinango, Yale Univ Costanza Navarretta, CST Massimo Poesio, Univ Essex Eric Reuland, OTS Jeffrey Runner, Univ of Rochester Antonio Fernandez Rodriguez, Univ Alacant Tony Sanford, Glasgow Univ Roland Stuckardt, Univ Frankfurt am Main Joel Tetreault, Univ. Rochester Renata Vieira, Unisinos Organisers: Antonio Branco, Univ Lisbon Tony McEnery, Lancaster Univ Ruslan Mitkov, Univ Wolverhampton F?tima Silva, Univ Oporto From a.m.koskela at sussex.ac.uk Wed May 17 12:42:52 2006 From: a.m.koskela at sussex.ac.uk (Anu Koskela) Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 13:42:52 +0100 Subject: The First UK PG Conference in Cognitive Linguistics Message-ID: The First UK Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics is to take place on Saturday 27th May at the University of Sussex at Brighton, UK. The conference will feature talks by postgraduate researchers, addressing a wide range of topics from a broadly Cognitive Linguistic perspective. In addition, the programme includes the following plenary sessions: Vyvyan Evans (University of Sussex): The cognitive linguistics enterprise: An overview Gilles Fauconnier (University of California San Diego): Blending theory workshop Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth): Language as a biocultural niche For more details of the conference, including the full programme, please visit the conference website at www.cogling.org.uk/pgccl Best regards, Anu Koskela DPhil Candidate and Associate Tutor Dept. of Linguistics and English Language/ Centre for Research in Cognitive Science University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN UK From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Wed May 24 09:52:37 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 05:52:37 -0400 Subject: Gray Codes and diagrammatic iconicity in language? Message-ID: For those of you who may have been interested in the symbolism-connectionism wars of a few years back, the notion of the Gray code seems to fill an important gap between pure binary/digital and more iconic ways of representing meaning (at least from the perspective of diagrammatical iconicity). Somehow I managed to wander from reading up on how such coding conventions have possible relevance to the biological genetic code and its evolution into possible linguistic applications (to which I can find NO references on the WWW). I guess ideally I should bring this up on the cognitivist discussion, but I've seen their reactions to anything coming from my mind, so on second thought maybe here is better. Less scratching of nails on blackboards. Any takers? Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 25 07:08:47 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 03:08:47 -0400 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: Dan Everett's recent challenges to orthodoxy regarding the interpretation of grammatico-lexical oddities in Piraha~ has had me thinking quite a lot about the language's place in typology. A recent posting in LanguageLog brought this to mind once again (the post links to this paper:http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/culturalgrammar.pdf).The emphasis on prosody, singing, humming, whistling, its de-emphasis on segments (having the lowest phoneme count of any language on earth, with huge variation of what there is), focus on the here-and-now aspects of reality, etc., lack of many grammatical distinctions, all seem to point the way towards a very different language type than those usually encountered. Some of the grammatical findings- no numbers, no number contrasts on lexical items. Individuable versus mass contrast exists- but not actual count. No quantifiers, but there are forms for 'whole' or 'part', which are not used in the abstract. Simplest pronoun inventory in the world, forms may be borrowings- and a much reduced set of roles for them in any case. No nominal morphology. No embedding. Verbal complexity high. Only two tense-like morphemes (remote versus proximate), no perfect. Lexical- no color terms, only 90 verb roots in entire language (less than Kalam/Kobon family!), very few words for time at all. Perhaps the simplest kinship system known (reduced gender distinctions), and only to known relatives. Cultural/discourse- no indigenous creation myths or fiction- everything is and always was like it is hear and now, no individual or collective memory more than two generations long. No art (at least drawing for decoration), but stick figures made representing spirit world directly experienced here, now. Everett's treatment appears aimed at challenging assumptions (especially Chomskyan) about what needs to be considered necessary for language, and he posits cultural reasons to explain the above facts. However, I have found little or no discussion of typology or typological change by the author. I cannot believe that the language has always been as it is today (despite the probability that speakers themselves might believe it). Thus it must have arrived in this state from some other. The question that I'm concerned with here is whether such change is somehow unusual in in type, or just in its extremity. As many of you are aware (though getting constructive criticism seems tantamount to extracting blood from stone- what, worried the men in black will come for you??), my later work on correlating language type with ideophone numbers leads to some interesting conclusions with regard to cyclic change and where iconicity versus symbolicity is expressed in the entire linguistic system. We are all aware of grammaticalization out of the lexicon, the processes evolving grams undergo, their functions, etc. I've hypothesized that ideophones and other more pragmatically oriented forms constitute a kind of 'antigrammar', which stands in diametric opposition to closed-class grammatical morphology on many fronts. It is becoming increasingly apparent (among those linguists who actually care to look further than purely left-hemisphere effects, thank you very much) that ideophone roots can, with the same sort of attrition and selection we see in the evolution of lexical items canalized towards morphology, move towards lexical status. We thus have three stations in a chain relation. Ideophones to lexemes to grams (likely multiple hops are not much sanctioned- reduced numbers limit such in any case). Grams then wear away to Cheshire Cat smiles (but not without first affecting prosody which has effects on syntax). Straight interjections may be the sources of many ideophone roots. There is implicit in all of this a re-prioritization of prosody versus segmentality in a Yin/Yang mandala-style cycle. Where languages are 'at' in this never-ending game is strongly linked to language type, as many people are slowly learning (though I doubt the interjection/ideophone connection has been made by them). OK, then, what does this have to do with Piraha~? It is obviously very heavy on the prosody, light on segmentality. And although Everett hasn't looked I'll bet a lot of the variation of the existing segments is pragmatically oriented (and not merely automatic, though it might be hard to tell if both go hand in hand). You see such variation in ideophones in many languages- in Africa, in Korean, etc., but there is much more of it in interjections in many other languages- one of the reasons they are often so hard to phonetically render in a consistent and satisfying way. If one thinks of the type cycle as a circle, and arbitrarily label the antigram-heavy state as zero degrees, then lexeme heavy types are at 90, gram-heavy types at 180, and syntax-heavy types at 270. Segmentalism is (roughly) more pronounced in the upper half of the figure (0 to 180), while prosody is in the lower half (180 to 360/0). It may not be as simple as this, but this is I feel a good first approximation. Piraha~ would be a 'syntax' heavy sort of language- where all sorts of nonsegmental phenomena take center stage and pragmatics is king. I believe there to be a good possible link, in general, between prosody and pragmatics, just as there may be between segmentality and grammar (at least the morphological kind). Certainly studies of the brain demonstrate that segments prefer the left (home of the lexicon and morphology) and nonsegments prefer the right (home of much that is pragmatic, interjections, and possibly also ideophones, though nobody has looked for the latter relation). Cyclic changes in language type would correlate with changes in how speakers view and interact with their world. Strong Whorfian argument (though I doubt he would have agreed with my particular take on the matter). Also changing might be WHICH hemisphere is in charge of language. As hinted at above, things might not be so simple or cut-and-dried. For instance the DEGREE to which languages change may depend on other factors, such as how fast or slow the change happens (thus either dragging the past with it and muddling the synchronic picture, or allowing slow 'recrystallization' to use geological/chemical metaphor that allows one to purify the system, and work out the bugs). According to Everett, Piraha~ speakers are for the most part monolingual in the language and have been for hundreds of years. Time enough? Anyway, it is my hope that my above tirade will generate some interest at the least, and discussion (but I won't bet that the heavy-hitters will want to dirty their fingers here...). I feel that Dan Everett, if his observations hold up, has found some VERY interesting data that pertain far more to the diachrony of language, typology, grammaticalization (versus antigrammaticalization!), etc. than they do to beating particular (un)dead Cambridge horses (even if such continue to rise every night to suck the blood of young and unsuspecting linguists). A horse is a horse, of course- eh Count Ed? BTHUH! Jess Tauber From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 14:22:57 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 07:22:57 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <13439845.1148540927520.JavaMail.root@elwamui-ovcar.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): "As languages change over time, they tend -- very roughly -- to move around a typologiocal circle: isolating to agglutinating, to fusional, back to isolating, and so on. If we place the isolating type at four o'clock position, agglutinative at eight o'clock and fusional at twelve o'clock, around a clock face, it is possible to describe recent movements in various language families. Proto-Indo-European was at twelve o'clock but modern branches of the family have moved at different rates, toward a more isolating position." (pp. 41-42) The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has undergone previously. Undoubtedly Piraha~ has not always been exactly as it currently is constituted, but there might conceivably be clues here to which position is more likely to have been the starting point for all of us. Without stating it directly, most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point, since they see movement in the direction of agglutinazation/ and or fusion as an indication of higher degrees of change than movement in the direction of isolation. (Bybee, for instance, actually counts degree of fusion as an indicator of degree of grammaticlaization.) An endless cycle as Dixon describes, though, would imply that the starting point is key. If you started out already fusional, a movement toward isolating typology indicates a higher degree of grammatical innovation. To solve the riddle, we have to look to extralinguistic factors. Piraha~ fits into an already existing pattern whereby most isolated cultures living in sociologically primitive situations (hunter gatherers with no external contact or commerce, for instance) have languages with surprisingly complex morphosyntactic typologies. Assuming that these people were not previously members of highly complex trading societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, we would conclude that complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From nrude at Ballangrud.com Thu May 25 16:10:59 2006 From: nrude at Ballangrud.com (Noel Rude) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 09:10:59 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: But of course the study of pidgins and creoles comes in here--left to themselves children will create a more isolating system (A. Katz: "most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point"). So there are two questions: 1) what are the categories and operations of Language? and 2), how did Language get here in the first place? The cycle of grammaticalization may tell us a lot in regard to the first question, I'm afraid the second question is much the most difficult. Piraha may be somewhat analogous to blind cave fish. It may say a lot about what can happen in an environment of deprivation, perhaps less about how Language got here. ----- Original Message ----- From: "A. Katz" To: "jess tauber" Cc: Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 7:22 AM Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): "As languages change over time, they tend -- very roughly -- to move around a typologiocal circle: isolating to agglutinating, to fusional, back to isolating, and so on. If we place the isolating type at four o'clock position, agglutinative at eight o'clock and fusional at twelve o'clock, around a clock face, it is possible to describe recent movements in various language families. Proto-Indo-European was at twelve o'clock but modern branches of the family have moved at different rates, toward a more isolating position." (pp. 41-42) The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has undergone previously. Undoubtedly Piraha~ has not always been exactly as it currently is constituted, but there might conceivably be clues here to which position is more likely to have been the starting point for all of us. Without stating it directly, most grammaticalization researchers posit an isolating starting point, since they see movement in the direction of agglutinazation/ and or fusion as an indication of higher degrees of change than movement in the direction of isolation. (Bybee, for instance, actually counts degree of fusion as an indicator of degree of grammaticlaization.) An endless cycle as Dixon describes, though, would imply that the starting point is key. If you started out already fusional, a movement toward isolating typology indicates a higher degree of grammatical innovation. To solve the riddle, we have to look to extralinguistic factors. Piraha~ fits into an already existing pattern whereby most isolated cultures living in sociologically primitive situations (hunter gatherers with no external contact or commerce, for instance) have languages with surprisingly complex morphosyntactic typologies. Assuming that these people were not previously members of highly complex trading societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, we would conclude that complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Thu May 25 16:19:06 2006 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 18:19:06 +0200 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Aya, dear Funknetters >The linguistic cycle is well described by Dixon in THE RISE AND FALL OF >LANGUAGES (CAMBRIDGE 1997): > Let me first add that the Linguistic Cycle (or: Grand Cycle, as we usually term it) is well described already in the tradition of 19th centruy German grammarians. Here, I do not want to turn to the question of which position Proto-Indo-European did take in this cycle (I think that Dixon referred to that layer of Proto-IE that is reconstructed by external evidence. The internal reconstruction of IE clearly opens the option for a position more close to four o'clock (isolating via agglutination)). Still, one should note that Dixon's clock can go into both directions: For instance, Ossetian and Tokharian both show clear evidence for the re-agglutination of a former fusional paradigm *without* pasing through the isolating stage. In fact, the Grand Cycle is just a tendency (with massive recursions), not a *must* for the dynamics of language paradigms. >The question seldom addressed by functional linguists is which typology is >likely to have come first. It's an endless cycle, so finding a language at >any particular clock position proves nothing about how many cycles it has >undergone previously. > I admit that I have diffculties to understand what Aya means by 'language' in this context. Perhaps, it is better to term it a 'linguistic-communcative tradition', because this would help us to avoid terming e.g. French and Indo-European 'one [and the same] language'. In this sense, the seemingly endless Grand Cycle goes together with the fact that language always is always is the reflex of a foregoing stage: A 'linguistic-communicative tradition' hence has only *one* starting point, that is 'language origin'. Note that here, I do not mean that all languages are genetically related - this seems not to be provable (out of methodological and theoretical considerations). But what we can say is that all language-based communicative systems are originally (!) related. The same logically holds for the Grand Cycle: It's starting point is immediately related to