From nino.amiridze at gmail.com  Sat May  2 07:07:40 2009
From: nino.amiridze at gmail.com (Nino Amiridze)
Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 09:07:40 +0200
Subject: 2nd Call for Abstracts: Workshop ''Advances in Kartvelian
 Morphology and Syntax', September 2009, Bremen, Germany
Message-ID: <SAT.2.MAY.2009.090740.0200.NINO.AMIRIDZE@GMAIL.COM>

[Apologies for multiple posting]

---------------------------------------------------------
ADVANCES IN KARTVELIAN MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX
(Caucasian Language Issues 10)

Workshop at the Festival of Languages
September 29-30, 2009, Bremen, Germany

Call Deadline: Monday, May 11, 2009

http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/kartvelian/
---------------------------------------------------------

2nd Call for Abstracts
==================
Submissions are invited for the workshop 'Advances in Kartvelian
Morphology and Syntax', which is the tenth in the series of
international conferences entitled Caucasian Language Issues
(Kaukasische Sprachprobleme). The previous event in this series,
'Kaukasische Sprachprobleme IX', was held in 2001 in Oldenburg,
Germany. The present workshop will take place in Bremen, Germany,
September 29-30, 2009 during the Festival of Languages
(http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de/).

The goal of the workshop is to discuss recent developments in the
study of morphology and syntax of the Kartvelian language family.
Abstracts for 20 minute talks (plus 10 minute discussion) will be
considered on topics relating to the synchronic or diachronic study of
Kartvelian languages from any theoretical perspective. Submissions
from any scholar (including graduate students) working on Kartvelian
morphology and syntax are welcome.

Invited Speakers
================
* Winfried Boeder (University of Oldenburg)
* Alice C. Harris (SUNY Stony Brook)
* Kevin Tuite (Université de Montréal)

Important Dates
===============
Abstract submission: Monday, May 11, 2009.
Notification:        Monday, June 8, 2009.
Workshop:            Tuesday and Wednesday, September 29-30, 2009.

Organizers
==========
* Nino Amiridze (Utrecht University; Institute of
 Oriental Studies, Georgian Academy of Sciences)
* Tamar Khizanishvili (University of Bremen)
* Manana Topadze (Univerity of Pavia)

Publication
===========
If after the workshop there will be interest in publishing either a
proceedings or a special journal issue, then the organizers will take
responsibility of finding a suitable forum and will act as editors.

Submission
==========
Anonymous abstracts (in English, maximum 2 pages, including data and
references) have to be submitted electronically as portable document
format (.pdf) or Microsoft Word (.doc) files via the EasyChair
conference management system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=akms09.
Each abstract will be anonymously reviewed by independent reviewers.

Workshop Web Page
=================
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/kartvelian/

Conference Fees
===============
until July 1, 2009:  Full rate 100 E / Student rate 50 E
after July 1, 2009:  Full rate 150 E / Student rate 75 E

Contact Person
==============
Tamar Khizanishvili,  <tamarkh at uni-bremen.de>

This workshop is part of the "Conference Marathon" within the
three-weeks programme of the Festival of languages in Bremen.


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Wed May  6 05:38:12 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 01:38:12 EDT
Subject: Universals and the Evans/Levinson Paper
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.2009.013812.EDT.>

To the Funklist:
I was very interested in Stephin Levinson's response to Tom's 
middle-of-the-road approach to universals.   (I'm not sure that response was intended for 
the list to see, and so I hope it's okay to refer to it here.)

Levinson wrote: "I think you are right about development as key in biology, 
and also about exceptions. But the question is can we list the strong 
tendencies?"

Of course, "strong tendencies" are not quite "universals".   Is it true 
that "once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 
6-8000 languages" (as the abstract says) that all we can hope to find are strong 
tendencies?

And is it true that "Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum 
for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system 
which is fundamentally variable at all levels" (as the abstract says)?   

The abstract allows for "stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple 
design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the 
constraints of human cognition" -- but I take it these don't qualify as 
"universals".

I am extremely sympathetic to the basic points made in the paper, but I'd 
question whether these statements are going too far.   

One of the great difficulties that cognitive studies have run into is 
describing cogitive processes in a way that also describes what should be going 
on in the brain.   Forget human cognition or language.   I previously quoted 
Heinrich and Bugnyar on the paper wasp: ""By some process that still remains 
one of the great unsolved mysteries of biology, exquisitely precise 
behaviors can be genetically programmed in animals with brains no larger than a 
pinhead..."   If we have problems understanding how a tiny brain can process an 
insect's programmed behavior, it should not be a surprise that we have 
difficulty with a much larger brain and   behavior as bewilderingly complex as 
human language.

Cognitivists need to know that human language is diverse and that they are 
not looking for a discrete syntactic template that guides all human 
language.   And biologists should know that therefore simple equivalencies will not 
be likely in the brain.

But there are some things that may be "universal" or "strong tendencies" in 
the "the world's 6-8000 languages" the abstract mentions.   And they may be 
very useful to keep in mind when we talk about "cognition".

Number one, all of these languages would appear to be communal.   At least, 
I presume there is not one instance of a language spoken by a single 
individual and no one else.   Chomsky's "self-expression" function of language has 
not yielded any instances of private languages that I am aware of and I 
presume none of the thousands of languages the authors studied fell into this 
category.

So, no, it's not complete diversity.   It's not "every snowflake is unique" 
diversity.   It's not a hundred million language diversity or even close to 
the genetic diversity of a typical human population.   

This is very important because it should signal to the cognitivist that the 
nature of language may not   be found in only studying individuals or 
individual "cognitions."   If language is shaped communally, then the processes 
are communal.   I'm not speaking of extralinguistic "social" factors,.   I'm 
talking about the structure of language itself, which certainly does not 
exist as a whole in any one individual.

If you are looking for an analogy, look to the latest developments in 
computer networking, where such concepts as "cloud" are emerging.

Here's a stab at another universal -- the abstract mentions "meaning" as an 
example of diversity.   But meaning cannot be that diverse, can it?   There 
has to be some sense that speakers of these languages were not quite free 
to use words completely as they choose, no matter how grammatical or 
syntactical.   

The "strong tendency" here would be COMMON REFERENCE.   No matter what 
language we look at, we can expect all its speakers to strive to refer to the 
same things or circumstances with the same sounds (or symbols) in order to be 
understood.

This isn't trivial.   What constraint could be stronger than a need for a 
common meaning.   Tense, case, word order -- all aspect of language in 
whatever form or morphology, they are all forms of references -- and they all most 
basically depend on the speaker and listener having a common sense of what 
is being spoken about.   All vocabulary and grammatical variations of any 
kind make reference to an object, an action a process, a relationship in place 
and time with greater or lesser specificity.   If my reference is different 
than your reference, we do not understand what we are saying.   Which of 
the 6-800 languages consisted of speakers who did not understand one another?

Esa's example of Tamil's diachronic changes in endings tells us not that 
Tamil suddenly became incomprehensible to its users, but instead that it 
changed to stay comprehensible to its users.   

If this makes any sense, then I don't see why we can't say that the need 
for common reference is a "strong tendency." As close as we can get to a 
universal.   And one that should be a great help in telling linguistics as well 
as the cognitive science why languages are structured as they are.

Regards,
steve long




















**************
Big savings on Dell’s most popular laptops. Now starting at 
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From bischoff.st at gmail.com  Thu May  7 19:48:13 2009
From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff)
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 15:48:13 -0400
Subject: theories of syntax
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.2009.154813.0400.BISCHOFF.ST@GMAIL.COM>

Hi all,

I'm looking for a good introductory textbook for "An Introduction To
Syntactic Theory" course. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The
idea is to introduce the students to what syntactic theory is, how theories
differ, how theories are similar, some idea of what theories are out
there...

Thanks!
Shannon


From edith at uwm.edu  Thu May  7 20:19:09 2009
From: edith at uwm.edu (Edith Moravcsik)
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 15:19:09 -0500
Subject: theories of syntax
In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20905071248t6a45a11l79a25dc2d13d42ab@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.2009.151909.0500.EDITH@UWM.EDU>

In 2006, I published a book titled "An introduction to syntactic theory" (New York: Continuum). The preface and table of contents are available on my website
(www.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/faculty/moravcsik.html).

Best,

Edith Moravcsik



-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of s.t. bischoff
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 2:48 PM
To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: [FUNKNET] theories of syntax

Hi all,

I'm looking for a good introductory textbook for "An Introduction To
Syntactic Theory" course. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The
idea is to introduce the students to what syntactic theory is, how theories
differ, how theories are similar, some idea of what theories are out
there...

Thanks!
Shannon


From acalude at gmail.com  Fri May  8 15:16:17 2009
From: acalude at gmail.com (Andreea Calude)
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 16:16:17 +0100
Subject: Paper on language evolution in Nature Reviews Genetics
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.2009.161617.0100.ACALUDE@GMAIL.COM>

Dear Funk-netters,

Following the recent fascinating discussion sparked by the Evans/Levinson
PNAS paper, I would like to take the somewhat bold opportunity to draw your
attention to another interesting paper which is similarly published in a
journal further afield of the typical focus of mainstream linguistics,
namely in *Nature Review Genetics*, which concerns language evolution and in
particular, what one can do with (/ask of) computational tools in this
research area. At the risk of being blamed for self-publicising work which
is coming out of the lab I am currently working in, please find below the
details of the paper.

With humble apologies,

Andreea Calude


Nature Reviews Genetics, advance online publication, Published online 7 May
2009 | doi:10.1038/nrg2560
Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator

Mark Pagel
<http://www.nature.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/nrg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nrg2560.html#top>
Abstract

Human languages form a distinct and largely independent class of cultural
replicators with behaviour and fidelity that can rival that of genes.
Parallels between biological and linguistic evolution mean that statistical
methods inspired by phylogenetics and comparative biology are being
increasingly applied to study language. Phylogenetic trees constructed from
linguistic elements chart the history of human cultures, and comparative
studies reveal surprising and general features of how languages evolve,
including patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements and social
factors that influence temporal trends of language evolution. For many
comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology,
historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more
relevant than those estimated from genes.


-- 
Dr. Andreea S. Calude
School of Biological Sciences
Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
University of Reading
Reading
RG6 6BX
United Kingdom
--
acalude at gmail.com
www.calude.net/andreea/andreea.html


From dcyr at yorku.ca  Fri May  8 23:45:15 2009
From: dcyr at yorku.ca (Danielle E. Cyr)
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 19:45:15 -0400
Subject: Paper on language evolution in Nature Reviews Genetics
In-Reply-To: <9c32037a0905080816t5b2f6167q6f32db0ad1f35420@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.2009.194515.0400.DCYR@YORKU.CA>

Please don't apologize for sending this most interesting piece of information.
The only problem is that one needs to have a login ID and password to access
the online paper. Is there another way to get it? I can't wait to read what's
under this thrilling title and abstract.