language origin. However, just as we can hardly say anything safe about the early seconds of language origin, we cannot describe the position, which language took on Dixon's clock at the period of language origin. In other words: The Grand Cycle is nothing but a heuristic approach to language change in the period of observable and reconstructable historical stages. I think that it will be difficult ever to describe how language looked like in its first stages (in the first seconds of language origin). From a modern point of view, it sounds logical to assume that in these seconds, language had been 'word-based' (or: isolating), but this is nothing but a projection of current linguistic thinking and categorization. Maybe that language was (by that time (!)) totally different from what we today know about linguistic 'types'. For instance, if we start from a phrase-based model, linguistic categories as we know them today would have emerged from massive processes of re-analysis and paradigmatization of more 'iconic' (or: idiosyncratic) utterances. If this is true, the Grand Cycle would have started to become a 'tendency' in language change at a later stage. Maybe that the Cycle was - in its first run - fed by a number of factors different from those we use to describe for the Cycle itself. Turning to the Piraha~ case, I do not see the necessity to set up a new type of the (fortunately dismissed) Stadial Theory (N. Marr) as suggested by Aya's wordings. There is no proof that a sociological habitus can be immediately related to a linguistic type. There is no convincing evidence that growing interactional complexity favors linguistic complexity. Nor does exist evidence for the contrary. Linguistic complexity is primarily a question of phenomonology. We linguists are used to describe something as complex, because we are trained in thinking in building blocks and in modeling the world thereafter. But we cannot say that a language is 'by itself' (or: ontologically) more complex than another (the assumption of complexity is immediately coupled with (more or less scientific) perception). In other words: Complexity bascially is a meta-linguistic criterion, which should be very carefully referred to in terms of a tertium comparationis when relating world 'objects' (such as a sociological habitus and a language type). Finally, I think that it is rather dangerous to start from the assumption that >these people were not previously members of highly complex trading >societies who later returned to a more primitive lifestyle, > and to conclude that >complex morphosyntax is the more conservative typology. This >indicates that our original starting point was far from isolating. > Maybe that say 15.000 years ago, the complexity rate of languages was much higher than thousands of years later, but this does not necessarily imply that massive complexity was given for the many earlier years, too. 15.000 years is a little bit of nothing in the history of mankind and (perhaps) in the history of language change. Best, Wolfgang -- ############################# Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut f?r Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft (IATS) [General Linguistics and Language Typology] Department f?r Kommunikation und Sprachen / F 13.14 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M?nchen Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 E-mail: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.ats.lmu.de/index.php From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 18:15:17 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:15:17 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <4475D8FA.2020403@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> Message-ID: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > For instance, Ossetian and Tokharian both show clear >evidence for the re-agglutination of a former fusional paradigm *without* >pasing through the isolating stage. In fact, the Grand Cycle is just a >tendency (with massive recursions), not a *must* for the dynamics of >language paradigms. I find this very interesting, since it flies in the face not only of the "grand Cycle" but also of the Unidirectionality Hypothesis of grammaticalization (assuming this de-fusional process applied to specific lexemes and not just the language as a whole). What is the evidence for not having an intermediary isolating stage? I don't know much about Ossetian or Tokharian, so citations to recommended reading would be greatly appreciated. Are we talking about the entire language or just one paradigm? Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From amnfn at well.com Thu May 25 18:32:23 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:32:23 -0700 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? In-Reply-To: <001301c68015$d2d52390$3b3c0a0a@mailcomm.ctuir.com> Message-ID: Noel Rude wrote: >But of course the study of pidgins and creoles comes in here--left to >themselves children will create a more isolating system More isolating than a pidgin? I thought creolization went the other way, creating a less isolating structure. >somewhat analogous to blind cave fish. It may say a lot about what can >happen in an environment of deprivation, perhaps less about how Language >got here. Not being in contact with other groups is not necessarily "an environment of deprivation" for human beings. T. Givon, for instance, suggests that our ancestors were used to living in a society of intimates, and that when language emerged, that's how all humans were living. (BIOLINGUSITICS, John Benjamins 2002). The massive populations that we are used to now are a result of agriculture (not to speak of industrialization.) Most humans, not too long ago, lived in very small, mostly isolated groups. Their society was less complex, but it's quite possible that their language might have been synthetic, rather than isolating. A smaller lexicon with tighter fusion is characteristic of languages used by hunter gatherers, as opposed to urban traders. (of course, there are exceptions, but they have historical explanations.) Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk Thu May 25 19:49:50 2006 From: phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk (Philippe De Brabanter) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 20:49:50 +0100 Subject: conference announcement + CFP Message-ID: Call for papers / Appel ? communications under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, international conference on: ? The notion of commitment in linguistics ? ? La notion de prise en charge en linguistique ? January 11-13, 2007 / 11-13 janvier 2007 / University of Antwerp (Belgium) / Universit? d?Anvers (Belgique) Organisateurs / Organizers : Patrick Dendale (Universiteit Antwerpen) Danielle Coltier (Universit? du Maine, Le Mans) Abstract Deadline : June, 20 2006 Date limite de soumission : 20 juin 2006 The notion of commitment (Non-)Commitment ((non-)prise en charge in French) is a notion which is fairly often used in the analysis of certain types of linguistic phenomena (sometimes under the guise of other labels, such as performativity) ? e.g. in the analysis of speech acts, of semantic categories such as modality, evidentiality and subjectivity, of different forms of reported speech, and of certain tenses and moods. But it is hardly ever the subject of explicit investigation in its own right. Goal of the conference The aim of this conference is to bring together research which crucially draws on the notion of (non-)commitment in one or another way, in an attempt to achieve a better understanding of the nature and the extension of the notion itself. It welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the issue in its own right or in terms of its role in any relevant linguistic or conceptual phenomenon, using any kind of methodological approach, and coming from any kind of theoretical background. One section of the conference will be devoted to typological contributions, next to other sections dealing with grammatical or lexical markers or strategies of (non-)commitment in the Romance and Germanic languages. Theoretical problems pertaining to the notion The theoretical issues addressed in this conference can be summarized in terms of five central questions: A) To what does (non-)commitment apply? What are possible objects or (aspects of) objects of (non-)commitment (elements of form, of meaning)? B) Who commits him/herself? Who is the agent of the commitment (which instance of the speaker)? C) When does (non-)commitment apply? Only at the moment of speech, or also at other times? D) What is the nature of (non-)commitment? Are there different forms or degrees of it? E) How is (non-)commitment taken? Under which conditions and by means of which forms, mechanisms or strategies is it signalled? Conference languages In view of the fact that the notion of (non-)commitment or (non-)prise en charge ((non‑)res?ponsibilit?) is quite manifestly present in the French linguistic tradition (especially in the aftermath of the work of Benveniste), more so than in the Anglo-American tradition, the present conference also explicitly aims to establish communication on the issue between these ?geographical? research traditions. Therefore, the conference will feature presentations in French as well as in English. Deadline for abstract submissions is June 20, 2006 Format and evaluation of abstracts Abstracts will be refereed anonymously. Abstracts are to be submitted as an attachment in Word or Rich Text Format to an email sent to commitment2007 at ua.ac.be. Your abstract should be in French or in English (please use the language of the actual presentation). It should not exceed 500 words (references not included). Please include the title but do not mention the name of the author(s). Use Times Roman 12 and single spacing, and make sure to embed TrueType Fonts for special characters (cf. typological studies). The email accompanying the abstract should contain the title of the presentation (identical to the title indicated on the abstract in the attachment), the name of the author(s), and their full coordinates (affiliation, postal address, email address). Notification of acceptance/rejection: late August 2006. Conference registration Registration fee: 80 Euro Special registration fees apply to members of the Linguistic Society of Belgium, please check the website (www.bkl-cbl.be) for details. Important dates Abstract deadline: June 20, 2006 Notification: late August 2006 Registration deadline: September 15, 2006 Second circular: September 2006 Conference dates: January 11-13, 2007 at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) Conference website: www.ua.ac.be/commitment For further information, please contact Patrick Dendale Universit? d'Anvers Department of Linguistics Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Anvers-Wilrijk Belgium Email: patrick.dendale at ua.ac.be Web : webhost.ua.ac.be/dendale T?l : +32 3 820 28 13 Fax : +32 3 820 28 23 UFR anglais-Paris4 1, rue Victor Cousin 75005 Paris Institut Jean Nicod 1bis, avenue de Lowendal 75007 Paris --------------------------------- Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. Do it now... From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 25 23:34:11 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 19:34:11 -0400 Subject: Prosody-pragmatics rich language- the case of Piraha~? Message-ID: One can have a rough unidirectional cycle as a default, deflections from it resulting from a variety of factors, not least of which is arealism. But it might be better to imagine the cyclic relation in a larger scheme, so for instance by adding another dimension (say through the center of the cycle) you end up with a spiral. One might also consider allowing for subcycles within the larger supercycle which are still unidirectional, but don't encompass the entire set of possibilities. This would let a language 'backslide' typologically without violating unidirectionality. Getting back to parts of my original post, I'm wondering whether its possible that lateralization and shared linguistic responsibilities cognition-wise could explain some of what has been found in Piraha~. Now while I don't KNOW for a fact, it will be my guess that the vast majority of brain-scan work and stroke studies (etc.) aimed at unlocking the neural basis of language have been done on a rather limited sample of subject languages. Of course if one assumes that all languages are processed in exactly the same way this shouldn't matter, and the Chomskyan tradition hasn't really bothered to challenge this assumption. Thus we have (with a nod to Scott Delancey's 'physics envy') our very own linguistic 'Standard Model': Left hemisphere language processing (and we can safely ignore the right). Of course more and more evidence has been cumulating that the right does most things pragmatic, but since when does the Cambridge tradition care too much about that? Not really 'language'. The left hemisphere seems to like to concern itself with sequences of smallish manipulations and behavioral automaticizations, which of course is perfect for the development of grammatical morphology, creating simple symbol strings (at several levels) , etc. I'm kidding of course that things are this clean. But the trend is definitely there. Objectification of the world, into orderly patterns of small, easily chewable bites. Fixed particles as opposed to wildly dynamic force fields. Crystals. Yet the idea of the right hemisphere as somehow more interested in global/holistic perspectives, in larger, clumsier manipulations also seems to have some merit. Here is the realm of give and take (perhaps more the latter), action and reaction (especially subjective/emotional), of discourse continuity, and humor, music, etc. Continually shifting contexts. Fields over particles. Effects can be spread over many individual manipulable objects, and the objects may themselves be partially broken down and spread out (and perhaps unrecognizable for anyone fixed on self-contained forms smaller than the whole). Solutes. Now obviously it takes the usual processes of both hemispheres to make language work, but there are questions about hemispheric dominance, either in absolute terms, or ordering, etc. Men tend to have more hemispheric laterization than women statistically- perhaps this comes into play in language structure as well? For instance in more synthetic languages we see left-hemisphere grammaticalization gone wild, and syntactic ordering 'relegated' more and more to pragmatic interpretations. This sounds a bit like increased lateral functional polarization- left gets grammar, right gets antigrammar, with much less crossover than 'middle ground' languages. Note that polysynthetic languages tend to have relatively few ideophones- another indication that segmentality is being segregated to the grammatical side of the equation. Polarization is left/right. But what about isolating and/or analytical languages? Here grammatical and lexical class relations depend much more on prosody, larger ordering, negotiation. Much more crossover between the prosodic and the segmental, between the pragmantic and the grammatical. Much less polarization, at least between left and right. How about polarization between front/back (motor versus sensory halves of the brain)? The verb/noun distinction is often the last to go? Here I'm delving into relatively uncharted territory. In addition to left/right and front/back polarization, there could also be top/bottom. Different pathways (used linguistically how?) have already been found along this axis, so it is possible. The homuncular mappings on the cortex have the feet on top, and the head on the bottom. I've already found in many languages of the 'bipartite construction' (involving instrument/bodypart and pathway/location affixation) there is often implicit in stem structure order a bias that splits the upper body (home of most of the instrument-relatable body parts) from the lower (home of those effectors that relate to path and location). Perhaps increased polarization of brain structure and processing in this dimension is involved in some way? The last gross dimension to deal with (that I'm aware of- are there more?) is depth. Cortex versus deeper layers and centers. The cortex is a differentiation device (literally where I have to lay/spell it out for you). Integration for the cortex seems to depend on long-distance connections which vary over evolutionary time, including the corpus callosum linking the two hemispheres (which exhibits great variability in humans). Interestingly the right hemisphere seems to have much grosser division into functional units versus the left, which may go towards its more holistic functioning. Lower centers less finely differentiate, are more integrated. So for instance temporarily disabling the cortex seems to be an effective way to experience synaesthesia. Given the way humans seem to operate (note how we lump certain body-centered spatial axes together- right/front/up versus left/down/back), one might try to do the same with the brain. So up (homuncular feet= down)/right (body left)/front (motor cortex- for most of evolutionary history body actions have been geared to pull or push things in the rearward direction- whether food (into us), mates (towards us), ground (away back), wastes, etc. We move forward, but the world moves the other way). Does the grosser/holistic versus finer/individuated distinction hold in each of these dimensions of the brain? How would increased or decreased functional polarity between them affect language structure and use? Can prioritizations between the poles be reversed (Alphonse versus Anatole)? Is there some sort of ordered sequence between the axes and poles that might help explain the linguistic cycle? And within each of these larger patternings are there smaller ones? For instance in the human arm gross but powerful motions get the arm moving ballistically, and finer and weaker ones are found as one moves distally (the hand itself has another axis of its own from thumb to pinkie finger)- similarly with most of the effectors of the external body (internally it may be the other way round- how does this affect how we view for instance phonological ontogeny in first language acquisition, and the actual sound symbolic values of the phonemes, which seem to follow?). Piraha~ may simply be a relatively rare (in TODAY'S world) extreme form of allowed language variation. It might be that in times past many more languages were like it. What other variations have we missed because of sample errors beyond our control (diachronically, or probabilistically)? Beyond what counts as human language as-we-know-it, how can we reconcile other species' communication systems with our own? Is the gap unbridgeable, or are we just not taking a large enough view. Chomskyan thinking has tended to ignore the right hemisphere, and completely ignore the other possibly relevant structural/functional polarities in the brain. Certainly our brains are different to some extent from those of other animals, but theirs are also different from each other as well. How much goes to phylogeny and genes, and how much can be ascribed to socialization and personality? What are the limits of variation, and how are they fixed? Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From Salinas17 at aol.com Fri May 26 16:38:51 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 12:38:51 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. Message-ID: In a message dated 5/25/06 12:20:23 PM, W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de writes: << There is no proof that a sociological habitus can be immediately related to a linguistic type. There is no convincing evidence that growing interactional complexity favors linguistic complexity. Nor does exist evidence for the contrary. >> But perhaps there is some evidence that English lost inflection because of a mixed populations of bi-lingual speakers. (And perhaps Bulgarian is another case.) It makes sense to expect that differences in developed structure are the result of differences in function. But it may be a bit too general to look for "sociological habitus" or "complexity" to account for differences in morphological typology. If we stick with communication as the variable, we might see analytical/isolating languages as a natural reaction by speakers to clashing inflectional systems as an obstacle to communication. While synthetic languages reflect a more mature development where speakers have found a Gouldian/Dixonian equilibrium. Perhaps the Grand Cycle is mainly a reflection of varying exposure of a working language to non-native speakers. With regard to the first language(s), a question to ask is whether we'd expect such languages to include nuanced concepts of tense, case and relationship. Did the first language automatically distinguish in a comprehensible way between present, past or the future? Did it disambigulate between singular and plural, near and far, genders or definitiveness? We can certainly imagine a language where such distinctions are omitted. And we can imagine how language might have been gradually tuned to reflect such concepts, as their importance to precise communication became apparent. This kind of approach gives us a better idea of how a complex language -- representing the complexity of the world we live in -- might have looked when it started. It also possibly supplies us with a sense of what order languages must be built in. Regards, Steve Long From jrubba at calpoly.edu Fri May 26 18:34:27 2006 From: jrubba at calpoly.edu (Johanna Rubba) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 11:34:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. In-Reply-To: <463.1b8a395.31a8891b@aol.com> Message-ID: I haven't been following this discussion -- sorry -- but I'm stumped by this statement by Steve Long: "synthetic languages reflect a more mature development" What does "mature" mean? Is Steve trying to say that synthetic languages are capable of expressing more-nuanced meanings than analytic languages? What would lead one to believe this? Languages heavy with fusional or agglutinative morphology are often full of redundancy -- even English's simple plural suffix is redundant enough to be omitted in some dialects when context makes the plurality clear. Is "five shoes" more "mature" than "five shoe"? Creoles that grow out of impoverished pidgins often develop analytic means of expressing nuanced tenses and aspects, as African American English has done with words like "do" and "be", expressing things like immediate vs. remote past, durativity, and so on. Is doing this with analytic morphology less "mature" than doing it with suffixes and bound roots? Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba From Salinas17 at aol.com Fri May 26 20:22:33 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 16:22:33 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (2) Message-ID: I wrote: <> Dr. Johanna Rubba replied: << What does "mature" mean? Is Steve trying to say that synthetic languages are capable of expressing more-nuanced meanings than analytic languages? What would lead one to believe this?>> Well, I did not intend "mature" to mean better or more capable of "expressing more-nuanced meanings." My point was that, if inflection gets in the way of communication, then a less inflected language would be one obvious solution. At least some scholars think this kind of explanation can account for the loss of inflection in English. It's not that analytic languages can't carry a large amount of information. It's more that synthetic languages might have difficulty carrying the required minimum amount of information. When you strip down to a bare minimum of "markedness" for communications' sake, perhaps a high degree of inflection simply gets in the way? <> And perhaps redundancy -- in the bad sense -- is the extra baggage that "maturity" brings? Again, maturity isn't necessarily a good thing. Perhaps it overstructures a language and therefore makes it less flexible, in terms of certain kinds of communication? <> Yes, it might be. Perhaps that is a sign of "maturity" -- a lot of semi-vestigial forms whose original independent meanings have been forgotten. For a verb to turn into a preposition and then an affix would seem sometimes to be a unidirectional, simply because there's no way to reverse the process. See e.g., Carol Lord's Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions. If the English possessive arose out of , then listeners and speakers without historical knowledge of the process have no way of knowing that the original was truncated down to , so there's no path left for going back to the isolating form. Perhaps a language needs a "history" in order to get to the point where enough independent forms are collapsed down to affixes to be "synthetic." Perhaps relatively recent creoles support that idea. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Fri May 26 21:41:09 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 14:41:09 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (2) In-Reply-To: <43b.1fe61ed.31a8bd89@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Well, I did not intend "mature" to mean better or more capable of >"expressing more-nuanced meanings." > >My point was that, if inflection gets in the way of communication, then a >less inflected language would be one obvious solution. At least some >scholars think this kind of explanation can account for the loss of >inflection in English. While it is clear from what you've written that you did not intend a value judgment on communicative effectiveness of a language by labeling its typology "mature", exactly what you did mean still remains somewhat obscure. You seem to be using "mature" in the way biologists would label an animal in its prime as "mature": adult, no longer in its infancy and not yet in its dotage. Is that what you intended? It is true that as we watch synthetic languages age, they tend to lose inflection. It is also true that as we watch a pidgin mature into a creole, it tends to become more synthetic. But the "Grand Cycle" is potentially endless, and unless we have some other criterion to measure by, we have no way of knowing that any of these languages emerged from an isolating "first language". It could be that all isolating languages became isolating due to stressful contact situations, where, as you noted, inflection became more of a hindrance to communication than a help. When you call synthetic languages "mature", do you assume they must necessarily have evolved from more analytical ones? Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 03:31:00 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 23:31:00 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/26/06 5:41:23 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: << But the "Grand Cycle" is potentially endless, and unless we have some other criterion to measure by, we have no way of knowing that any of these languages emerged from an isolating "first language". It could be that all isolating languages became isolating due to stressful contact situations, where, as you noted, inflection became more of a hindrance to communication than a help.>> "IF" a language can move away from inflection when inflection becomes a hindrance, then the "Grand Cycle" is a superficial description -- like describing the application of a car's brake and gas pedals as "cyclic" -- all it tells us is that there are two negatively correlatable variables. What we are seeing as a cycle would be instead the relative presence or absence of extrinsic factors -- which represent nothing regular enough to be called a cycle. A. Polikarpov has suggested that the analytic-synthetic continum is the product of two different "economies" that speakers lean towards -- the need to reduce the memory load required by a language and the need to reduce the size of speech messages. When we switch this perspective to that of the listener, comprehension might demand a reduction in inflection, but efficency in communication might be aided by an increase in inflection. This puts the speaker in the position of a balancing act that may vary from listener to listener. Early language is a different question. If you imagine a language with the minimal possible use of grammatical differentiation -- one case, one tense, one voice, etc. -- you are essentially imaging a language with little need for inflection or fusion or any other synthetic feature. It may be that such a language would need some modicum of syntax and some minimal number of prepositions to be comprehensible. But its fundamental character would be recognizable as analytic. And if such a language were to move in the direction of differentiating out the grammatical features we recognize in modern languages, it would be moving towards the synthetic. <> Unless an affix is entirely arbitrary and not a re-working of an earlier stand-alone word or phrase, one would have to conclude that such affixes could only be supplied by a prior, "more" analytic stage. (If an affixes is truly arbitrary, then one might conclude that the synthetic feature was original and by design.) In that sense, synthetic typology needs to be "mature" compared to an earlier analytic typology, in order to be supplied with its working parts. But, once again, we would expect the process of going synthetic to be forgotten, so that a language that goes to analytic is NOT going back to its earlier state. We would not expect English speakers to recognize that the possessive "s" was once "his" and to go back to the old usage. So it's also not really a "cycle" in that sense. You can't go back to an old analytic state. You can only go on to a new one. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sat May 27 06:05:42 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 23:05:42 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) In-Reply-To: <4b6.89eb9.31a921f4@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Early language is a different question. If you imagine a language with >the minimal possible use of grammatical differentiation -- one case, one >tense, one voice, etc. -- you are essentially imaging a language with >little need for inflection or fusion or any other synthetic feature. It >may be that such a language would need some modicum of syntax and some >minimal number of prepositions to be comprehensible. But its fundamental >character would be recognizable as analytic. And if such a language were >to move in the direction of differentiating out the grammatical features >we recognize in modern languages, it would be moving towards the >synthetic. Why prepositions and syntax? It still seems as if you are imagining early language as a pidgin working its way up to a creole. But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, as is the case in the most synthetic of human languages. Imagine the minimal set of messages to be divided into two categories: (1) warnings (about predators) and (2) invitations (to feast on specific foods.) The coding possibilities could be something like this: predicate ----------- warning invitation argument ---------- bird snake mammal fruit The warning or invitation effect would be created by pitch and frequency of repetition effects superimposed on formant combinations -- that is combinations mostly of different vowels the animal is capable of making. How did such a system arise? Partially, it came about through genetically transmitted compulsions. The animal making the cry does not gain from making it -- its surviving relatives are the ones who transmit the system to the next generation. The system is autonomous and requires no theory of mind for its interpretation. On seeing a predator, the speaker feels compelled to make the corresponding cry. On seeing food, it cannot help but declare it. (More evolved individuals of the group may realize the danger to themselves and try to stop their mouths with their hands, to keep the involuntary cry from coming out.) But as unplanned as this system may be in terms of the individuals who use it to encode and decode information, it is surprisingly autonomous as a code, in the sense that sentences which have never been spoken would immediatley be understood. "Warning: fruit" would be a possible sentence whose meaning might be something like the attack of the killer tomatoes. (The creatures are omnivores, so it is possible that some animals in their list of arguments can serve as both predator and prey.) As theory of mind develops gradually in more evolved descendants of this group, they gain voluntary control of the inbred communicative system, may add vocabulary, and even learn to lie. As the system becomes more complex, sentences will become less tightly bound, less holistic, more polysynthetic. In human languages, the larger the lexicon, the more isolating the language is. Yet most linguists imagine an isolating starting point, where people talk in something resembling a pidgin. Having separate words for predicates and arguments is something that doesn't happen until a language has acquired a very extensive lexicon. >But, once again, we would expect the process of going synthetic to be >forgotten, so that a language that goes to analytic is NOT going back to >its earlier state. We would not expect English speakers to recognize >that the possessive "s" was once "his" and to go back to the old usage. So >it's also not really a "cycle" in that sense. You can't go back to an old >analytic state. You can only go on to a new one. We don't need to confuse the re-cycling of particular morphemes with the recycling of typologies. It is possible to fall into an older typology without having the original morphemes performing their original function. This is consistent with a unidirectional cycle of typologies. That said, I would like to point out that sometimes the same morphemes do return to roughly the same function through a series of changes. This does not require speakers to know the history of the language. Sometimes they just accidentally stumble into an older usage. My 1996 dissertation showed that copulas turn into pronouns and pronouns turn into copulas through a normal process of grammaticalization in many unrelated languages. In Hebrew, there is even a full cycle from a third person singular version of an inflected copula to a third person singular pronoun to a third person singular copula once more. (The same word was interpreted as a copula when the third person pronouns were null, and as a pronoun when null pronouns came into disuse, and then back to a copula when null copulas were in disfavor.) Not knowing the history of your language can sometimes doom you to repeat it. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sat May 27 08:46:21 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 04:46:21 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) Message-ID: Aya Katz k-i:kama:n-ude: >But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, as is the case in the most synthetic of human languages.< Not so fast... Single phonological 'word' yes, but still morphologically complex, to the analyst (even if the speaker is unaware of the constructive pre-packaging of the finished product). Let's also consider the good number of historically fusional but synchronically isolating/analytical languages exist (such as in Tibeto-Burman) where ancient derivational affixes have first merged with other phonemes sometimes creating consonantal contrasts, which then were lost to tonal development, and so on. No longer synchronically analyzable. There are many languages where morphemes are at the level of individual distinctive features, so worn down are the original forms. In some of the San languages, despite a monosyllabizing tendency, a number of ancient morphemes still appear to be present. Then in many analytical/isolating monosyllable languages you need larger collocational context in order to pin down which lexeme you're actually dealing with, because too many of its old features have been lost or rendered unrecognizable- it might be a little odd from the POV of usual thinking, but one might argue that in such cases the morphological word is in some way obligatorily larger than the phonological word (even when not dealing with 'affixes' per se). This would be the flip side of the situation in polysynthetic languages. So the phonological and morphological word are in an endless struggle to try to contain each other. Embedding versus serialization, etc, might also be part of the same type of struggle, in the larger arena. Sometimes you get the tiger.. sometimes the tiger gets you. Animal cries seem to display the same sort of typological variations, along certain parameters, that human languages do- some are more synthetic and 'holistic', but others seem much more analytical. One size doesn't fit all. Research done in animal communicative ethology shows the same sorts of automatizing processes we see in human languages- bits and pieces of pre-existing behavior, often anticipatory or initial movements ('Modal Action Patterns', or MAP's), get shortened, fused, etc. Eventually shorter still, the older pieces may no longer be evident. In other cases its the final products (glandular, wastes, etc.- which by the way are the origins of the vast majority of body pigments) or terminal motions in an action. Some chains are serializations (normally sequential motions a, b, c, d become much reduced chain a'b'c'd')- I don't know if others are 'embedded', or there are head/dependent relations that would determine which old signal gets 'inflected' or otherwise modified. The researchers aren't thinking along these lines, since they slavishly follow Old Chomsky, and have not kept up so far as I know with later developments or movements in linguistics- for those in the 'animal language' biz the only focus seems to be on what counts as *syntax*, which is unfortunate. All human languages have phonemes- ranging from the minimum (with compensatory or substitutive prosody and large allophonic variation) in Piraha~ to maximum in San languages (@120-140 depending on what counts as a contrast) or Ubykh with 80+. With only so many distinctive features to play with, we get the higher numbers by piling them onto each other. It's something we're able to do, yet not that many languages have the highest or lowest numbers. Obviously there is a preference zone (IIRC somewhere between 20-40 phonemes). But that's us humans. Animals may have different preferences. Interestingly, if one extrapolates either up or down, one ends up with a near continuum featurally, from the perspective of signal quantization. If we go below the Piraha~ phoneme number we leave recognizable segmentality altogether, and end up with a multidimensional continuum of prosodic effects. If packaged properly, with lots of context to help you along, the system may still be communicatively viable- it just takes a bit of effort to imagine it from the human perspective. In the other direction imagine how many phonemes one could generate if one used all human contrasts maximally. The resulting system might leave click languages in the dust in terms of jawbreaking articulations. Now vary the number (and form) of feature contrasts we're allowed to use and you end up with an even larger playing field. Each species will have its own, limited by its anatomy and neurology in absolute terms, and to a probable subset of the possible for actual communicative purposes. Interestingly, the articulators themselves (and this goes beyond vocalism to ALL possible signal generators) often shift their own forms and motional possibilities in order to increase the effectiveness of the signaling. It may be hard for us to recognize some of the signals we are looking at as being 'phonemic', 'morphemic', 'phrasal', or 'clausal' if we limit ourselves to seeing through the blinders of human norms. Or looking only at vocal signals (versus more global communication). I'm not saying that what animals are doing is 'language', but perhaps what humans do is just a special case of a more generalized set of communicative behavioral norms. Jess Tauber From amnfn at well.com Sat May 27 13:21:52 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 06:21:52 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (3) In-Reply-To: <25427048.1148719582232.JavaMail.root@elwamui-huard.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Quoth Jess Tauber: >Aya Katz k-i:kama:n-ude: > >>But animal cries, even those of our closest relatives, tend to be holistic, >> in the sense that a whole sentence is communicated with a single word, >>as is thecase in the most synthetic of human languages.< > >Not so fast... Single phonological 'word' yes, but still morphologically >complex, to the analyst (even if the speaker is unaware of the >constructivepre-packaging of the finished product). That's right -- single phonological word, but still morphologically complex. That's precisely what I meant. My point was that in all likelihood, early human language was tightly bound on the phonological level, while exhibiting a certain degree of morphological complexity. This is in sharp contrast to a pidgin, where morphologically simplex words are phonologically isolated, so that each morpheme is uttered separately. It's time to stop assuming that early human language resembled the speech of Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein's Monster in American movies and certain SNL sketches. Meaning abides in contrast. The idea that we could have amassed a language out of individual monomorphemic words, one word at a time, is unworkable. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 21:56:16 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 17:56:16 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 2:06:07 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << Why prepositions and syntax? It still seems as if you are imagining early language as a pidgin working its way up to a creole.>> If by "pidgin" you mean a human language with the simplest possible grammar, that would be a good place to start. In theory at least, what you have in a pidgin is humans building a language from scratch. The forms that a pidgin takes would apparently indicate what steps are the first steps in establishing a comprehensible language among a human group. Those first steps do not show full blown grammar. Tense, for example, is often left out of the communication. ("nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") From that we might conclude that concepts like tense are on the next level of discrimination, after a basic common reference is established. Whether they are later injected into the language by way of affixes or compounding or by way of syntax is another matter. <> Why start with animal cries? Why not start with the rather sophisticated communal cooperation and communication that bees need to build a bee hive? If anyone needs to communicate in "sentences," they do. There are many better examples of animal communication than "cries." There are many instances where a single signal can trigger all by itself a whole bevy of elaborate behaviors. These "single words" must embed very, very complex sentences indeed! Whether or or not primates are speaking in synthetic languages and capable of expressing complex sentences in a single word, it looks pretty clear that humans, when they start languages from scratch, speak in something somewhat akin to what are called "analytic" languages. The obvious reason for this is that common reference must be established first. Before we can communicate, we need to be confident that the words we use refer to the same things for both of us. This is a condition precedent to all the nuances we find in modern human languages -- it is certainly a condition precedent to the situation we find in the highly synthetic Latin verb structure, in which a single verb can take 118 different forms. As far as animal cries go, whether I'm yelling "Tiger!" or "Fire!," the shorthand really doesn't have too much to do with implied or encoded whole sentences. The obvious use of the "word" is intended to have immediate behavioral consequences, not to mark tense, mood or aspect. Analytic versus synthetic is really irrelevant. Crying "tiger!" or "fire!" is simply making use of language's representational power. The words are symbols standing in for the real things. From Salinas17 at aol.com Sat May 27 22:24:29 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 18:24:29 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (5) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 9:22:51 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << This is in sharp contrast to a pidgin, where morphologically simplex words are phonologically isolated, so that each morpheme is uttered separately. It's time to stop assuming that early human language resembled the speech of Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein's Monster in American movies and certain SNL sketches. >> On the other hand, I should point out that Tarzan's and Tonto's pidgins are very easy to understand, compared to Cicero or chimps or other synthetic speakers. Perhaps elite early humans spoke a synthetic language and the rest of us spoke a pidgin. Perhaps that explains the Grand Cycle -- two different starting points. <> Come on. Day and night is a contrast. You don't need affixes or even compounds to discriminate in plain words between two things. Regards Steve Long From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Sat May 27 23:01:03 2006 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 19:01:03 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >In theory at least, what you have in a pidgin is humans building a language from scratch.< With all due respect, pidgin speakers do not start from scratch. The words they use COME from other languages, with their own individual evolutionary histories. And combinational habits from these languages may effect what the pidgin ends up with. Even signed languages 'from scratch' use pre-existing movements and gestures. Sure, in all cases invention may occur, but I doubt that it is purely creative and inspired, and it never totally replaces bits and pieces coapted from other functions. Twin-speech might come close, but then twins may be more easily able to come to mutual understanding, being clones, than the average genetically mixed population. Unless one believes in TOTAL form/meaning arbitrariness, one must suspect that forms drawn into pidgins will have subtle effects on the developing system, even when the lexical mapping has shifted radically. If this is so then the nascent pidgin is in some sense 'pre-chewed' by all that went into it. As for animal 'cries', depending on what species you look at, what particular signal, function it is used for, etc., there are quite radical variations in the complexities involved (which I was trying to point out in my last post). How much information, for instance, is in the signal? How much is still separable (analytically extractable by receiver)? How compressed is it? Does it need repeating (enhancing signal/noise ratio for discrimination/reception purposes)? And what about the receiver? Does he/she need to respond with a back-communication, or by other behavior? How simple or complex are these? In hormonal signaling systems a single molecule can release a wave of increasingly complex responses, if the receiving system is set up to do this. A single word can mobilize an army, but only if prior arrangements have been made. Otherwise one might need to lay out exactly what needs doing responsewise. I don't think bee communication is all that sophisticated compared to many communications of higher animals- for instance the growing known number of chimp food calls. We have no idea how many calls there are ultimately, how they can be internally or externally modified, etc. Chimps do coordinated hunting- are there signals there we've missed? The problem with terms like 'cries' is that they are somewhat dismissive in import. Lastly, I'll bet that the animal signals are often a bit less symbolic and far more iconic representationally. Eugene Morton (National Zoo) with his 'Motivation Structure Theory' showed that many (most?) calls used in intraspecific conflicts and their resolutions were part of the same system of signal modulation, across quite a few different vertebrate species. Some had more, some fewer, but they fit the same pattern. Interestingly frequency ranges and timings changed radically between species, but the pattern persisted. Threat calls such as in monkeys for predators may also be iconically representing the overall SHAPES of the threats, allowing the receivers to quickly home in on the threat through the connotational connection (but without unambiguously denoting it). Food calls may well be similarly structured (shape, size, texture, ripeness/food value, etc.). Can't assume English human as the standard reference model. Jess Tauber From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun May 28 03:28:42 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 23:28:42 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/27/06 7:01:33 PM, phonosemantics at earthlink.net writes: <> Very true. But for the purposes of this discussion re typology -- in theory -- pidgins represent the closest thing with we have to a language with the bare minimum of grammatical features. ("...nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") That is close enough to the form I'd suspect early languages would have taken. The point is that form is more in the direction of analytic languages. <> There's no real scientific evidence for any such thing and I'd suggest its just another expression of genomania. <> Bee communication is extremely sophisticated -- especially because it is truly representational -- especially in terms of mapping distance and direction. Wild chimps exhibit nothing as sophisticated in terms of intricate spatial representations. Bird calls are far more intricate than any communications by chimps that has been credibly reported in the wild (in captivity, chimps have far outperformed their wild cousins). The use of the term "higher animals" is just not good scientific terminology. The efficency or effectiveness of exchange of communal information is not correlateable to the relatedness to humans as the crowns of creation. Nor does it seem to be relateable to a species brain size. If a species -- particularly communal species -- specializes in communication, it will demonstrate features that are very similar to human speech. The underlying mechanisms are of course quite different. <> No reason to attribute this to heredity between species. The environment will select the same formulas either as species specific adaptions or learned behavior. However, I would like to see evidence that cats, dogs and rats share the "same system of signal modulation" -- I'm pretty sure they don't. <> Nevertheless, any model that excludes English in terms of human language functioning is bound to be wrong. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sun May 28 06:53:09 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 23:53:09 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <4a9.231717.31aa72ea@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > But for the purposes of this discussion re typology -- in >theory-- pidgins represent the closest thing with we have to a language >with the bare minimum of grammatical features. ("...nouns, verbs, >adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological >form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or >aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this >aspect of meaning in accord with the context.") That is close enough to >the form I'd suspect early languages would have taken. The point is that >form is more in the direction of analytic languages. The fact that you "suspect" early languages would have taken a form with "a bare minimum of grammatical features" is very much influenced by the typology of the language you speak. Babies learning English start out with a very isolating beginning. Monolingual English speakers, when they start talking, do sound like Tarzan. But this is not universal. According to Dan Slobin, Turkish speakers start out with inflectional morphology at the one word level. As soon as they start speaking, it's inflected all the way. In the present, all humans are capable of speaking isolating languages if they are exposed to them, but isolating languages are not necessarily easier to understand or to come up with from scratch. Evidence from home sign shows that systematicity tends to get built into early systems of communication, because it's easier to remember a sign if it patterns with another contrasting one. Isolating languages are more context dependent. For sophisticated urbanites, that's not a problem, But do you assume early man already had a theory of mind as developed as that of the average modern day Chinese or English speaker? Grammar allows language to become autonomous from theory of mind. While no language is context free, grammar allows us to spend less of our resources on mind-reading. >Bee communication is extremely sophisticated -- especially because it is >truly representational -- especially in terms of mapping distance and >direction. >Wild chimps exhibit nothing as sophisticated in terms of intricate >spatial >representations. >Bird calls are far more intricate than any. >The underlying mechanisms are of course quite different. I'm not sure what your point is in bringing up the commmunicative abilities of bees and birds. If it's meant to dispel the notion that only our close relatives have sophisticated systems of communication, I take no issue with that. Bees -- if their dance language is to be credited (and there apparently is some controversy about that among the bee experts) -- are communicating accurately without a theory of mind, in a highly structured way. If bees can do this, do you think early man couldn't? Is that your point? ><language out of individual monomorphemic words, one word at a time, is >unworkable.>> > >Come on. Day and night is a contrast. You don't need affixes or even >compounds to discriminate in plain words between two things. Now imagine a language with only two words. How likely is it that the contrast chosen would be "night" and "day"? Of what use would this two word language be to anyone? Given a single binary contrast to begin with, one might suppose that "yes" and "no" would be good candidates, but in reality, they're not. Try getting a chimp to use "yes" and "no." It's very hard, because the concepts are extremely abstract. (I speak from experience.) It's easier to teach the three part contrast of "banana", "grape" and "apple", than the single binary contrast of "yes" and "no." But you have to be very careful when you introduce choices such as "grapes" or "apple." You might think you are teaching nouns. But the chimp will interpret it as "give me a grape" or "give me an apple", more often than not. You can't teach separate nouns as nouns until you have a much bigger lexicon. Until that time, each word stands for a full proposition. This is not due to mental limitations of the subject. It's due to the way information theory works. The meaning of words is determined by the contrasts available. It would come out the same way if the research subject were an uneculturated human. My point is that a single contrast isn't enough to make a language out of. A bigger inventory is required. But you'll never get to a bigger inventory, if you try adding one word, or even one contrast at time. Speakers will refuse to use them, because they won't seem meaningful. "Yes" and "NO" make sense only in the context of a very rich system of already available propositions. You have to start with propositions first, then work your way back to names for single items. Once you have a meaningful array of relevant (to the speakers) choices, then it makes sense to build a grid, a paradigm, based on the types of signaling devices availabe to you. It's easier to remember contrasts this way. When I say that early language was probably highly structured, I'm not suggesting it was anything like Latin. Tense may not have been one of things coded for. But it's unlikely there were any monomorphemic phonological words. That would have been too inefficient to function, given a small lexicon. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From Salinas17 at aol.com Sun May 28 16:27:41 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 12:27:41 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/28/06 2:53:20 AM, amnfn at well.com writes: << The fact that you "suspect" early languages would have taken a form with "a bare minimum of grammatical features" is very much influenced by the typology of the language you speak. Babies learning English start out with a very isolating beginning. Monolingual English speakers, when they start talking, do sound like Tarzan. But this is not universal. According to Dan Slobin, Turkish speakers start out with inflectional morphology at the one word level. As soon as they start speaking, it's inflected all the way. >> I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers starting out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have for the most part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers have tried hard to find grammar in very early development, but I believe that a disciplined, objective review will show that it is just not there. We do see mimicry and association, and that will have children mimicking inflected words, but without any kind of grammatical sense. The key I believe is when children pass the threshold into understanding the representational, symbolic nature of language. Judy DeLoache and others have done very important work in identifying the borderline in development where children begin to realize the relationship between a symbol and the real object. (see, e.g., J.S. DeLoache, Mindful of Symbols, Sci Am August 2005) When children begin to understand language as a descriptive tool, grammar begins to make sense -- because grammar plainly enhances descriptive power. A child struggling with describing one block or many blocks, or something that happened in the past versus something happening in the present is still figuring out how changing the shape or position of words promotes accuracy - and approval. Before a child starts understanding the symbolic nature of words, language is at best mimicry and association, and so the manipulation of grammatical elements is out of reach. What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty certain that a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech have? I see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina that somehow implanted grammar full-blown in the form of a Chomskayan language mechanism, which I believe violates the naturalistic assumption of science. Pidgins do function for mutual comprehension and, more importantly, for the effect they have on human behavior. If the first real words were shared neologisms (they had to be neologisms), then what was acheived was the beginning of a communal representational system that mirrored the world. Naming things in the world is a prerequisite for what we call human speech. There can be no communication without common reference. The lexicon would grow either by what you call "contrast" (discrimination) or by generalization. Only then would grammar in the modern sense be possible. <> I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that grammar more accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between things in time and space. But just because early languages did not have much grammar did not mean they had not developed into distinctively human language. <> Again, I don't know what theory of mind means. But the point with bees is th at communication techniques have appeared and disappeared many times in the course of evolution on this planet. Humans fly but did not inherit that trait from bees, birds or bats. The fact that chimps communicate may have little relationship to the ways humans communicate. Animal cries may carry all kinds of implication, but that is no reason to conclude that wild chimps speak in sentences. Bees on the other hand have been shown to communicate using representative behavior that accurately maps and communicates location and distance (there's really no credible challenge to this) -- which bespeaks of some kind of an in-born grammar that we humans only acquire by hard learning and taking too many wrong exits off the turnpike. <> The big cats only hunt at night. The fact that night is coming would be a valuable piece of information to spread around. A very good occasion for language to start. <> Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which only reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more centered in the listener than the speaker. Regards Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Sun May 28 22:02:23 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Sun, 28 May 2006 15:02:23 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <38e.4424113.31ab297d@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to >believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional >morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers starting >out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have for the most > part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers have tried >hard to find grammar invery early development, but I believe that a >disciplined objective review will show that it is just not there. Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one word stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any significance if there isn't another category to contrast it with. >I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that grammar more >accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between things in >time and space. But just because early languages did not have much >grammar did notmean they had not developed into distinctively human >language. Theory of Mind refers to an individual's awareness of the minds of others, their context, desires, beliefs and motivations. Humans are known for their unusually well-developed theory of mind, but not all humans are equally endowed with this ability. Autistics are said to have considerable deficits in theory of mind, regardless of how high their IQ may be in other areas. Deficits in theory of mind make language acquisition very difficult, because mind-reading is a good way to jump start first language learning. However, later in life, autistics often catch up in language ability, despite lingering deficits in theory of mind. Shifting between 1st and second person is something that come naturally to speakers with a normal theory of mind. If you don't have TOM, it's much harder to guess when to use first and when to use second person. >Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. >Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which only >reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more >centered in the listener than the speaker. Really? Does your dog answer yes/no questions? I have yet to meet a dog who can. When I ask my dog if she wants to go out, it's clear that she understands the question. But if she doesn't want to go out, she never gives any signal to say so. She just stands there glumly and won't follow me to the door. If she wants to go out, she wags her tail excitedly and goes to the door before I do. That is not answering "yes" and "no." That is involuntarily showing her emotional states using body language. She has no volitional control over that wagging tail. There is nothing to keep her from nodding her head "yes" or shaking it "no," as she sees me doing. But she never does. In what context has your dog used "yes" and "no"? >What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty certain that >a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" >ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech have? I >see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least >grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina >that somehow implanted grammar full-blown inthe form of a Chomskayan language > mechanism, which I believe violates the >naturalistic assumption of science. No, there are other conclusions that do not require us to adopt Chomskyan mechanisms or violate the naturalistic assumptions of science. The idea of individual words carrying meaning without a system of contrasts is not naturalistic. When you imagine people talking in nouns, verbs and prepositions, and you think of them building up their grammatical system gradually, one word at a time, that is not naturalistic. How long do you imagine our primitive ancestors spent at the one word -- or rather, one morpheme stage? How long a period from the use of the "first" word to the discovery of the second word? There is a critical mass required before a language can be useful. A one word language serves no function, and nobody will wait around to learn the second word. Our ancestors, before they were truly human, already had a communication system much like that of present-day primates. Do you think they would discard it for something whose communicative function was much weaker, in the hopes of one day working their way up to modern language? --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon May 29 12:16:10 2006 From: bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de (bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 12:16:10 GMT Subject: 3rd CfP - Session on Lexical Bootstrapping - GCLA conference Message-ID: Dear all, Please find below the third and final call for papers for our theme session on lexical bootstrapping in early language and conceptual development. DEADLINE: May 31, 2006 With best wishes, Susanna Third and Final Call for Papers LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CHILD CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT Theme session To be held at the SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE GERMAN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION, Munich, 5-7 October 2006 PLEASE NOTE: - CLARIFICATION ABOUT CONTENTS OF SUBMITTED ABSTRACTS - POSSIBILITY OF PUBLICATION Apart from some few exceptions (Brown 1958, Nelson 1973), the research on child lexical development did not receive much attention from students of child language in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to some statements found in the more recent literature (Rothweiler & Meibauer 1999), this fact is not really surprising when one considers the very influential role then played by formal linguistics with its primacy of syntactic structures and the view of lexicon and semantics as something rather epiphenomenal. From the 1980s on, this state of affairs has changed dramatically. For one thing, over the last 25 years or so, there has been more and more interest in topics related to child lexical acquisition. Over these several years, the research has issued many relevant theoretical insights resp. assumptions, and methodologies about lexical development, such as the view of individual differences in early vocabulary composition in terms of a continuum between referential and expressive style (Nelson 1973) and the holophrastic nature of early words (Nelson 1985), the differentiation between expressive and receptive vocabulary, as well as the use of correlational methods (Bates et al. 1988), or the role of domain-general cognitive skills of categorisation and theory of mind (Tomasello 2003), amongst several others. Secondly and most importantly, this body of research (much of which has been done within functionalist-cognitivist frameworks) seems to allow for the formulation of general assumptions concerning child language development in general, as well as the interplay between language and conceptual development. Thus, especially studies focussing on within- and cross-domain developmental correlations seem to provide evidence for a Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Dale et al. 2000, Dionne et al. 2003), i.e., the assumption that early lexical development, as mapping of words to referents or their conceptualisations, and even to whole propositions, is not only prior to, but also pre-requisite for the emergence of morpho-syntactic constructions (which, incidentally, are not fundamentally different from words, in that they are equally form-meaning pairs). The lexical bootstrapping hypothesis presupposes an early stage in lexical development characterized by the learning of archilexemes, a term originally proposed by Zemb (1978), as grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only, here understood as the means by which the child begins to cognize and categorize the world. Such assumption on the