Cheers,
Danielle Cyr


Quoting Andreea Calude <acalude at gmail.com>:

> Dear Funk-netters,
>
> Following the recent fascinating discussion sparked by the Evans/Levinson
> PNAS paper, I would like to take the somewhat bold opportunity to draw your
> attention to another interesting paper which is similarly published in a
> journal further afield of the typical focus of mainstream linguistics,
> namely in *Nature Review Genetics*, which concerns language evolution and in
> particular, what one can do with (/ask of) computational tools in this
> research area. At the risk of being blamed for self-publicising work which
> is coming out of the lab I am currently working in, please find below the
> details of the paper.
>
> With humble apologies,
>
> Andreea Calude
>
>
> Nature Reviews Genetics, advance online publication, Published online 7 May
> 2009 | doi:10.1038/nrg2560
> Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator
>
> Mark Pagel
>
<http://www.nature.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/nrg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nrg2560.html#top>
> Abstract
>
> Human languages form a distinct and largely independent class of cultural
> replicators with behaviour and fidelity that can rival that of genes.
> Parallels between biological and linguistic evolution mean that statistical
> methods inspired by phylogenetics and comparative biology are being
> increasingly applied to study language. Phylogenetic trees constructed from
> linguistic elements chart the history of human cultures, and comparative
> studies reveal surprising and general features of how languages evolve,
> including patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements and social
> factors that influence temporal trends of language evolution. For many
> comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology,
> historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more
> relevant than those estimated from genes.
>
>
> --
> Dr. Andreea S. Calude
> School of Biological Sciences
> Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
> University of Reading
> Reading
> RG6 6BX
> United Kingdom
> --
> acalude at gmail.com
> www.calude.net/andreea/andreea.html
>


"The only hope we have as human beings is to learn each other's languages.  Only
then can we truly hope to understand one another."

Professor Danielle E. Cyr
Department of French Studies
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
Tel. 1.416.736.2100 #310180
FAX. 1.416.736.5924
dcyr at yorku.ca


From david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu  Sun May 10 18:43:54 2009
From: david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu (David Kronenfeld)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 11:43:54 -0700
Subject: {FUNKNET}new books on pragmatics and on kinship
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.2009.114354.0700.>

Friends,
I just thought that, while I have a moment, I would circulate some 
information regarding my two new books. Together with my 1996 Plastic 
Glasses and Church Fathers (Oxford University Press) they offer a 
coherent and organized approach to the semantics and pragmatics of 
collectively held concepts, including the words of ordinary language.

Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies (2009, 
University of Illinois Press)
The publisher’s URL is 
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/33qps5ad9780252033704.html

Culture, Society, and Cognition: Collective Goals, Values, Action, and 
Knowledge (2008, Mouton Series in Pragmatics No. 3, Mouton de Gruyter)
The publisher’s URL is
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110206074-1

While the book is new, the studies that Fanti Kinship... brings together 
cover an extended, and still continuing and evolving, research project 
that began in 1965. This book
provides the solid and systematic empirical base for much of what 
follows in the other two. Because of the special nature of kinship, and 
the long history of its anthropological study, kinship provides a unique 
laboratory for careful and well-defined study of instances of a wide 
range of generally relevant linguistic and cultural phenomena. It offers 
especially tight empirical control of reference and contrast, of 
cultural norms and presuppositions, of conversational usage, and of the 
interrelationship between terminological categorization and the 
categorization of kinsfolk that is implicit in behavioral patterns. On 
the other hand, particular important aspects of kinship seem unique to 
kinship.
My first attempt to extend the theoretical insights of the kinship work 
to general language and culture came in Plastic Glasses and Church 
Fathers, which considers the semantics of ordinary, everyday 
words--words which lacked the kinds of special constraints seen in the 
terminological domains of kinship and color. Developed examples include 
words for drinking vessels, political factions, warring religious 
groups, and women’s and men’s household tasks in Los Angeles households. 
The analytic approach, a prototype-extension one, makes use of 
psychological work on conjunctivity, linguistic work on marked vs. 
unmarked categories, and general aspects of cognitive ease. 
Communicative function, context, and the role of form definitions figure 
importantly in the discussion.
The other new book, Culture, Society, and Cognition, continues where 
Plastic Glasses leaves off, and considers the pragmatics of collective 
distributed knowledge systems, that is, the kinds of systems of cultural 
knowledge that are required to understand the interactive and 
communicative force of language as well as of non-language culture. The 
book first explores the systematic implications of taking culture as the 
parallel distributed processing system of variably distributed knowledge 
that enables all levels of social systems to function and that enables 
our division of labor. It then considers the kinds of productive 
cultural knowledge systems that exist, paying extended attention to 
“cultural models of action” in which knowledge (including how to do 
stuff, who does which stuff, what stuff is good for, and so forth), 
goals, values, and emotions are brought together in scenarios that we 
use to construct our own actions and interpret the actions of others.

This is, I guess, sort of like a birth announcement--except that no 
presents are expected !





Best,
David

-- 
David B. Kronenfeld             Phone   Office          951 827-4340
Department of Anthropology              Message 951 827-5524
University of California                Fax             951 827-5409
Riverside, CA 92521             email   david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu
Department:     http://Anthropology.ucr.edu/
Personal:       http://pages.sbcglobal.net/david-judy/david.html


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 11 05:11:04 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 01:11:04 EDT
Subject: What the heck is "Common Reference"?
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.2009.011104.EDT.>

To the list:
I've been asked in a couple of private posts where I got the terminology 
"Common Reference" and what kind of peer-reviewed source it came from.   Valid 
question.

I suspect it's not difficult to understand what "common reference" means in 
the context of a lot of linguistic terminology (though not all).   

"Reference" here means the object, property, process, in time and place, 
that a word or other aspect of language stands for, symbolizes or refers to.   
This is reference as in "sense and reference" (Sinn und Bedeutung) pretty 
much as Frege defined it back in the 1890s.   The reference a word (or other 
parts of language structure) makes corresponds to some thing or some process 
or situation in the world, the universe or alternative universes or 
imaginary worlds.   It can even be a reference to other words in the same sentence, 
but that's in no way a limitation on the broader sense in which "reference" 
is used here.

"Common" here means shared in common with other people.   It does not mean 
here frequently or commonly occuring or average.   Very simply put, when two 
people use the same word to stand for the same thing, that's Common 
Reference.

Now there are all kinds of little logic games that you can play to show 
that no two people can ever share the same reference, but for now I think most 
of us can confirm that common reference works pretty well for most of us 
most of the time.   If I say, "Bring me the book", chances are pretty good that 
the person I am talking to will pick up a physical book, carry it over and 
hand it to me -- without falling into a metaphysical vortex where an 
infinite of potential meanings collide.   The problem that shared references can 
only be approximations doesn't mean they don't work, but rather tell us how 
they work to change language.

You'll find "common reference" used in the way descrbed here, of course, in 
many disciplines and institutions that feel the need for standardized 
specialized terminology among its members, especially among doctors, engineers 
and computer scientists.   So that everybody uses the same terms to refer to 
the same things.   This usage of "common reference" simply takes the same 
sense and applies it beyond specialist terminology to all language.

The IMPORTANT point here is that common reference is NOT 100% present in 
any instances of use of language.   The idea is instead that it is the most 
fundamental objective in all language -- and in that it is the closest we come 
to a universal in language.  Among language users, common reference is not 
a framework, it is an on-going quest that creates frameworks. 

If I ask -- in English -- a person who only speaks Mandarin to "Bring me 
the book", we can expect an absence of common reference.   The sounds I've 
made do not correspond to objects or processes I am referring to, in the 
language of my listener.   If i wish to change that circumstance, I will need to 
find a way to share all or most of my references with that listener.   On a 
much less extreme level, that may be the task with every sentence we speak, 
even every utterance we make.

There is at least one field of research that is supporting the idea that 
finding common reference is a pervasive problem throughout language use.    If 
you try to build a robot that uses human language, and make syntactic   
structure what happens first, you get a very confused and confusing robot.   
But if you make a robot's first job finding common reference, you actually 
start to see a robot developing its own pragmatics. 

What's led me to the use of the "common reference" is my time to time 
involvement with businesses involved in interactive robotics.   In this field, 
there has been a very long but most convincing drift towards this idea, or 
ideas very much like it, to describe the first and recurring steps an 
artificial intelligence must take in the real world to use human language.   A lot of 
this trend is going on in a commercial context which does not generate a 
lot of publicly published findings, but some has made its way into the public 
dialogue.

An incredibly enlightening paper regarding robotic interactive language use 
-- and one that defines the term "common reference" operationally if not 
formally is:
Yoko YAMAKATA, Tatsuya KAWAHARA, Hiroshi G. OKUNO and Michihiko MINOH: “
Belief Network based Disambiguation of Object Reference in Spoken Dialogue 
System”, Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 
Vol. 19, No. 1, pp.47-56 (2004).The paper can be downloaded at:
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/tjsai/19/1/19_47/_article/-char/en

This paper has been very influential among a number of human-robotic 
language developers because it provided a way of overcoming the hurdle of how 
robots should be designed to respond to the starting block problem of obviously 
non-human, pre-programmed language generation.   (The paper is one reason 
that I and some others came to use the term "common reference", although 
terminology in this field is hardly uniform, because a lot of the concept naming 
is private.)

Here's part of the abstract: "... In addition to the ambiguity of the 
object reference, the actual system must cope with two sources of uncertainty: 
speech and image recognition. We present the belief network based 
probabilistic reasoning system to determine the object reference. The resulting system 
demonstrates that the number of interactions needed to find a COMMON 
REFERENCE is reduced as the user model is refined." (caps added)    The word 
"belief" here is actually a quantitive system of measuring confidence levels by the 
robot, as it restructures its language based on human responses.   The 
robot's success in all interactions in these tests were enhanced by anything 
that increased common reference.

The term common reference appears in a number of other papers where 
robotics has attempted functioning use of human language.

Bauer A, Gonsior B, Wollherr D, Buss M. Heuristic Rules for Human-Robot 
Interaction Based on Principles from Linguistics - asking for directions, AISB 
(2009).   The paper can be downloaded at:
www.lsr.ei.tum.de/fileadmin/publications/aisb09_bauer.pdf

In this research, the term "common reference" turned from a question of 
spatial coordinates to one of linguistic rules.   The authors cite Karl 
Buhler's The Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language (1934), 
but don't use Buhler's broad definition of Deixis -- following instead 
Levinson and others who limit deitic to a narrower category of words and 
constructions.   That the rules had to be heuristic simply reflects the fact that 
simple syntactic or semantic rules would not solve the real-world tasks the 
robots were given.

Finally, there's also the work of Luc Steels, who has been associated with 
the SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris, and has generated a good deal of 
research that relates to the idea of "common reference" as a driving objective 
in artificially reproducing human language, though not always under that 
name.   One of Steels' points is that the the need for shared connotation and 
adaptive processes puts the study of language at a higher order of 
rule-making than can be established by structural approaches or even those focusing on 
discourse.

A very informative article from a 2004 commercial applications blog on how 
Steels' approach relates to progress on information sharing technologies and 
a process that starts with dismbiguation through common reference (or 
"shared cognitions") and then moves on to the rest of language:
http://www.headshift.com/blog/2005/02/can-robot-learning-teach-us-ho.php

There are a number of Luc Steels' recent papers downloadable on the web, 
and they can be found by Googling his name.

I'll try to post something about how the idea of "common reference" relates 
to pragmatic concepts like deixis and indexicality in a future post.

Any questions or comments would be appreciated.

steve long































  


**************
An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222585010x1201462743/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=62&amp;
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From langconf at bu.edu  Mon May 11 14:58:51 2009
From: langconf at bu.edu (BUCLD BUCLD)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 10:58:51 -0400
Subject: Deadline Approaching - BUCLD 34 submissions
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.2009.105851.0400.LANGCONF@BU.EDU>

CALL FOR PAPERS

THE 34th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
NOVEMBER 6-8, 2009

Keynote Address
“Developing Fluency in Understanding: How it matters”
Anne Fernald, Stanford University

Plenary Address
“Innate Syntax - Still the Best Hypothesis”
Virginia Valian, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center

Lunch Symposium
“Recent Advances in the Study of Production and Comprehension:  
Implications for Language Acquisition Research”
John Trueswell, University of Pennsylvania
Mike Tanenhaus, University of Rochester
Kay Bock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submissions which present research on any topic in the fields of  
first and second language acquisition from any theoretical  
perspectives will be fully considered, including Bilingualism,  
Cognition & Language, Creoles & Pidgins, Dialects, Discourse and  
Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input &  
Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics,  
Pragmatics, Pre-linguistic Development,  Reading and Literacy, Signed  
Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception & Production.

ABSTRACTS

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From Salinas17 at aol.com  Sun May 17 19:09:45 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 15:09:45 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.2009.150945.EDT.>

(First, my deep appreciation to this forum for an opportunity to try out 
these ideas and to those kind enough to consider them.)

It’s striking how the term "deixis" has shrunk in meaning since it was 
first coined in linguistics. 

It's common these days to say that deictic words are a special class of 
words or utterances that "need external context", or "require contextual 
information" or "depend on an external frame of reference."   And to use 
demonstratives (this, that) as examples.   And to make a comparison to anaphora, 
another "special class" of expressions.

But in reading Karl Buhler, whom I think first used deixis as a formal 
linguistic term, you don't find those kind of limitations.   It seems that 
originally deixis was not just a class of expressions but the “fundamental” base 
of all "linguistic messages" or all "intercourse using language."

This is from Buhler's The Theory of Language (the English translation from 
1991):
"...in linguistic messages there are two closely interlocked fundamental 
processes which we can and must distinguish in order to understand what is 
going on.   In intercourse using language there is first pointing: things and 
processes are indicated.   That is demonstratio; I prefer the Greek word 
deixis.   Second, there is also representing... Objects and states of affairs 
are given a formulation in language and are symbolized by words that designate 
them in the symbolic field of language."

It's not easy to read the segment above and think that Buhler was writing 
about a "special class" of expression.   And it's also difficult to think 
that Buhler meant "pointing" literally.   (The Greek word deixis in its most 
basic sense meant the act of bringing something to light, un-hiding, 
revealing; more abstractly showing proof, demonstrating, or more concretely an 
imaging.)

How deixis got linguistically limited to where the pointing has to be 
almost explicit, I'm not sure.   But that contraction in definition might perhaps 
have been unfortunate, as it perhaps made deixis a bit more difficult to 
explain.

The authors of the Handbook of Pragmatics (2006) in introducing the subject 
write: 
“One persistent complication for any theory of reference is the ubiquity of 
deictic or indexical expressions.   Deixis characterizes the properties of 
expressions like I, you, here, there, now, hereby, tense/aspect markers, 
etc., whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary...”

Now, there's a peculiar linguistic beast -- meaning stays constant, but 
referent varies!   Some would say that a different referent equals a different 
meaning.   How is “meaning” defined here, if it doesn’t include reference?  
 How do we separate the two ideas for the sake of defining deixis?

Here’s an example of the difficulty. Recently, I've met different persons, 
each one introduced with the phrase, "This is John."   The referents 
definitely varied. Does "John" have the same meaning but varying referents – more 
than one John?   So therefore is “John” a deictic?

Stephen Levinson, in the same volume, goes on to explore in detail the many 
paradoxes and ambiguities of this narrowly defined linguistic “deixis” 
(along with the akin philosophical “indexicality,” using Charles Pierce’s 
terminology.)

Levinson, points to the many ambiguities that deixis can create in 
describing time, place, space, person, etc.   And they CAN be confusing!   Like: 
today referred to today yesterday. But, today, today refers to a different day. 
  Or, of course, I is I if I say I, but if you say I, you mean you, not I.
There are many more, needless to say.

And because of this, we learn from Levinson that “semantic deficiency” is 
a defining characteristic of deixis (or “indexicality”.) 

Now, this might seem contrary to our more common understanding – deixis 
would seem in fact to remove ambiguity, not add it.   Even definite articles 
are not as definite as some deictics.   "The car is mine" could refer to any 
one of millions of cars.   But "THAT car is mine" suddenly becomes more 
specific, less ambiguous.   "Truths" can refer to millions of different truths, 
but "we hold THESE truths to be self evident" tells us that all the truths 
are going to be narrowed down.   “I’ll get it to you today,” promises a more 
specific time than “I’ll get it to you.”

Even when the deictic must be ambiguous to be accurate -- “Somewhere out 
there.” -- it still contributes to a greater specificity by the most elemental 
logic, being unambiguously ambiguous – “Not here, but somewhere out there.”
   The absence of the object, not “being here,” is quite definite.

How can this be?   How is that this special class of expressions can 
linguistically increase ambiguity, when we seem to use it for the exact opposite 
purpose? Is it that deictic language, in promising to be specific, is held to 
a higher standard than language that doesn’t make reference to “external 
context”?

The answer, according to Levinson, seems to have something to do with what 
linguists traditionally study and some kind of a conclusion from somewhat 
dubious animal psychology: 
“Students of linguistic systems tend to treat language as a disembodied 
representational system which is essentially independent of current 
circumstances, that is, a system for describing states of affairs in which we 
individually may have no involvement… It is these properties of language that have 
been the prime target of formal semantics and many philosophical approaches to 
language – and not without good reason, as they appear to be the exclusive 
province of human communication. The communication systems of other primates 
have none of this “displacement” as Hockett (1958: 579) called it.”

So, compared to “language as a disembodied representational system” – one 
with no or at least relatively few ambiguities – deixis seems replete with 
them. Here we are using “this” and “that”, “I” and “you”, “today” or “
next week” to be more specific, and it ends up we are being more “
semantically deficient,” according to this point of view.

Obviously, one way to find deictic expression guilty of ambiguity is to 
assume away the ambiguity in non-deictic expression.   Say “Socrates is a man” 
and you are fine, but say “Socrates is that man” and you are in trouble.
 
Of course, these ambiguities just get an awful lot worse if we literally 
follow what Buhler seems to be saying and consider that all "linguistic 
messages" as grounded in deixis – not just a special class of expressions.   (cf., 
Lyons (1972) “Deixis as the Source of Reference”)

It should also be pointed out that Buhler makes deixis just part one in a 
two part “interlocking” process.   The second part is “representing... 
Objects and states of affairs are given a formulation in language and are 
symbolized…”

So that in Buhler’s system, deixis is not even a class of expressions at 
all, but what happens before something – whatever it is, an object, a process, 
an idea or even another word – can be translated into a representation, a 
symbol or a “linguistic message.”   If that’s the case, then deixis is 
pretty much an individual event, even a private one, since it occurs before 
language can be used to share it.

There are a number of interesting ways to look at ambiguity in language – 
even ambiguity in syntax.   But one way of looking at it is a problem created 
by a hundred million personal deictic events becoming representations, 
symbols that can be in some way and to some degree unambiguously shared by a 
hundred million speakers of the same language.   How is that accomplished?

Thus our focus shifts from ambiguity as a problem -- the common approach -- 
to how language solves that problem.
 
steve long 












**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2 
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From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 18 02:21:39 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 22:21:39 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.2009.222139.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/17/09 3:17:13 PM, eitan.eg at gmail.com writes:
<<I agree with what you say, especially with the general tone. However, I 
would point out that a nicer conception of deixis is found in quite a lot of 
works: I would note the late Suzanne Fleischmann's wonderful "Tense and 
Narrativity" for tense as a deictic category in dialogue (as opposed to 
narrative), and Lenore Grenoble's excellent "Deixis and Information Structure in 
Russian". There's also some neat work on Yiddish spoken discourse (Gertrud 
Reershemius). There might be a mistake in the titles or spelling, since it's 
from my admittedly bad memory.
Best wishes, Eitan>>

Hi, Eitan.   Thanks for these other sources.   I'll try to post a 
bibliography at some point that might also add to this.

The reason I choose Stephen Levinson's piece on Deixis in the Handbook of 
Pragmatics is partly because he was mentioned on the list recently in 
connection with the Myth of Universals paper and partly because the Handbook is 
recent (2006).   To be fair, he does write that the article "does not attempt 
to review either all the relevant theory (see e.g. the collections in Davis 
1991, Section III, or Kasher 1998, Vol. III) or all of what is known about 
deictic systems in the world’s languages (see e.g. Anderson & Keenan, 1985, 
Diessel 1999)."

What I think Levinson does do is resort to the "disembodied proposition," 
free of external context, like a kee-jerk reflex, to make deixis seem so 
especially paradoxical, ambiguous and "semantically deficient."