fundamental role of early lexical acquisition for later language development as a whole challenges the view about the primacy of syntax over lexicon and semantics that has been postulated in these 50 years of formal linguistics. For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion. Empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions dealing with aspects of word learning in the one-word phase (and perhaps also before) that might predict diverse aspects of later language and conceptual development of typically developing and impaired children may focus on one or more of the following questions and topics (evidently, other suggestions are equally welcome): - How can measures of, and assumptions on, early lexical development (vocabulary size, vocabulary composition, vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary style, vocabulary spurt, critical mass, others?) be correlated to measures of later grammatical emergence and development (emergence and proportion of multi-word utterances, Mean Length of Utterance, development of inflectional paradigms and use of function words, realisation of argument constructions, others?) How reliable are such correlations? - How can the study of early lexical development shed light on the issue of individual variance and developmental language disorders? Can aspects of early word learning (expressive vs. referential style, dissimilar timing of vocabulary development, peculiarities in vocabulary composition, peculiarities in the conceptual mapping, others?) provide criteria for a differentiation between mere individual variance and developmental disorder, as well as for a differentiation between transient and persistent disorders? Can such aspects be used in the context of early diagnosis of such disorders? - Which cognitive processes underlie word learning as both word-to-concept mapping and categorization task? Are there constraints and principles at play? What is the nature of such constraints?are they domain (=language) specific or domain general? How are they related to later language and conceptual development? - Does a notion of lexical bootstrapping in language acquisition preclude other bootstrapping mechanisms in the stages before the emergence of grammar, such as prosodic, semantic, syntactic bootstrapping, or can interplay amongst these types of bootstrapping mechanisms be assumed? - Related to the last question, how does the child construct her mental lexicon? How is it structured?is this structure modular or network-like or anything else? Which processes of reorganisation are at work along development? - Can early words (at least partially) be seen as holophrases in that they (at least partially) refer to whole propositions? Which developmental change(s) takes place in the transition from holophrastic one-word utterances to multi-word utterances? - Which evidences can be drawn from studies of word learning in children with cognitive developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, others?), as well as in blind and deaf children? - Which insights can be drawn from research based on (i) corpora analyses; (ii) computer learning simulations; (iii) neural activation in experimental situations, such as categorisation tasks; (iv) lexical/conceptual processing in adults with and without language disorders (e.g. aphasia)? - Which similarities, differences or peculiarities can be observed when comparing mono- and multilingual word learning, as well as comparing monolingual and cross-linguistic studies? Depending on the number of contributions, the special session will take place at one or two days of the conference. The theme session will be framed by a paper introducing the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development and, again depending on the number of contributions, one or two discussion rounds. BEFORE SENDING IT, MAKE SURE PLEASE THAT YOUR ABSTRACT: - indicates EXPLICITLY how and to which extent YOUR STUDY IS RELATED TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING in child language and conceptual development. Does your study support or refute the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis? If yes, how and to which extent? If not, why not? - is detailed, i.e., it is about 1000 WORDS LONG, not including list of references, tables, diagrams, etc.; - indicates explicitly and in detail the EMPIRICAL BASIS of your study; this holds also for theoretical works, i.e., theoretical work might rely, for instance, on empirical studies of other researchers, but please NOT SOLELY ON INTROSPECTIVE METHODS; - contains a LIST OF THE REFERENCES mentioned. DEADLINE EXTENSION The deadline for abstract submission was extended to 31 May 2006. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 1 July 2006. Participants should send us an updated abstract of their papers by 21 September 2006. Please send your abstracts exclusively as email attachments (doc- or rtf-files) to: Susanna Bartsch Dagmar Bittner bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de The conference languages are German and English. The organizers are preparing a PROPOSAL FOR PUBLICATION of the presented papers in the series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH (CLR) (Mouton de Gruyter) edited by Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and Ren? Dirven. REFERENCES Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Dale, P. S., Dionne, G., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. 2000. Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language, 27/3, 619-642. Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., Boivin, M., & Plomin R. 2003. Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development, 74, 394-412. Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London & New York: Routledge. Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass. Journal of Child Language, 21/2, 339-366. Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: Univ. Press. Nelson, K. 1985. Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Developmental psychology series. Orlando: Academic Press. Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Rothweiler, M. & Meibauer, J. (eds.) 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Ein ?berblick. In: Meibauer, J., & Rothweiler, M. (eds.). 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb. UTB f?r Wissenschaft;Mittlere Reihe, 2039. T?bingen: Francke. Rescorla, L., Mirak, J., & Singh, L. 2000. Vocabulary growth in late talkers: Lexical development from 2;0 to 3;0. Journal of Child Language, 27, 293-311. Zemb, J. M. 1978. Vergleichende Grammatik Franz?sisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux syst?mes. Mannheim et al.: Bibliographisches Institut. Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Susanna Bartsch Zentrum f?r allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZaS) Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research J?gerstr. 10-11 10117 Berlin Germany From Salinas17 at aol.com Mon May 29 15:37:03 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:37:03 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function (6) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/28/06 6:02:35 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: << Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one word stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any significance if there isn't another category to contrast it with. >> If all the child says is "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" and he does not connect those words with anything in particular, yeah, he's just imitating sounds. If however he correctly identifies a dog, a ball and Mommy and does not apply these words to the kitchen cabinets or the trash can, then we have a clear "contrast" -- there is Mommy and there is all that is not Mommy. There is a ball and all that is not a ball. This is the most basic kind of definition that we can give any item x -- x is all that is not y. This kind of "contrast" is at the very core of perception and logic - the discrimination of stimuli so that they achieve a less then ephemeral identity. These words -- "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" -- may or may not be "nouns," but they are certainly "nominative" in the classic Aristotelian sense of a naming. Animals, right down to amoebas, are able to perceptually distinguish modalities in their field of perception, to "contrast" some shape or form or sound against others, to discriminate. But most non-human animals are simply not very adroit at creating observable symbolic equivalencies of those perceptual modalities, whether made by sound or some other form of communal signal. What "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" are doing is giving those objects a NAME -- a label, a symbolic equivalency, an independent representation made with specific sounds. If I hide the ball and ask the child to find it and he looks for it, that shows he has grasped the symbolic nature of the word versus the object. This is something that some animals can do, but compared with even very young human children, their repetoire appears to be small. If the same child points out a running dog to me and says "run," he's probably not using a verb, he's probably naming an action. Before the child can start constructing noun-verb formations, he must also be able to name actions, processes or relationships as well as objects. Otherwise there is no contiguous material to build grammar with. Theorists have been prone to jump to grammar and syntax in setting the boundary of human language lately. (I'm reminded of what Frans de Waal said about the reaction after Washoe learned ASL -- ""The linguists then came up with a definition that emphasised syntax much more than symbols," says de Waal. "Sometimes we feel it's a bit unfair that they move the goal posts as soon as we get near.") The basic mistake in this I believe is the artificial discontinuity created between the grammatical and vocabulary. Grammar is actually a more subtle and intricate form of naming, but it is naming none the less. Marked features are actually shorthand descriptions of relationships in time and space that could also be "worded-out", but are adopted for their economy. The core of human language is a common symbolic system that approximates (to varying degrees of accuracy) objects, processes and relationships in the real world. Any "model" that diminishes this core nature at any point is going to be faulty. <> A one word language may not get you far. But a vocabulary of about ten words helped me survive in southeast asia -- so I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this. <> So you are saying a human pidgin with the barest minimum of grammar is "weaker" in communicative function than the "communication system" of present day apes? I don't think you have that quite right. Regards, Steve Long From lise.menn at colorado.edu Mon May 29 16:19:56 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 10:19:56 -0600 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ok, a few notes on child language here, though this is tangential to the issue of the theoretical cycle of typologies, and problematic in its relations to pidgins. [And on the topic of pidgins, remember that - definitionally! - speakers of pidgins have some OTHER language as their native language. They are not naive as to how languages are constructed - e.g. that they have embedding - even though the various speakers of the pidgin - again by definition - have different native languages to draw on. Sociologically it seems very weird to assume - as the old bioprogram claims apparently do - that a substantial fraction of children growing up surrounded by a pidgin (and thus on their way to becoming the first generation of creole speakers) do not also hear parents and parents' friends speaking a fully-developed human language, even if they themselves do not become fully able to speak that language.] First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. Ann Peters has been publishing on this since 1977; go to http:// www2.hawaii.edu/~ann/ A detailed diachronic study of one case is a dissertation (available via University Microfilms) by my student Andrea Feldman, Colorado; a portion of her data are in Feldman, Andrea, & Lise Menn (2003). Up close and personal: the development of filler syllables. Journal of Child Language, 30:4, 735-768. Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. Suppose she also says 'byebye' (an extremely common first word) when people are leaving her house. And 'no' when she pushes things away that she doesn't want to eat. You've got a contrast now, but that's still not sufficient; 'dog' doesn't become a noun just because 'bye- bye' and 'no' aren't nouns, and adding a verb to the mix won't do it either. Again, consider all the properties you expect a word to have before you call it a noun or a verb. Whatever your list is, evidence that children's early words have the full set of properties that you want will not be forthcoming - but evidence for SOME of them will be there. People working in the tradition of Martin Braine - now, most visibly, Michael Tomasello & colleagues - argue for a gradual development of language-wide 'parts of speech' from very local privilege-of-occurrence classes. Try Veneziano's 'The Emergence of Noun and Verb Categories in the Acquisition of French', pdf at http:// cogprints.org/3044/01/Veneziano.pdf for one well-articulated approach. Lise Menn On May 28, 2006, at 4:02 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Steve Long wrote: > >> I think this is where the disagreement is. There's good reason to >> believe that those Turkish speakers starting out with inflectional >> morphology are not doing anything different from analytic speakers >> starting >> out with non-inflected words. The grammatical implications have >> for the most >> part not entered into either of their speeches. Many researchers >> have tried >> hard to find grammar invery early development, but I believe that a >> disciplined objective review will show that it is just not there. > > Conversely, I'm not sure that beginning English speakers at the one > word > stage are actually using nouns when they say things like "dog" or > "ball" > or "Mommy". I don't think the category noun can have any > significance if > there isn't another category to contrast it with. > >> I'm not sure what theory of mind means, but it is true that >> grammar more >> accurately maps identities, processes and relationships between >> things in >> time and space. But just because early languages did not have much >> grammar did notmean they had not developed into distinctively human >> language. > > Theory of Mind refers to an individual's awareness of the minds of > others, > their context, desires, beliefs and motivations. Humans are known for > their unusually well-developed theory of mind, but not all humans are > equally endowed with this ability. Autistics are said to have > considerable deficits in theory of mind, regardless of how high > their IQ may be > in other areas. Deficits in theory of mind make language > acquisition very > difficult, because mind-reading is a good way to jump start first > language > learning. However, later in life, autistics often catch up in language > ability, despite lingering deficits in theory of mind. > > Shifting between 1st and second person is something that come > naturally to > speakers with a normal theory of mind. If you don't have TOM, it's > much > harder to guess when to use first and when to use second person. > >> Hmmm. My dog knows the difference between yes and no very well. >> Generalized (abstracted) across a whole slew of situations. Which >> only >> reinforces the idea that the real functions of language may be more >> centered in the listener than the speaker. > > Really? Does your dog answer yes/no questions? I have yet to meet a > dog > who can. > > When I ask my dog if she wants to go out, it's clear that she > understands > the question. But if she doesn't want to go out, she never gives any > signal to say so. She just stands there glumly and won't follow me > to the > door. If she wants to go out, she wags her tail excitedly and goes > to the > door before I do. > > That is not answering "yes" and "no." That is involuntarily showing > her > emotional states using body language. She has no volitional control > over > that wagging tail. > > There is nothing to keep her from nodding her head "yes" or shaking it > "no," as she sees me doing. But she never does. > > In what context has your dog used "yes" and "no"? > > >> What was early human language like? Well, we can be pretty >> certain that >> a full-blown Latin grammar was not inherited from our "pre-human" >> ancestors. Then how much grammar did the earliest human speech >> have? I >> see no reason to think it had anymore than the simplest, least >> grammatical pidgin. Any other conclusion calls for a deus ex machina >> that somehow implanted grammar full-blown inthe form of a >> Chomskayan language >> mechanism, which I believe violates the >> naturalistic assumption of science. > > No, there are other conclusions that do not require us to adopt > Chomskyan > mechanisms or violate the naturalistic assumptions of science. > > The