That's probably the only way that the special deficiencies shows up -- when 
you assume that language can be rightly just studied as a logic system, an 
algorithm or independent framework for semantics.   Deixis becomes a 
convenient "special" category, or catch-all, for when the language itself doesn't 
allow you to stay within its self-logic.

That deixis is a special class of expressions is now pretty common 
throughout the literature so far as I can tell.   Grenoble, who you mentioned, and 
other practitioners of text linguistics have the broadest definition it seems 
-- probably because it was established long ago, with that approach, how 
inadequate generative grammer is once you get past the sentence.   

Various approaches speak of internal deictic versus external deictic, or 
primary and secondary deictic, or even of diectic tenses versus non-diectic 
tenses (as per D. N. Shankara Blat, who uses the terms in place of the 
traditional absolute vs relative tenses.)

Even from the diachronic perspective, dietic has not been treated as a 
basic phenomenon, but rather something special layered on language to effect a 
semantic shift.   See, e.g., Davidse, Breban and Van Linden (2008), where 
deictification “is a type of grammaticalization and semantic shift in the NP 
analogous to auxiliarization in the VP… where a general relation… is given a 
reference point in or relative to the speech event.”

Part of the difficulty for all these approaches I think is caused by the 
fact that reference/deixis is not limited to external things.   Expressions 
can also refer to other representations, i.e., the referent can be a symbol as 
well as an object or state of affairs.   This drops us into a spiral of 
references where there's often no start point or end. 

And that's why it is easier to limit deixis to the orientational, aspectal 
or ostensive parts of language.   

But it's not how Buhler first used the word.   And perhaps using his 
broader concept of deixis might clear up some of these difficulties.   

At some point, I'd like to make a comment on how Levinson dismissed the 
idea that deixis might be the source of all reference (Lyons 1972), because 
that idea deserves not to be dismissed. 

Regards and thanks for your help,
steve long





















**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2 
Easy Steps! 
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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 07:16:21 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:16:21 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <cfa.583d4e17.3741baf9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.091621.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content, but the one can predomiante over the other in a specific instance.
Tahir

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/17/09 9:09 PM >>>
(First, my deep appreciation to this forum for an opportunity to try out
these ideas and to those kind enough to consider them.)

It’s striking how the term "deixis" has shrunk in meaning since it was
first coined in linguistics.

It's common these days to say that deictic words are a special class of
words or utterances that "need external context", or "require contextual
information" or "depend on an external frame of reference."   And to use
demonstratives (this, that) as examples.   And to make a comparison to anaphora,
another "special class" of expressions.

But in reading Karl Buhler, whom I think first used deixis as a formal
linguistic term, you don't find those kind of limitations.   It seems that
originally deixis was not just a class of expressions but the “fundamental” base
of all "linguistic messages" or all "intercourse using language."

This is from Buhler's The Theory of Language (the English translation from
1991):
"...in linguistic messages there are two closely interlocked fundamental
processes which we can and must distinguish in order to understand what is
going on.   In intercourse using language there is first pointing: things and
processes are indicated.   That is demonstratio; I prefer the Greek word
deixis.   Second, there is also representing... Objects and states of affairs
are given a formulation in language and are symbolized by words that designate
them in the symbolic field of language."

It's not easy to read the segment above and think that Buhler was writing
about a "special class" of expression.   And it's also difficult to think
that Buhler meant "pointing" literally.   (The Greek word deixis in its most
basic sense meant the act of bringing something to light, un-hiding,
revealing; more abstractly showing proof, demonstrating, or more concretely an
imaging.)

How deixis got linguistically limited to where the pointing has to be
almost explicit, I'm not sure.   But that contraction in definition might perhaps
have been unfortunate, as it perhaps made deixis a bit more difficult to
explain.

The authors of the Handbook of Pragmatics (2006) in introducing the subject
write:
“One persistent complication for any theory of reference is the ubiquity of
deictic or indexical expressions.   Deixis characterizes the properties of
expressions like I, you, here, there, now, hereby, tense/aspect markers,
etc., whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary...”

Now, there's a peculiar linguistic beast -- meaning stays constant, but
referent varies!   Some would say that a different referent equals a different
meaning.   How is “meaning” defined here, if it doesn’t include reference?
 How do we separate the two ideas for the sake of defining deixis?

Here’s an example of the difficulty. Recently, I've met different persons,
each one introduced with the phrase, "This is John."   The referents
definitely varied. Does "John" have the same meaning but varying referents * more
than one John?   So therefore is “John” a deictic?

Stephen Levinson, in the same volume, goes on to explore in detail the many
paradoxes and ambiguities of this narrowly defined linguistic “deixis”
(along with the akin philosophical “indexicality,” using Charles Pierce’s
terminology.)

Levinson, points to the many ambiguities that deixis can create in
describing time, place, space, person, etc.   And they CAN be confusing!   Like:
today referred to today yesterday. But, today, today refers to a different day.
  Or, of course, I is I if I say I, but if you say I, you mean you, not I.
There are many more, needless to say.

And because of this, we learn from Levinson that “semantic deficiency” is
a defining characteristic of deixis (or “indexicality”.)

Now, this might seem contrary to our more common understanding * deixis
would seem in fact to remove ambiguity, not add it.   Even definite articles
are not as definite as some deictics.   "The car is mine" could refer to any
one of millions of cars.   But "THAT car is mine" suddenly becomes more
specific, less ambiguous.   "Truths" can refer to millions of different truths,
but "we hold THESE truths to be self evident" tells us that all the truths
are going to be narrowed down.   “I’ll get it to you today,” promises a more
specific time than “I’ll get it to you.”

Even when the deictic must be ambiguous to be accurate -- “Somewhere out
there.” -- it still contributes to a greater specificity by the most elemental
logic, being unambiguously ambiguous * “Not here, but somewhere out there.”
   The absence of the object, not “being here,” is quite definite.

How can this be?   How is that this special class of expressions can
linguistically increase ambiguity, when we seem to use it for the exact opposite
purpose? Is it that deictic language, in promising to be specific, is held to
a higher standard than language that doesn’t make reference to “external
context”?

The answer, according to Levinson, seems to have something to do with what
linguists traditionally study and some kind of a conclusion from somewhat
dubious animal psychology:
“Students of linguistic systems tend to treat language as a disembodied
representational system which is essentially independent of current
circumstances, that is, a system for describing states of affairs in which we
individually may have no involvement* It is these properties of language that have
been the prime target of formal semantics and many philosophical approaches to
language * and not without good reason, as they appear to be the exclusive
province of human communication. The communication systems of other primates
have none of this “displacement” as Hockett (1958: 579) called it.”

So, compared to “language as a disembodied representational system” * one
with no or at least relatively few ambiguities * deixis seems replete with
them. Here we are using “this” and “that”, “I” and “you”, “today” or “
next week” to be more specific, and it ends up we are being more “
semantically deficient,” according to this point of view.

Obviously, one way to find deictic expression guilty of ambiguity is to
assume away the ambiguity in non-deictic expression.   Say “Socrates is a man”
and you are fine, but say “Socrates is that man” and you are in trouble.

Of course, these ambiguities just get an awful lot worse if we literally
follow what Buhler seems to be saying and consider that all "linguistic
messages" as grounded in deixis * not just a special class of expressions.   (cf.,
Lyons (1972) “Deixis as the Source of Reference”)

It should also be pointed out that Buhler makes deixis just part one in a
two part “interlocking” process.   The second part is “representing...
Objects and states of affairs are given a formulation in language and are
symbolized*”

So that in Buhler’s system, deixis is not even a class of expressions at
all, but what happens before something * whatever it is, an object, a process,
an idea or even another word * can be translated into a representation, a
symbol or a “linguistic message.”   If that’s the case, then deixis is
pretty much an individual event, even a private one, since it occurs before
language can be used to share it.

There are a number of interesting ways to look at ambiguity in language *
even ambiguity in syntax.   But one way of looking at it is a problem created
by a hundred million personal deictic events becoming representations,
symbols that can be in some way and to some degree unambiguously shared by a
hundred million speakers of the same language.   How is that accomplished?

Thus our focus shifts from ambiguity as a problem -- the common approach --
to how language solves that problem.

steve long












**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2
Easy Steps!
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bcd=Maystrongfooter51709NO115)


From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 07:30:53 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:30:53 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <c80.4f1b891c.37422033@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.093053.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/18/09 4:21 AM >>>
Part of the difficulty for all these approaches I think is caused by
the
fact that reference/deixis is not limited to external things.  
Expressions
can also refer to other representations, i.e., the referent can be a
symbol as
well as an object or state of affairs.   This drops us into a spiral
of
references where there's often no start point or end.

'External' is probably a red herring. At the risk of sounding like
Durkheim one might say that discourse facts are also things. One can
talk about James Bond just as much as one can talk about Winston
Churchill. What makes both of them concrete (rather than external) is
their presence in episodic memory. Someone who doesn't have either of
these in memory cannot refer to them.
Tahir


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 18 13:40:38 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:40:38 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.094038.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
--I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a 
small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to 
do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of 
concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to 
universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as 
an ideational content--

Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity arises in 
two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created by external 
context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but the most apparent are the 
most basic -- "from the infant’s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
hall of mirrors: my “I” is your “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
, your “there”, and so forth."

Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be definite, i.e., 
to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but this car.   The irony 
here is that what decreases ambiguity also increases ambiguity, since we are 
not in Kansas anymore when we accept deictic reference into our study of 
expression.

The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we really 
have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
John knew that.
That was exactly what I was thinking.
Do you believe this?
Here is where we part thinking.
That is diectic and this is not.
Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.

So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme abstracts -- 
which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the point before the "pointing" 
became representation or symbolic.   Perhaps because the process changes 
after that, if we are pointing to an abstract.

regards and thanks,
steve long













**************
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From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Mon May 18 16:39:46 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 10:39:46 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <ce5.508cbb9d.3742bf56@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.103946.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the infant's 
point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors", we ought 
perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants actually acquire 
communicative expression of reference, starting from deixis and going on 
to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES transcript of communication in 
the first year of life shows that the prerequisite to reference is the 
care-giver's intense exercise in establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The 
reason why this will become first deictic reference is obvious--in early 
childhood, all communication is about here-and-now, you-and-I, 
this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech situation. 
There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning sessions. On 
the contrary, the process capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and 
the child's innate propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, 
compactly-shaped, fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the 
child is also acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and 
communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering 
OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own 
(inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential 
communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. 
Joint-attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional 
sessions.

Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared situation 
in early childhood is done by various pointing means--touching, 
approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the child's 
position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic expressions. Verbs of 
perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or "touch" are prominently used 
in the care-giver's verbal "obligato" that accompanies these 
joint-attention (or joint-reference) sessions. Early nominal vocabulary 
is also prominently introduced at these sessions. And early uses of 
determiners ('this', 'the', 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by 
discourse but still by the deictic situation.

With the gradual change during the second year to communication about 
non-present objects and future and past events, the move from deictic to 
other types of reference is phased in, together with more sophisticated 
grammatical devices that point at remembered or imagined referents. 
Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the basic principle 
established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION--remains as the leitmotif 
of all referential gestures, verbal & otherwise: Make sure that you & I 
are attending to the same thing. This is, of course, deeply embedded in 
the human capacity to consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory 
of Mind, empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the 
evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps 
worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire 
complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
deals in some detail with the child reference data during years 2-3-4).

Cheers, TG

==============


In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd year,

Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to 
> do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of 
> concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to 
> universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as 
> an ideational content--
>
> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity arises in 
> two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created by external 
> context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but the most apparent are the 
> most basic -- "from the infant’s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
> hall of mirrors: my “I” is your “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
> , your “there”, and so forth."
>
> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be definite, i.e., 
> to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but this car.   The irony 
> here is that what decreases ambiguity also increases ambiguity, since we are 
> not in Kansas anymore when we accept deictic reference into our study of 
> expression.
>
> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we really 
> have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
> John knew that.
> That was exactly what I was thinking.
> Do you believe this?
> Here is where we part thinking.
> That is diectic and this is not.
> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>
> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme abstracts -- 
> which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the point before the "pointing" 
> became representation or symbolic.   Perhaps because the process changes 
> after that, if we are pointing to an abstract.
>
> regards and thanks,
> steve long
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **************
> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
> Steps! 
> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>
>   


From dlevere at ilstu.edu  Mon May 18 16:53:59 2009
From: dlevere at ilstu.edu (Daniel Everett)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 12:53:59 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <4A118F52.7020108@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.125359.0400.DLEVERE@ILSTU.EDU>

And of course Mike Tomasello (whom Hrdy acknowledges) has been talking  
about this stuff for years, looking at cross-species data among  
different primates.

Dan



On 18 May 2009, at 12:39, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the  
> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in  
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first  
> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication  
> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both  
> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to  
> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process  
> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate  
> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped,  
> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also  
> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and  
> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering  
> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own (inter- 
> subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential  
> communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. Joint- 
> attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional  
> sessions.
>
> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at  
> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
> deictic situation.
>
> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more  
> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the  
> basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind, empathy).  
> There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of  
> this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps worth  
> reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire  
> complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
> during years 2-3-4).
>
> Cheers, TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
> year,
>
> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>
>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created  
>> by external context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but  
>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant’s point of  
>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my “I” is your  
>> “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
>> , your “there”, and so forth."
>>
>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>
>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>> example:
>> John knew that.
>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>> Do you believe this?
>> Here is where we part thinking.
>> That is diectic and this is not.
>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>
>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>> to an abstract.
>>
>> regards and thanks,
>> steve long
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> **************
>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>
>>
>


From macw at cmu.edu  Mon May 18 17:11:31 2009
From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 19:11:31 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <4A118F52.7020108@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.191131.0200.MACW@CMU.EDU>

Tom,

     Yes, this is all quite right.  In his book Infant Speech from  
about 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9 month  
range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with attention  
to objects.  Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of attention to the  
issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me that the issue of  
"why da?" is more fundamental.  Whether it is da, there, di, do, or  
itt, these early dental syllables have a clear pointing function.  And  
Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976 analysis of the association of  
pointing with vocalization and looking at the interlocutor.  As Tom  
says, you can find plenty of these early deictics in the earliest  
CHILDES transcripts.  Moreover, they form one of the most solid bases  
for syntactic learning in item-based frames such as "this X" or "that  
X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
    However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue  
comes from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic-developmental  
account of symbol formation and the growth of language and thought.   
Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they talk about the  
mother-child-object triangle.  Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is  
the one in which they show how a therapist can reestablish a  
schizophrenics contact with reality by resurrecting this triangle.   
Very 60s.   Dan is right that Mike Tomasello has taken this analysis  
one step further and shown parallels across primates, while  
emphasizing the extent to which these activities are even sharper in  
humans.  I haven't yet read the Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite  
compatible.
     Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis?  Of  
course not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and  
concrete from the beginning.

--Brian MacWhinney

On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the  
> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in  
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first  
> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication  
> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both  
> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to  
> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process  
> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate  
> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped,  
> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also  
> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and  
> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering  
> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own (inter- 
> subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential  
> communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. Joint- 
> attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional  
> sessions.
>
> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at  
> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
> deictic situation.
>
> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more  
> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the  
> basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind, empathy).  
> There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of  
> this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps worth  
> reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire  
> complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
> during years 2-3-4).
>
> Cheers, TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
> year,
>
> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>
>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created  
>> by external context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but  
>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant’s point of  
>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my “I” is your  
>> “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
>> , your “there”, and so forth."
>>
>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>
>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>> example:
>> John knew that.
>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>> Do you believe this?
>> Here is where we part thinking.
>> That is diectic and this is not.
>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>
>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>> to an abstract.
>>
>> regards and thanks,
>> steve long
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> **************
>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>
>>
>
>


From dlevere at ilstu.edu  Mon May 18 17:24:47 2009
From: dlevere at ilstu.edu (Daniel Everett)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:24:47 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <756FF8FC-EE03-46A8-BB9F-0728C3977226@cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.132447.0400.DLEVERE@ILSTU.EDU>

On establishing joint attention in the development of deixis, other  
species do seem to show primitive signs of this. Some dogs, for  
example (mine is one instance), regularly get their owners to focus on  
a third object. So my dog paws me to get me to look at someone sitting  
on the sofa in my dog's spot. I will be sitting talking to the person  
and the dog approaches. The dog paws me and then, when I make eye  
contact with the dog, he looks at the person sitting on the sofa. He  
keeps looking to me and then towards the offending person until I ask  
the person to move. Then he gets into his place on the sofa.

This seems to me like a joint-attention-getting event. It is possible  
that this comes from the dog's close contact with humans and  
represents a learning strategy available to canines but perhaps not  
always used. I don't know of studies of this in any form, certainly  
not studies comparing domestic canines with wild canines. I know,  
however, that Tomasello's group in Leipzig is studying canine  
communication/cognition. I am sure there must be other groups.

Surely Tomasello, Givon, Hrdy and others are on to something here in  
the looking at the importance of deixis, especially joint-attention,  
in the development of language. But, as Tom just said, it is  
principally in the 'other minds' recognition ability that humans  
shine. My dog gives me no reason to believe that he thinks of me as  
having a mind like his.

Recognizing and cooperating with entities that have minds like one's  
own seems to be a/the crucial evolutionary step in developing  
language. Once you have this, you can use just about anything to  
communicate, though speech works best.

Dan



On 18 May 2009, at 13:11, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> Tom,
>
>    Yes, this is all quite right.  In his book Infant Speech from  
> about 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9  
> month range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with  
> attention to objects.  Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of  
> attention to the issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me  
> that the issue of "why da?" is more fundamental.  Whether it is da,  
> there, di, do, or itt, these early dental syllables have a clear  
> pointing function.  And Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976  
> analysis of the association of pointing with vocalization and  
> looking at the interlocutor.  As Tom says, you can find plenty of  
> these early deictics in the earliest CHILDES transcripts.  Moreover,  
> they form one of the most solid bases for syntactic learning in item- 
> based frames such as "this X" or "that X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
>   However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue  
> comes from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic- 
> developmental account of symbol formation and the growth of language  
> and thought.  Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they  
> talk about the mother-child-object triangle.  Perhaps the most  
> fascinating chapter is the one in which they show how a therapist  
> can reestablish a schizophrenics contact with reality by  
> resurrecting this triangle.  Very 60s.   Dan is right that Mike  
> Tomasello has taken this analysis one step further and shown  
> parallels across primates, while emphasizing the extent to which  
> these activities are even sharper in humans.  I haven't yet read the  
> Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite compatible.
>    Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis?  Of  
> course not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and  
> concrete from the beginning.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
> On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>
>>
>> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
>> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
>> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
>> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
>> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
>> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that  
>> the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise  
>> in establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become  
>> first deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all  
>> communication is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that  
>> accessible to both of us in the shared speech situation. There is  
>> nothing confusing to the infant in these learning sessions. On the  
>> contrary, the process capitalizes on the shared perceptual field  
>> and the child's innate propensity to attend to salient objects-- 
>> colorful, compactly-shaped, fast-moving, or pointed to by the care- 
>> giver. But the child is also acquiring another important  
>> prerequisite to reference--and communication in general--during the  
>> first year of life: Considering OTHER MINDS as having a perspective  
>> distinct from one's own (inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So  
>> the acquisition of referential communication is deeply embedded in  
>> these early capacities. Joint-attention sessions are indeed early  
>> theory-of-mind instructional sessions.
>>
>> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
>> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
>> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
>> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
>> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
>> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
>> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
>> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced  
>> at these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
>> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
>> deictic situation.
>>
>> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
>> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
>> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with  
>> more sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
>> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands,  
>> the basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
>> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
>> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
>> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
>> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind,  
>> empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the  
>> evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is  
>> perhaps worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children  
>> acquire complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
>> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
>> during years 2-3-4).
>>
>> Cheers, TG
>>
>> ==============
>>
>>
>> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
>> year,
>>
>> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>>
>>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem  
>>> created by external context.   Levinson describes these on all  
>>> levels, but the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the  
>>> infant’s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
>>> mirrors: my “I” is your “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
>>> , your “there”, and so forth."
>>>
>>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>>
>>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>>> example:
>>> John knew that.
>>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>>> Do you believe this?
>>> Here is where we part thinking.
>>> That is diectic and this is not.
>>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>>
>>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>>> to an abstract.
>>>
>>> regards and thanks,
>>> steve long
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> **************
>>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Mon May 18 17:39:37 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 11:39:37 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <64F13618-3EBB-4ACA-86CA-B641A02A6A56@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.113937.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

Yeah, I used to study this with Shaggy Dog in the early 1970s. First 
time I met Dave Premack ca. 1972, he told me "dogs can't interpret 
pointing". So I told him (he was already a bigshot, right after Sarah) 
"you haven't met my dog". Most mammal species point with their nose, 
eyes or posture/orientation. Even domestic cats can point, first they 
attract your attention with voice or coming to you, then they dart to 
the target they want to attract your attention to. And for that matter, 
horses have joint-attention gestures, tho I've never seen them do it 
among themselves, only with us. As Tomasello notes, species with 
rudimentary capacities can accelerate them under intensive contact with 
humans. And human pointing gestures vary enormously cross cultures. 
E.g., the Utes point with their lips. A very distinct gesture. Cheers, TG

===============

Daniel Everett wrote:
> On establishing joint attention in the development of deixis, other 
> species do seem to show primitive signs of this. Some dogs, for 
> example (mine is one instance), regularly get their owners to focus on 
> a third object. So my dog paws me to get me to look at someone sitting 
> on the sofa in my dog's spot. I will be sitting talking to the person 
> and the dog approaches. The dog paws me and then, when I make eye 
> contact with the dog, he looks at the person sitting on the sofa. He 
> keeps looking to me and then towards the offending person until I ask 
> the person to move. Then he gets into his place on the sofa.
>
> This seems to me like a joint-attention-getting event. It is possible 
> that this comes from the dog's close contact with humans and 
> represents a learning strategy available to canines but perhaps not 
> always used. I don't know of studies of this in any form, certainly 
> not studies comparing domestic canines with wild canines. I know, 
> however, that Tomasello's group in Leipzig is studying canine 
> communication/cognition. I am sure there must be other groups.
>
> Surely Tomasello, Givon, Hrdy and others are on to something here in 
> the looking at the importance of deixis, especially joint-attention, 
> in the development of language. But, as Tom just said, it is 
> principally in the 'other minds' recognition ability that humans 
> shine. My dog gives me no reason to believe that he thinks of me as 
> having a mind like his.
>
> Recognizing and cooperating with entities that have minds like one's 
> own seems to be a/the crucial evolutionary step in developing 
> language. Once you have this, you can use just about anything to 
> communicate, though speech works best.
>
> Dan
>
>
>
> On 18 May 2009, at 13:11, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>
>> Tom,
>>
>> Yes, this is all quite right. In his book Infant Speech from about 
>> 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9 month 
>> range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with 
>> attention to objects. Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of 
>> attention to the issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me 
>> that the issue of "why da?" is more fundamental. Whether it is da, 
>> there, di, do, or itt, these early dental syllables have a clear 
>> pointing function. And Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976 analysis 
>> of the association of pointing with vocalization and looking at the 
>> interlocutor. As Tom says, you can find plenty of these early 
>> deictics in the earliest CHILDES transcripts. Moreover, they form one 
>> of the most solid bases for syntactic learning in item-based frames 
>> such as "this X" or "that X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
>> However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue comes 
>> from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic-developmental 
>> account of symbol formation and the growth of language and thought. 
>> Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they talk about the 
>> mother-child-object triangle. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is 
>> the one in which they show how a therapist can reestablish a 
>> schizophrenics contact with reality by resurrecting this triangle. 
>> Very 60s. Dan is right that Mike Tomasello has taken this analysis 
>> one step further and shown parallels across primates, while 
>> emphasizing the extent to which these activities are even sharper in 
>> humans. I haven't yet read the Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite 
>> compatible.
>> Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis? Of course 
>> not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and concrete from 
>> the beginning.
>>
>> --Brian MacWhinney
>>
>> On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the 
>>> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of 
>>> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants 
>>> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting 
>>> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES 
>>> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the 
>>> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
>>> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first 
>>> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication 
>>> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both 
>>> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to 
>>> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process 
>>> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate 
>>> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped, 
>>> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also 
>>> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and 
>>> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering 
>>> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own 
>>> (inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of 
>>> referential communication is deeply embedded in these early 
>>> capacities. Joint-attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind 
>>> instructional sessions.
>>>
>>> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared 
>>> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing 
>>> means--touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing 
>>> the child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic 
>>> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or 
>>> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato" 
>>> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference) 
>>> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at 
>>> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the', 
>>> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the 
>>> deictic situation.
>>>
>>> With the gradual change during the second year to communication 
>>> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from 
>>> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more 
>>> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or 
>>> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the 
>>> basic principle established in early 
>>> infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION--remains as the leitmotif of all 
>>> referential gestures, verbal & otherwise: Make sure that you & I are 
>>> attending to the same thing. This is, of course, deeply embedded in 
>>> the human capacity to consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, 
>>> Theory of Mind, empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah 
>>> Hrdy on the evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I 
>>> think is perhaps worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How 
>>> children acquire complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of 
>>> Syntactic Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference 
>>> data during years 2-3-4).
>>>
>>> Cheers, TG
>>>
>>> ==============
>>>
>>>
>>> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd year,
>>>
>>> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>>>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>>>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of 
>>>> it as a early stages ("see the kitty?").
>>>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it 
>>>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more 
>>>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or 
>>>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will 
>>>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>>>
>>>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment. Let me suggest that ambiguity 
>>>> arises in two ways with deixis. One is the simple problem created 
>>>> by external context. Levinson describes these on all levels, but 
>>>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant’s point of 
>>>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my “I” is your 
>>>> “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
>>>> , your “there”, and so forth."
>>>>
>>>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be 
>>>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but 
>>>> this car. The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also 
>>>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we 
>>>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>>>
>>>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we 
>>>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes. For 
>>>> example:
>>>> John knew that.
>>>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>>>> Do you believe this?
>>>> Here is where we part thinking.
>>>> That is diectic and this is not.
>>>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>>>
>>>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme 
>>>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the 
>>>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic. 
>>>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing 
>>>> to an abstract.
>>>>
>>>> regards and thanks,
>>>> steve long
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> **************
>>>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
>>>> Steps! 
>>>> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp; 
>>>>
>>>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Mon May 18 19:01:13 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:01:13 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.150113.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

Tom Givon pointed out the variability of human pointing gestures, and the fact that animals often point with their noses. It is interesting that the rostral end of the body is used- this is where most of the major senses reside in their most developed form, the end that gets there first in quadrupeds (at least when not evading something in reverse, and even then they continue to attend to what they try to get away from). It is very interesting to watch a dog, for instance, trying to decide whether to approach or avoid something- as if the parts of the brain controlling the rear quarters and forequarters were actively slugging it out with visible symptoms there for all to see.

Brian McWhinney asks 'why da?'. Crosslinguistically dental/alveolar phonemes, in initial position in roots, seem to have very strong connections to dull, blunt impacts, non-bonded contacts, rebounds directed on elongated paths prototypically at higher angles towards presented surfaces. This might make them just right for the pre-linguistic function. Avoidance (lack of fusion, penetration, etc.) despite approach. Palatals (when present) are the other way round, but preserve the elongated path from Jakobson's acute feature- that is approach despite avoidance (such as straining to reach and grab something from a position of general safety, with a ten foot pole with a hook, etc.).

One question, though: is the child's use un-(or under-) differentiated between these extremes, at least at first?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 14:03:40 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 16:03:40 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <ce5.508cbb9d.3742bf56@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.160340.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/18/09 3:40 PM >>>
The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we
really
have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
John knew that.
That was exactly what I was thinking.
Do you believe this?
Here is where we part thinking.
That is diectic and this is not.
Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.


Steve, when I mentioned this I had in mind something that is concretely
known in terms of either episodic memory, or working memory or
perception. In each of your examples there is a concrete
interpretation:

John knew that. This means that John knew something which is in focus
for both interlocutors, e.g. John knew that what you just said is true.
It is not abstract, because it is precisely in episodic memory for you
and for me and is activated, other wise we couldn't have referred to it.
it is therefore both concrete and specific. Something we refer to can be
a specific mental state or a stimulus. These are not abstract in
themselves. The contents of epiosdic memory are in a sense factual
knowledge and just as concrete as the contents of perception. All of
your examples are the same in this regard. Your mistake IMHO lies in
thinking that for reference to occur it must involve a concrete, unitary
object. Not so. One can refer to an utterance, a memory, a thought, a
text, a dream.
Tahir


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 03:10:04 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 23:10:04 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (2)
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.231004.EDT.>

Tom wrote:
--The CHILDES transcript of communication in the first year of life shows 
that the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first deictic 
reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication is about 
here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech 
situation.   There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning 
sessions.--

Tom - Very appreciative of your wisdom on all this.   And I would not 
contest with you on any of these points, except one -- because it is important to 
my premise at this point -- though of course I always stand to be 
corrected.

How could it be that: "There is nothing confusing to the infant in these 
learning sessions"?

If that is the case, is it the only instance where experiencing a new 
environment isn't confusing to a human (or an animal)?   Doesn't some confusion 
come before every learning situation?

Perhaps it's too early to speak of ambiguity (my point) when we are only 
talking about joint attention rather than using language, but certainly if 
it's learned it should be a matter of hit or miss from early on.   Is mom 
pointing to the toy bear or the ribbon on the bear or the chair the bear is on -- 
or is she pointing out that the bear is sitting on a chair -- or am I being 
asked if I want the bear? Whether or not that confusion is disturbing or 
not, it is fairly easy for mom to be unclear at this early stage in our 
communications. 

(After all, pointing or gesturing or saying "look at this" doesn't always 
solve the problem of what someone is asking me to attend to, much less a 
child.   Is it the lamp?   Is there something wrong with the lamp?   Is it the 
lampshade?   Is it the bulb?   Oh, it's the fact that the light was left on, 
wasting electricity.   Never would have guessed.)

In any case, if I'd guess what might motivate a child to seek joint 
attention, one thing would be that it to some degree alleviates confusion.   
Attention is after all as much a matter of exclusion as anything else.   We need 
to see the forest and not the trees, or vice versa.   Joint attention gives a 
child something specific to attend to, rather than attending to everything 
that's shiny or colored or in motion -- and even in a poor environment, that 
can be many many things.

A bigger question.   Let's imagine a child who is never invited at all to 
join in joint attention with a care giver.   Would such a child be incapable 
of learning language?

We have a simple technical, mechanical reason to avoid gross ambiguity in 
the language we speak with one another.   Otherwise we can't share the same 
words or even the same syntax.   I suspect that the inability to share 
attention is an even deeper mechanical problem and one that would undermine 
language use.   And to that extent I don't think I am disagreeing with you.