idea of individual words carrying meaning without a system of > contrasts is not naturalistic. When you imagine people talking in > nouns, > verbs and prepositions, and you think of them building up their > grammatical system gradually, one word at a time, that is not > naturalistic. How long do you imagine our primitive ancestors spent > at the > one word -- or rather, one morpheme stage? How long a period from > the use > of the "first" word to the discovery of the second word? There is a > critical mass required before a language can be useful. A one word > language serves no function, and nobody will wait around to learn the > second word. > > Our ancestors, before they were truly human, already had a > communication > system much like that of present-day primates. Do you think they would > discard it for something whose communicative function was much > weaker, in > the hopes of one day working their way up to modern language? > > --Aya > > > > ================================================================ > Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO > 65542 USA > (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 > http://www.well.com/user/amnfn > ================================================================= > Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ From amnfn at well.com Mon May 29 18:18:27 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:18:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lise Menn wrote: >First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix >of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. Yes. And sometimes unanalyzed phrases stand for whole propositions, from which names for participants are identified only later in the development of the child's speech. In such cases, the unanalyzed phrase describes the whole event holisitically. >Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- >way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to >having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally >monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things >they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is >doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - >and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the >noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun >use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous >here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. Agreed. >Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is >not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that >she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for >it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. Sometimes children don't use "Mommy" to name a concrete object. Sometimes they use it to mean "come here!" I have anecdotal evidence. When my daughter was 18 months old, we were living in Taiwan. I spoke Hebrew to her, and her nanny spoke Mandarin. When my daughter wanted one of us to come help her with something, she would call out: "Mama! Mama!" It didn't matter if it was the nanny who was there or me. She called for both of us the same way. (She learned to do this by observing the nanny's daughter.) However, she did not use "Mama" to refer to either of us. If I showed her a picture of the nanny, she would point at it and say "A Yi" (which is how the nanny referred to herself: Auntie.) If my daughter saw a picture of me, she would point and say "Ani". "Ani" is the Hebrew 1st person nominative pronoun. I referred to myself in first person, so my daughter used the first person pronoun to refer to me, too. It doesn't matter what the nanny or I originally thought "Mama" meant. It doesn't matter that most people use that word as a nominal or participant reference. For my daughter, it was the way to summon help. It was not a way to refer to anyone, because she never pointed at any person and said Mama. Regardless of their derivation, words mean only what they are used for by the particular speaker at a particular place and time. That was my point. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From amnfn at well.com Mon May 29 18:31:27 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:31:27 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function (6) In-Reply-To: <486.14d9f94.31ac6f1f@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >What "dog" or "ball" or "Mommy" are doing is giving those objects a NAME >-- a label, a symbolic equivalency, an independent representation made >with specific sounds. My point with regard to the development of early human language is that using a symbol to stand for a concrete object which is stable through time and space is a very late development in language, both in ontology and phylogeny. Before we break down a sentence into its component parts and figure out which parts refer to which participants, we have to first understand what event the whole sentence referred to. It's true that in second language acquisition, especially under formal teaching, the parts are presented to us already broken down. However, for someone who has never had language comprehension, getting to that point is a very big deal. It's not the first thing that happens for infants, and it was probably not the first step we took as a species on the road to modern language. Best, --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue May 30 01:16:35 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 19:16:35 -0600 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: One more caution, then: while conclusions derived from multiple observations such as Aya gives at the end of her reply are very strong, very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by saying it. The notion of the 'holophrase' - the single utterance that supposedly means a whole proposition - is to be regarded with considerable suspicion; it arose in child language 40- odd years ago, before linguists in general, Austin's lessons having sunk in, began to routinely distinguish semantics (what this form means) from semantics plus pragmatics (what this person means by producing this form in this context), and it has hung around in child language since then. I have never been convinced that there is any such thing. A claim that a particular child means a whole proposition by producing 'horsie' or 'banana' in a given situation is of course often quite reasonable, as judged by the child's actions and reactions. But claiming that the form itself 'means' a whole proposition is very dicey indeed. If I yell 'fire', I mean a whole lot of things at once, including warnings as well as propositions, but the word 'fire' itself does not mean those things. I may yell for my husband, but the name 'Bill' does not then mean 'Where are you, can you hear me, if you can would you please yell back to let me know where you are?'; it's my calling his name that has this meaning. We all know this about adult language, but forget it too easily in dealing with child language. Yet the call 'yoo-hoo', which has the same functions as calling a name, is similar to Aya's 'mama' example below. 'Ouch' and 'hello' are two more examples of words whose meaning can only properly be described as 'what you say in situation X (if you want to produce effect Y)'. This kind of meaning is very observable to kids who want to do things with words, and it is often present much earlier than referential meaning. Liz Bates wrote good stuff about this years ago, though her terminology, derived directly from Austin, was not transparent enough to catch on widely. Lise On May 29, 2006, at 12:18 PM, A. Katz wrote: > Lise Menn wrote: > >> First: Children learning English and other languages often have a mix >> of longer unanalyzed phrases, words + 'fillers', and single words. > > Yes. And sometimes unanalyzed phrases stand for whole propositions, > from > which names for participants are identified only later in the > development > of the child's speech. In such cases, the unanalyzed phrase > describes the > whole event holisitically. > > >> Secondly, having a modest amount of inflectional morphology (say a 2- >> way marking of person or case distinction) is not tantamount to >> having a full grammar - NOR is it the same as having a totally >> monomorphemic language. Children who use accusative case for things >> they are throwing or eating and nominative case for someone who is >> doing something do have a case contrast - but it's very restricted - >> and it may be almost completely predictable by the animacy of the >> noun (nominatives animate, accusatives inanimate), as early pronoun >> use may be in English. It does not make sense to be dichotomous >> here, to say 'either there's a grammar or there's no grammar'. > > Agreed. > >> Third: What does it mean to say that a child who says 'dog' is or is >> not using a noun? If she is pointing to a dog, you can say that >> she's referring to a concrete object. Whether that is sufficient for >> it to be a noun is going to depend on your theory of grammar. > > Sometimes children don't use "Mommy" to name a concrete object. > Sometimes > they use it to mean "come here!" I have anecdotal evidence. > > When my daughter was 18 months old, we were living in Taiwan. I spoke > Hebrew to her, and her nanny spoke Mandarin. When my daughter > wanted one > of us to come help her with something, she would call out: "Mama! > Mama!" > It didn't matter if it was the nanny who was there or me. She > called for > both of us the same way. (She learned to do this by observing the > nanny's > daughter.) > > However, she did not use "Mama" to refer to either of us. If I > showed her > a picture of the nanny, she would point at it and say "A Yi" (which > is how > the nanny referred to herself: Auntie.) If my daughter saw a > picture of > me, she would point and say "Ani". "Ani" is the Hebrew 1st person > nominative pronoun. I referred to myself in first person, so my > daughter > used the first person pronoun to refer to me, too. > > It doesn't matter what the nanny or I originally thought "Mama" > meant. It > doesn't matter that most people use that word as a nominal or > participant > reference. For my daughter, it was the way to summon help. It was > not a > way to refer to anyone, because she never pointed at any person and > said > Mama. > > Regardless of their derivation, words mean only what they are used > for by > the particular speaker at a particular place and time. That was my > point. > > Best, > > > > --Aya > > > ================================================================ > Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO > 65542 USA > (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 > http://www.well.com/user/amnfn > ================================================================= Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 02:17:49 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:17:49 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 9:19:41 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: << very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by saying it. >> Let's start with two categories of "meaning": -- what an utterance means to the speaker -- what an utterance means to the listener(s) Somehow, we've got a third kind of meaning described here -- "what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what a child means by saying it" What makes us think there is such a thing as "what an utterance means in itself"? Regards Steve Long From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 03:33:55 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 23:33:55 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (8) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 2:18:53 PM, amnfn at well.com writes: <> I'm not sure what this proves. The child wanted help but did not have a word for help? Or were her words for "help me with something" less effective than saying "Mama." What if she said "Mama! Mama! and nobody came? Obviously, the listeners did not care about what she said, because they came anyway. This is not special to human language. Sound draws attention and aimed at the right audience will draw a response. If "mama" has been effective on mother, it may be effective on others. If "bobo" is more effective than "mama" at drawing a response, start using "bobo." Of course, if "Mama" works, use it. It's the real world consequence that drives language, cognition is only an intermediary. Once again, a man touring a candy factory falls into a vat of chocolate. He yells "Fire! Fire!" After being rescued he is asked why he yelled, "Fire! Fire!" He answers, "If I yelled, 'Chocolate, Chocolate', do you think anyone would have come?" All this is a completely different issue than common reference. If Aya's child started calling her Taiwanese nanny, "Queen Mary" or asking for help by saying "leg of lamb," the anecdote was have been quite different in the point it was making. Where common reference is clearly off the track, that is categorized as a serious language problem. The reason we even have a guess at what a child or an adult "means" by spoken word is based on an assumption of commonality of reference. If a child says "ya ya" to indicate that he needs to go to the bathroom, we have to learn that reference and incorporate it into our own set of references for communication to be effective. If a child says "bathroom" to indicate that he needs to go to the bathroom, that is within our common reference, and it takes less work on the LISTENER's part to understand the intended result the child is after -- assuming the listener is interested in what the child is after. <> That's true and that is because -- before sounds become symbolic -- they were merely auditory attempts to manipulate the environment. Yelling "Mama! Mama!" where "Mama" has no connection to any particular object, process or relationship, is equivalent to yelling "Bobo" -- the sound may elicit a response just because it is a sound. What separates human language is the extent of common reference. The other sounds we make are not really different than those made by cicadas and chimps. <<...the parts are presented to us already broken down. However, for someone who has never had language comprehension, getting to that point is a very big deal. It's not the first thing that happens for infants, and it was probably not the first step we took as a species on the road to modern language.>> The "parts" of language are merely representations of the "parts" of the world. There are many folks out there who never really thought about the world being separable into objects and actions, despite the fact that it is easy for them to distinguish the two for the most part, once they think about it. There are many folks out there who never really thought about language being separable into nouns and verbs, despite the fact that it is easy for them to distinguish the two for the most part, once they think about it. This correspondence between symbol and the real world, when it is made common by a common language, is what makes human language particularly effective. Most examples of the "holistic" nature of language are either deducible shorthand versions of complete statements, or examples of arbitrary sound-generation that acts as a simple discriminative stimulus -- whether the sound is a bell, a buzzer, a child shouting an ambiguous "mama" or a mating songbird repeating tweets and warbles in a consistent pattern. The fact that the sound is not symbolic does not keep it from being effective. But it is not distinctively human speech. Regards Steve Long From david_tuggy at sil.org Tue May 30 03:50:34 2006 From: david_tuggy at sil.org (David Tuggy) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:50:34 -0500 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: <4a0.13a5a40.31ad054d@aol.com> Message-ID: It could perhaps be defined as "what the speaker and listeners think the utterance would mean to other people, apart from the particular context". At least I judge that's what most people mean when they say "that word(/phrase/etc.) means X". I.e. it is the conventional meaning. --David Tuggy Salinas17 at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 5/29/06 9:19:41 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: > << very often it is necessary to be carefully agnostic on the issue of what a > child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what the child means by > saying it. >> > > Let's start with two categories of "meaning": > -- what an utterance means to the speaker > -- what an utterance means to the listener(s) > > Somehow, we've got a third kind of meaning described here -- > "what a child's utterance means in itself, as opposed to what a child means > by saying it" > > What makes us think there is such a thing as "what an utterance means in > itself"? > > Regards > Steve Long > > > From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 03:58:08 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 23:58:08 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 12:23:10 PM, lise.menn at colorado.edu writes: << [And on the topic of pidgins, remember that - definitionally! - speakers of pidgins have some OTHER language as their native language. They are not naive as to how languages are constructed - e.g. that they have embedding - even though the various speakers of the pidgin - again by definition - have different native languages to draw on. >> The point was not that pidgin speakers were not naive to how language works, but rather the description of certain pidgins as a language with the bare minimum of grammatical features -- "...nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on tend to have only one invariant phonological form... The verbal root itself does not express any particular tense or aspect. When used in a clause, it is up to the listener to interpret this aspect of meaning in accord with the context." Unless "pidgin" does not match this discription, speaker familiarity with other languages is irrelevant. Steve Long From Salinas17 at aol.com Tue May 30 04:12:51 2006 From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 00:12:51 EDT Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) Message-ID: In a message dated 5/29/06 11:50:39 PM, david_tuggy at sil.org writes: << It could perhaps be defined as "what the speaker and listeners think the utterance would mean to other people, apart from the particular context". At least I judge that's what most people mean when they say "that word(/phrase/etc.) means X". I.e. it is the conventional meaning. >> Well, there's a big difference between "what an utterance means in itself" and "conventional meaning." Human languages are built on common reference, and common reference is a matter of statistical probabilities. If a child says "mama," we feel confident he is referring to his mother. If we discover he is calling his dog, we treat that reference as an oddity -- a low probability occurence -- and it does not affect our interpretattion of "mama" when other children say the word. However, if we look up "mama" in the New Speech Dictionary and see a picture of a dog next to it, we know the chances are that the common reference -- "conventional meaning" -- has shifted. Regards, Steve Long From amnfn at well.com Tue May 30 05:19:39 2006 From: amnfn at well.com (A. Katz) Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 22:19:39 -0700 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: <4a0.13c3826.31ad2043@aol.com> Message-ID: Speculation about what beginning speakers "mean" by words they use was initiated by Steve Long earlier in this thread when he questioned whether the use of inflectional morphology by Turkish children in the one word stage was really to be taken as inflection. If every word uttered is to be taken for its conventional meaning, then there is no point in asking that question. Accusative case is accusative case, and never mind what the child was using it for. If it is appropriate to question the function played by case marking morphology in the communicative behavior of beginning speakers, it is equally appropriate to question whether a conventional noun is really a noun in the usage of a particular child. The real problem in trying to maintain an intelligent, sustainable discussion of this issue is to remember that the point of view of the speaker may be very different from our own and that deviations from convention are not necessarily manipulative acts. An adult crying "fire" in order to attract attention, when he knows full well the conventional meaning of the term "fire" is being manipulative. A child who has no idea what the conventional meaning of "mama" is, and who may not have realized yet that every person has a mother, nor that what we call someone depends on our relationship with that person, nor for that matter, that mama is a noun rather than a verb, is not being manipulative, when using "mama" as a general summoning device. I think the same problem of not paying attention to the speaker's context may also be at the base of some of the misunderstandings about pidgins. Take this sentence from p.514 of Hock's PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (Mouton 1991): (9) Number two cop catch him pass finish. `The subordinate official received the letter.' We tend to think of pidgins as using only substantive words, with hardly any function words at all. And if we take every English word in (9) for its standard dictionary meaning, that would be true. But isn't it clear that the word "him" is serving as an indicator that the verb "catch" has an object "pass"? Isn't it equally obvious that the word "finish" is marking completive aspect? Is the pidgin speaker being "manipulative" when using English substantives as unconventional grammatical markers? --Aya ================================================================ Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO 65542 USA (417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 http://www.well.com/user/amnfn ================================================================= From hartmut at ruc.dk Tue May 30 09:15:50 2006 From: hartmut at ruc.dk (Hartmut Haberland) Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 11:15:50 +0200 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (7) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What about loans? Take the Greek dish called mousak?s, whose name has been borrowed into several languages as moussaka (spelling can vary). (Never mind that the Greek word probably is a loan itself; cultural flows suggest that the word has been borrowed from Greek.) The borrowed form is 'actually' the genitive or accusative singular, but does this matter? We can consider the foreign tourist as an incipient speaker of Greek (although he or she never might sample more than a few words), and we may speculate why they picked the form (maybe they heard it in contexts like "I'd like one_______"), but it is or course neither genitive or accusative since they have no Greek inflection in their English, German, Danish Swedish, etc. You couldn't even say they reanalyzed it wrongly as a feminine noun (which would have identical nominative and accusative singulars). Only if one of these incipient speakers becomes a full-flegded learner and finally speaker of Greek and still uses mousaka for the nominative, you could correct them (or talk about a reanalysis as a feminine). (There are loads more of examples like this with loans from inflecting languages.) Do I have to spell out the analogy to children's language acquisition? Hartmut Haberland A. Katz wrote: >Speculation about what beginning speakers "mean" by words they use was >initiated by Steve Long earlier in this thread when he questioned whether >the use of inflectional morphology by Turkish children in the one word >stage was really to be taken as inflection. > >If every word uttered is to be taken for its conventional meaning, then >there is no point in asking that question. Accusative case is accusative >case, and never mind what the child was using it for. > >If it is appropriate to question the function played by case marking >morphology in the communicative behavior of beginning speakers, it is >equally appropriate to question whether a conventional noun is really a >noun in the usage of a particular child. > >The real problem in trying to maintain an intelligent, sustainable >discussion of this issue is to remember that the point of view of the >speaker may be very different from our own and that deviations from >convention are not necessarily manipulative acts. > >An adult crying "fire" in order to attract attention, when he knows full >well the conventional meaning of the term "fire" is being manipulative. A >child who has no idea what the conventional meaning of "mama" is, and >who may not have realized yet that every person has a mother, nor that >what we call someone depends on our relationship with that person, nor >for that matter, that mama is a noun rather than a verb, is not >being manipulative, when using "mama" as a general summoning device. > >I think the same problem of not paying attention to the speaker's context >may also be at the base of some of the misunderstandings about pidgins. >Take this sentence from p.514 of Hock's PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL >LINGUISTICS (Mouton 1991): > >(9) Number two cop catch him pass finish. > `The subordinate official received the letter.' > >We tend to think of pidgins as using only substantive words, with hardly >any function words at all. And if we take every English word in (9) for >its standard dictionary meaning, that would be true. But isn't it clear >that the word "him" is serving as an indicator that the verb "catch" has >an object "pass"? Isn't it equally obvious that the word "finish" is >marking completive aspect? > >Is the pidgin speaker being "manipulative" when using English substantives >as unconventional grammatical markers? > > --Aya > >================================================================ >Dr. Aya Katz, Inverted-A, Inc, P.O. Box 267, Licking, MO >65542 USA >(417) 457-6652 (573) 247-0055 >http://www.well.com/user/amnfn >================================================================= > > > > > From dorgeloh at mail.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de Wed May 31 07:46:18 2006 From: dorgeloh at mail.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de (Heidrun Dorgeloh) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 09:46:18 +0200 Subject: Syntactic Variation and Emerging Genres - Section of the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society Message-ID: Date: 28-Feb-2007 - 02-Mar-2007 Location: Siegen, Germany Contact Person: Anja Wanner Meeting Email: awanner at wisc.edu Web Site: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner/dgfs2007.htm Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics Call Deadline: 31-Jul-2006 Meeting Description: This workshop, co-organized by Heidrun Dorgeloh (Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf) and Anja Wanner (University of Wisconsin-Madison), is an integral part of the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). It will explore the question of how syntactic variation is linked to the context of genre and, more specifically, how such variation can be studied with view to contexts of constantly changing and emerging genres. The conference includes plenary talks and parallel thematic workshops. Workshop description: Modern genre theory emphasizes the importance of genres as typified utterances that share a set of communicative purposes, emerging and developing through repeated use in similar situations. For some registers a trend towards ''genrefication'' has been observed. Cases in point are the standardization of review processes and other performance assessments in academic and administrative discourse, or the emergence of new patterns of style in newspaper language. We would like to explore in this workshop the question of how syntactic variation is linked to the context of genre and, more specifically, how such variation can be studied with view to contexts of constantly changing and emerging genres. How and when do new genres emerge, and how does syntactic variation reflect or contribute to that process? Studies that fall into the scope of this proposal include: - sociolinguistic studies of different registers - corpus studies of emerging genres or constructions - studies focusing on the link between syntax and pragmatics We primarily invite empirical work, but there should also be space for discussing more theoretical issues, in particular of how to incorporate variation according to genre into theories of grammar. We hope to bring together insights from different approaches to syntactic variation (corpus linguistics, construction grammar, historical and synchronic pragmatics, genre theory), unified by the connection they make between linguistic form and communicative purpose. One-page abstracts (max. 500 words) should be sent by e-mail to the coordinators by July 31, 2006 (as attachment in .doc or .pdf format). Contributors should indicate their name, affiliation, e-mail address under which they can be contacted over the summer, and their DGfS membership status. Please send your abstract to both coordinators at the same time (dorgeloh at phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de and awanner at wisc.edu). For more information and for updates please visit the workshop website: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner/dgfs2007.htm -------------------- Dr. Heidrun Dorgeloh Institut fuer englische Sprachwissenschaft - Anglistik III Universitaet Duesseldorf Universitaetsstr.1, D-40229 D?sseldorf Tel.49-(0)211-81-13774, Fax -13026 From dcyr at yorku.ca Wed May 31 15:31:40 2006 From: dcyr at yorku.ca (dcyr at yorku.ca) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:31:40 -0500 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <4FF743E9-A735-4571-B838-517FE800698A@colorado.edu> Message-ID: A propositional example, yet showing the same principles Lisa and Aya mentioned is a whole proposition uttered by a two-year old and that hardly has the meaning of a single word. In French the form for "please" is still the whole proposition "s'il vous plait" ('if it pleases you'). Children are trained to use that proposition as a necessary word or sound sequence to get what they want. Parents call it "the magic word" and of course toddlers have no idea of what they are uttering except that it makes them get what they ask for. So indeed it is a magic word! Similarly, my grandson Ulysse, at the age of two and a half asked his dad to play a video tape for him. Just as my son was introducing the tape in the machine Ulysses said: "D'abord il faut le rembobiner! (First we have to rewind it!)" And my son replied: "You're right, first we have to rewind it." And immediately Ulysses asked his dad: "Daddy what does it mean "First we have to rewind it?" Which indicates that Ulysses was not conscious of uttering a proposition. For him it was only a ritual word, another magical word, necessary to be uttered if one wanted the video tape to played. Regards to all, Danielle E. Cyr From macw at cmu.edu Wed May 31 16:07:50 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 12:07:50 -0400 Subject: Analytic languages and their function. (4) In-Reply-To: <1149089500.447db6dca7223@mymail.yorku.ca> Message-ID: My take on Danielle's example is that, by the age of 2;6, Ulysse recognizes and produces the items "d'abord" and "il faut" and that he understands the item-based positional patterning of "le" before the verb. I would argue that the reason he is citing the full utterance is not because he is processing it as a unit, but rather because he is unsure about the morphemic status of the unknown word "rembobiner." Perhaps this is one morpheme, perhaps two. To make matters clearest, he cites the whole sentence. This whole sentence is indeed a loosely assembled chunk in short term memory, but I very much doubt that it is an unanalyzed lexical chunk in long-term memory. This is not to say that there may not be some long-term trace of many common sentences, but there is no reason to expect that to be more true here than with something like "D'abord il faut le changer." I could cite gobs of psycholinguistic analyses and experiments in support of this overall analysis, but perhaps you folks already know this literature. Lise cited some materials in a previous posting. I could add my work on linguistic analysis of child language corpora from the period of 1975-1987 and then additional experimental evidence from 1987-1997 on rote vs analytic storage in short and long-term memory. I totally agree with the important of ritualized chunks in early child language about the age of 1;6.* However, by the age of 2;6, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. -- Brian MacWhinney *One of my favorite papers on this is: Ninio, A., & Snow, C. (1988). Language acquisition through language use: The functional sources of children's early utterances. In Y. Levy, I. Schlesinger & M. Braine (Eds.), Categories and processes in language acquisition (pp. 11-30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. On May 31, 2006, at 11:31 AM, dcyr at yorku.ca wrote: > A propositional example, yet showing the same principles Lisa and > Aya mentioned > is a whole proposition uttered by a two-year old and that hardly > has the > meaning of a single word. > > In French the form for "please" is still the whole proposition > "s'il vous plait" > ('if it pleases you'). Children are trained to use that proposition > as a > necessary word or sound sequence to get what they want. Parents > call it "the > magic word" and of course toddlers have no idea of what they are > uttering > except that it makes them get what they ask for. So indeed it is a > magic word! > > Similarly, my grandson Ulysse, at the age of two and a half asked > his dad to > play a video tape for him. Just as my son was introducing the tape > in the > machine Ulysses said: "D'abord il faut le rembobiner! (First we > have to rewind > it!)" And my son replied: "You're right, first we have to rewind > it." And > immediately Ulysses asked his dad: "Daddy what does it mean "First > we have to > rewind it?" Which indicates that Ulysses was not conscious of > uttering a > proposition. For him it was only a ritual word, another magical > word, necessary > to be uttered if one wanted the video tape to played. > > Regards to all, > Danielle E. Cyr >