Regards and thanks,
steve long




























**************
A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 04:00:29 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:29 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (3)
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.000029.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 12:54:28 PM, dlevere at ilstu.edu writes:
-- And of course Mike Tomasello (whom Hrdy acknowledges) has been talking 
> about this stuff for years, looking at cross-species data among 
> different primates.--
> 
Dan - Christine Kenneally, in her book "The First Word" tells of how 
Tomasello was "brought over" to the belief that chimps do point by a video 
presentation by David Leavens, where a chimp consistently points and Leavens 
consistently retrieves.   Afterwards, Leavens said "I submit there is a 
well-trained primate in this video, but it is not the chimpanzee."

Tomasello thinks that chimps rarely point in the wild because they are not 
as cooperative a species as humans.   However, I do not know of any research 
that proves that humans point in the wild, either -- if by "in the wild" we 
mean not contact with human culture.

Leavens, Hopkins and Bard published a wonderful paper in 2005 called 
"Understanding the Point of Chimpanzee Pointing" where they quote the title of an 
article by George Butterworth , "Pointing is the Royal Road to Language for 
Babies."

On the other hand, Stephen Levinson barely mentions "ostensive definition" 
in his article in the Handbook of Pragmatics and he denies chimps can really 
point or understand a pointing gesture, citing Kita and Povinelli.

But once again Levinson treats deixis not as a basis of language, but 
rather as a special class of expressions.   That is why he argues that deixis 
appears late in development in part of the article which reads as follows (and 
includes the line about hall of mirrors that Tom objected to):

"Linguists have argued similarly, that deixis is the source of reference, 
i.e. deictic reference is ontogenetically primary to other kinds (Lyons 
1975). But the actual facts concerning the acquisition of deictic expressions 
paint a different picture, for the acquisition of many aspects of deixis is 
quite delayed (Tanz 1980, Wales 1986), and even though demonstratives figure 
early, they are often not used correctly (see Clark 1978). This is hardly 
surprising because, from the infant’s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
hall of mirrors: my “I” is your “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “
here”, your “there”, and so forth . The demonstratives aren’t used correctly 
in English till well after the pronouns “I” and “You”, or indeed till 
after deictic “in front of”/ “in back of”, that is not till about 4 (Tanz 
1980:145)."

Again, Levinson is defining deixis narrowly, but that it is fairly common 
in the literature.

regards,
steve long
































**************
A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Tue May 19 04:12:26 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 22:12:26 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (2)
In-Reply-To: <c5f.51fd7c0d.37437d0c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.221226.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

All higher cognitive capacities (cortex, mid-brain), in us as well as in 
other animals, require an interaction between innate capacities and 
learning experience ("triggers"). This was, by the way, Kant's 
conclusion about (what he considered, and I guess I do too) the futile 
eternal argument between rationalists & empiricists. So he was 'only' a 
philosopher, but he got it right anyway. In the case of your question, I 
hope nobody will ever do the crucial experiment with children. Sarah 
Hrdy describes some horrible experiments of this type done on children 
in the 1930's (raising them in the first few months without affective 
human touch). Thank God we have the Human Subject Committees nowadays. 
But similar experiments were done on newborn kittens. If raised for the 
first 90 days in the dark, their visual system will never develop. 
Likewise with barn owls, where visual deprivation in the first 3 months 
will prevent them for developing their AUDITORY spatial orientation 
(vision trains audition). Nobody would claim that mammal & avian vision 
is not a highly innate capacity. But it still need the triggering of 
experience. Only old-brain (vagus, pons, medula) functions are fully 
automated, and on line, at birth. Slow neurological maturation is the 
hallmark of learning species. Best,  TG

==========



Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> Tom wrote:
> --The CHILDES transcript of communication in the first year of life shows 
> that the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first deictic 
> reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication is about 
> here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech 
> situation.   There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning 
> sessions.--
>
> Tom - Very appreciative of your wisdom on all this.   And I would not 
> contest with you on any of these points, except one -- because it is important to 
> my premise at this point -- though of course I always stand to be 
> corrected.
>
> How could it be that: "There is nothing confusing to the infant in these 
> learning sessions"?
>
> If that is the case, is it the only instance where experiencing a new 
> environment isn't confusing to a human (or an animal)?   Doesn't some confusion 
> come before every learning situation?
>
> Perhaps it's too early to speak of ambiguity (my point) when we are only 
> talking about joint attention rather than using language, but certainly if 
> it's learned it should be a matter of hit or miss from early on.   Is mom 
> pointing to the toy bear or the ribbon on the bear or the chair the bear is on -- 
> or is she pointing out that the bear is sitting on a chair -- or am I being 
> asked if I want the bear? Whether or not that confusion is disturbing or 
> not, it is fairly easy for mom to be unclear at this early stage in our 
> communications. 
>
> (After all, pointing or gesturing or saying "look at this" doesn't always 
> solve the problem of what someone is asking me to attend to, much less a 
> child.   Is it the lamp?   Is there something wrong with the lamp?   Is it the 
> lampshade?   Is it the bulb?   Oh, it's the fact that the light was left on, 
> wasting electricity.   Never would have guessed.)
>
> In any case, if I'd guess what might motivate a child to seek joint 
> attention, one thing would be that it to some degree alleviates confusion.   
> Attention is after all as much a matter of exclusion as anything else.   We need 
> to see the forest and not the trees, or vice versa.   Joint attention gives a 
> child something specific to attend to, rather than attending to everything 
> that's shiny or colored or in motion -- and even in a poor environment, that 
> can be many many things.
>
> A bigger question.   Let's imagine a child who is never invited at all to 
> join in joint attention with a care giver.   Would such a child be incapable 
> of learning language?
>
> We have a simple technical, mechanical reason to avoid gross ambiguity in 
> the language we speak with one another.   Otherwise we can't share the same 
> words or even the same syntax.   I suspect that the inability to share 
> attention is an even deeper mechanical problem and one that would undermine 
> language use.   And to that extent I don't think I am disagreeing with you.
>
> Regards and thanks,
> steve long
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **************
> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
> Steps! 
> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>
>   


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 04:14:00 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 00:14:00 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (4)
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.001400.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 3:03:43 PM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
> Your mistake IMHO lies in
> thinking that for reference to occur it must involve a concrete, unitary
> object. Not so. One can refer to an utterance, a memory, a thought, a
> text, a dream.
> 
Tahir - Not my mistake.   The use of "secondary deixis" as pertaining to 
abstractions rather than concrete object that can be literally be pointed to 
appears to be somewhat common.   I cited a paper on diachronic changes that 
used the term, and I believe that Grenoble uses it in this way in her paper 
on Deixis in Russian.

My point is that whether a reference is to "an utterance, a memory, a 
thought, a text, a dream" it will always carry some degree of ambiguity when it 
is shared in language.   And the more abstract the reference ("liberty", 
"knowledge", "thinking") the more likely the ambiguity.

regards,
steve long










**************
An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221823248x1201398651/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=62&amp;
bcd=MayExcfooter51609NO62)


From phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk  Tue May 19 18:24:03 2009
From: phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk (Philippe De Brabanter)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 18:24:03 +0000
Subject: CFP: Utterance Interpretation & Cognitive Models III
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.182403.0000.PHDEBRAB@YAHOO.CO.UK>

First call for
papers: Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models 3
 
The third edition of the Brussels conference on Utterance
Interpretation and Cognitive Modelswill take place on February 5-7, 2010, under the auspices
of the Belgische Kring voor Linguïstiek / Cercle Belge de
Linguistique. 
The first edition addressed the issue of the semantics/pragmatics
interface from a cognitive perspective and drew essentially on the work of
semanticists, pragmaticists and philosophers of language. The second broadened
the perspective by inviting the views of scholars from the related subfields of syntax, cognitive linguistics and evolutionary
linguistics. For this third edition, the focus will
be on the developmental and cognitive determinants of utterance
interpretation. On the one hand, the ontogenetic development of our ability to
interpret linguistic utterances provides invaluable insights into adult
cognition; on the other, the methods of cognitive psychology, with their
emphasis on experimental inquiry and empirical results raise crucial
epistemological questions for the progress of research in the field. The focus of this third edition is fully in keeping with
our continued ambition to reach across disciplinary boundaries and bring
together researchers who, though belonging to different schools or traditions,
all take a view of interpretation that is informed by cognitive concerns and
share the assumption that the ultimate test for any theory of utterance
interpretation is its psychological plausibility. 
 
Keynote speakers:
 
Bart
Geurts (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) 
Jean-Marie Marandin
(CNRS, Université Paris 7) 
Anna
Papafragou (University of Delaware)
Josef Perner (Universität Salzburg)
Dan
Sperber (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod)
 
Abstract submissions: 
 
In addition to keynote lectures, the conference will
feature parallel sessions with contributed papers. We welcome submissions of
abstracts for 25-minute papers that focus on the psychological or cognitive
underpinnings of utterance interpretation or, conversely, address the
implications that theories of any aspect of utterance interpretation can have
for the psychology of language and for cognitive science at large. We also
welcome papers from scholars who study utterance interpretation in connection
with language development, impaired communication, non-verbal communication and
non-human communication. Abstracts will be anonymously refereed by members of
the program committee.
 
Important dates:
 
Deadline for abstracts: October 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance: November 15, 2009
Conference: February 5-7, 2010
 
Abstract format: 
 
- Only electronic submissions are accepted. 
- Abstracts should be submitted to the email address:
uicm3 at ulb.ac.be, with the following subject line: ''Utterance Interpretation
and Cognitive Models 3'' 
- The abstracts should be sent as an attachment to an email
message, in either MS Word (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf) or Adobe Acrobat
(.pdf ) format 
- The length of the submissions is a maximum of two A4
sides, using 2,5 cm (1 inch) margins and a 12 pt font. Each abstract should
clearly indicate the title of the talk, and may include references. In the
interest of fairness these constraints will be strictly enforced.
- The abstracts should be prepared for blind review, and
include no indication of the name(s) of the author(s). Only anonymous abstracts
will be considered.
- The body of the email message should contain the
following information: The name(s) of the author(s), affiliation, title of the
paper and contact details (postal and email address).
- A maximum of one submission as author, and one as
co-author will be considered
 
For further
information, please consult: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~uicm3/


      


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Tue May 19 21:32:04 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 17:32:04 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.173204.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

This was in the newsfeeds today:

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090518-monkey-mirror.html

>controlling one's attention and interpreting someone else's attention may involve the same neurons

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From eitkonen at utu.fi  Wed May 20 14:13:39 2009
From: eitkonen at utu.fi (Esa Itkonen)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 17:13:39 +0300
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.171339.0300.EITKONEN@UTU.FI>

Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
Esa

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Wed May 20 15:50:38 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 09:50:38 -0600
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <fbc2b45d8857.4a143a43@utu.fi>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.095038.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

Well now, Esa. To take a youthful slogan out of context, not cite the 
fuller (some still erroneous, of course) details of the original 1971 
paper, not cite the considerable elaborations & corrections in "On 
Understanding Grammar" (1979; chs 5,6), not cite the countless following 
papers that corrected & elaborated & expanded on the diachronic relation 
between morphology & syntax, not only mine but many others', and then to 
skip over altogether the recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
(2009), is not exactly an edifying way of reviewing the topic. While I 
do count Hermann Paul as my all-time guru in linguistics, with all do 
respect we do know some things now that the great IE tradition did not. 
Not much more, but some. And we do know them because some of them, 
particularly H. Paul, pointed the way toward a broader 
cross-disciplinary approach to language.  Best,  TG

================


Esa Itkonen wrote:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>   


From oesten at ling.su.se  Wed May 20 16:12:42 2009
From: oesten at ling.su.se (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 18:12:42 +0200
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <4A1426CE.9080707@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.181242.0200.OESTEN@LING.SU.SE>

Hi Esa, on p. 7 of your paper you say:

"On p. 165 [of Dahl (2004)], zero is referred to as “the final output of
grammaticalization”, and on the continuum of Figure 2, zero indeed
represents the logical end point of maturation. But it certainly cannot be
said to represent the highest degree of complexity. In this sense, then,
maturity and complexity are not identical."

...but if you care to re-read the page you quote, you may realize that the
phrase you are quoting is actually found in the context of the notion of a
critique of the model of grammaticalization proposed in Lehmann (1985), and
in fact what you say goes in the same direction. But it also follows from my
argument that zero cannot represent the highest degree of maturation, since
it does not presuppose any prehistory.

I may have more comments at a later point, this was just something I noticed
when browsing the paper.

- Östen

References
Dahl, Östen. 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization: synchronic variation and
diachronic change. Lingua e Stile, 20.203-218.



> ================
> 
> 
> Esa Itkonen wrote:
> > Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's
> agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to
> read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my
> homepage (click below).
> > Esa
> >
> > Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
> >
> >


From haspelmath at eva.mpg.de  Wed May 20 16:18:35 2009
From: haspelmath at eva.mpg.de (Martin Haspelmath)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 18:18:35 +0200
Subject: complexity/referring to WALS chapters
In-Reply-To: <fbc2b45d8857.4a143a43@utu.fi>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.181835.0200.HASPELMATH@EVA.MPG.DE>

Dear Esa,

Please refer to individual chapters of WALS (World Atlas of Language 
Structures), not to WALS as a whole. WALS is an edited volume, not a 
monograph, so you cannot attribute claims made in individual chapters to 
the whole work. Moreover, it's very important to acknowledge the 
contributions of individual authors.

In your complexity paper, you say

"Notice also that WALS (= Haspelmath et al. 2005) finds it appropriate to
adopt the following position: : “less frequent inflectional methods like 
infixation,
tonal affixes, and stem changes [= ablaut] are ignored” (p. 110)"

Instead, you should have said:

"Notice also that Dryer (2005) finds it appropriate to adopt the 
following position: ..."

referring to Dryer 2005 (Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional 
Morphology, ch. 26 of WALS).

Sorry for insisting on this, but it's very important for large-scale 
collaborative works that the individual contributions are recognized as 
such.

Gretings,
Martin

Esa Itkonen schrieb:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>
>   


From hopper at cmu.edu  Fri May 22 08:39:20 2009
From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 04:39:20 -0400
Subject: Hermann Paul
In-Reply-To: <4A142D5B.4090708@eva.mpg.de>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.043920.0400.HOPPER@CMU.EDU>

Dear Funknetters,

Hermann Paul's name has cropped up a number of times recently, so I thought some of you might be interested in the titles presented at the Colloquy on Hermann Paul held last week at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

- Paul Hopper
---------------------------------------------------

Colloquy on Hermann Paul 

FRIAS/HPCL May 15, 2009
Venue: FRIAS, seminar room ground floor

Programme

14.00-14.45 
On the Perennial Issue of ‘Influence’ in Linguistic Historiography: Hermann Paul and Ferdinand de Saussure?
E.F.K. Koerner 

14.45-15.30 
Die Psychologie im Sprachdenken Hermann Pauls
Clemens Knobloch 

COFFEE BREAK

16.00-16.45 
Paul, Schuchardt, and Exemplar-Theoretic Models 
Robert Murray

16.45-17.30 
"Plus ça change...": Hermann Paul and Recent Linguistic Theories
Paul Hopper 

17.30-18.00 
General discussion

Discussants: William Labov, Marga Reis
----------------------------------------------------

Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213


From paul at benjamins.com  Fri May 22 15:24:22 2009
From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 11:24:22 -0400
Subject: New Benjamins title- Mahiew/Tewrsis: Variations on Polysynthesis
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.112422.0400.PAUL@BENJAMINS.COM>

Variations on Polysynthesis
The Eskaleut languages
  Edited by Marc-Antoine Mahieu and Nicole Tersis
University Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle / CNRS-CELIA

Typological Studies in Language 86
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2086
2009. ix, 312 pp.
Hardbound  978 90 272 0667 1 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00
e-Book  978 90 272 8937 7 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00

This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme 
polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over 
the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the 
Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of 
the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in 
general linguistic terms, particularly with regard to polysynthesis. 
The degree of variation from more to less polysynthesis is evaluated 
within Eskaleut (Inuit-Yupik vs. Aleut), even in previously 
insufficiently explored domains such as pragmatics and use in 
context  including language contact and learning situations  and over 
typologically related language families such as Athabascan, 
Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Iroquoian, Uralic, and Wakashan.

Table of contents

Preface  vivii
Part I. Polysynthesis
Polysynthesis in the Arctic
Marianne Mithun 317
Polysynthesis as a typological feature: An attempt at a 
characterization from Eskimo and Athabaskan perspectives
Willem J. de Reuse 1934
Analytic vs. synthetic verbal constructions in Chukchi and West Greenlandic
Michael Fortescue 3549
Lexical polysynthesis: Should we treat lexical bases and their 
affixes as a continuum?
Nicole Tersis 5164
How synchronic is synchronic analysis? Siberian Yupik agglutinative 
morphology and language history
Nikolai Vakhtin 6580
Comparative constructions in Central Alaskan Yupik
Osahito Miyaoka 8194
Part II. Around the verb
The efficacy of anaphoricity in Aleut
Jerrold M. Sadock 97114
Objective conjugations in Eskaleut and Uralic: Evidence from Inuit and Mansi
Marc-Antoine Mahieu 115134
Complex verb formation revisited: Restructuring in Inuktitut and 
Nuu-chah-nulth
Christine M. Pittman 135147
Determining the semantics of Inuktitut postbases
Conor Cook and Alana Johns 149170
The marking of past time in Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language
Naja Frederikke Trondhjem 171182
Part III. Discourses and contacts
Tracking topics: A comparison of topic in Aleut and Greenlandic discourse
Anna Berge 185200
Arguments and information management in Inuktitut
Elke Nowak 201214
Space and structure in Greenlandic oral tradition
Arnaq Grove 215230
Grammatical structures in Greenlandic as found in texts written by 
young Greenlanders at the turn of the millennium
Karen Langgård 231247
Chat  New rooms for language contact
Birgitte Jacobsen 249260
Seward Peninsula Inupiaq and language contact around Bering Strait
Lawrence D. Kaplan 261272
Typological constraints on code mixing in InuktitutEnglish bilingual adults
Shanley Allen, Fred Genesee, Sarah Fish and Martha Crago 273306
Index of languages  307308
Index of subjects  309312

Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com)
General Manager
John Benjamins Publishing Company
763 N. 24th St.
Philadelphia PA  19130
Phone: 215 769-3444
Fax: 215 769-3446
John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com 


From paul at benjamins.com  Fri May 22 15:19:20 2009
From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 11:19:20 -0400
Subject: New Benjamins title- Givon/Shibatani: Syntactic Complexity
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.111920.0400.PAUL@BENJAMINS.COM>

Syntactic Complexity
Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution
  Edited by T. Givón and Masayoshi Shibatani
University of Oregon / Rice University
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2085Typological 
Studies in Language 85

2009. vi, 553 pp.
Hardbound  978 90 272 2999 1 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00
Paperback 978 90 272 3000 3 / EUR 36.00 / USD 54.00
e-Book  Not yet available 978 90 272 9014 4 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00

Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human 
language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, 
recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a 
special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language 
facultyevolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This 
volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 
2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental 
perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive 
instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform 
of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal 
with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, 
the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning 
synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor 
directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical 
performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two 
developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and 
neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the 
evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is 
argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the 
contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not 
in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two 
distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as 
modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of 
paratactic into syntactic structures.


Table of contents

Introduction
T. Givón 120
Part I. Diachrony
 From nominal to clausal morphosyntax: Complexity via expansion
Bernd Heine 2352
Re(e)volving complexity: Adding intonation
Marianne Mithun 5380
Multiple routes to clause union: The diachrony of complex verb phrases
T. Givón 81118
On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam
Andrew Pawley 119144
A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates: The 
case of Swedish Pseudo-Coordination with sitta "sit"
Martin Hilpert and Christian Koops 145162
Elements of complex structures, where recursion isn't: The case of 
relativization
Masayoshi Shibatani 163198
Nominalization and the origin of subordination
Guy Deutscher 199214
The co-evolution of syntactic and pragmatic complexity: Diachronic 
and cross-linguistic aspects of pseudoclefts
Christian Koops and Martin Hilpert 215238
Two pathways of grammatical evolution
Östen Dahl 239248
Part II. Child language
On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject 
and non-subject relative clauses
Holger Diessel 251276
'Starting small' effects in the acquisition of early relative 
constructions in Spanish
Cecilia Rojas-Nieto 277310
The ontogeny of complex verb phrases: How children learn to negotiate 
fact and desire
T. Givón 311388
Part III. Cognition and neurology
Syntactic complexity versus concatenation in a verbal production task
Marjorie Barker and Eric Pederson 391404
The emergence of linguistic complexity
Brian MacWhinney 405432
Cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic complexity
Diego Fernandez-Duque 433460
Neural mechanisms of recursive processing in cognitive and linguistic 
complexity
Don M. Tucker, Phan Luu and Catherine Poulsen 461490
Syntactic complexity in the brain
Angela D. Friederici and Jens Brauer 491506
Part IV. Biology and evolution
Neural plasticity: The driving force underlying the complexity of the brain
Nathan Tublitz 509530
Recursion: Core of complexity or artifact of analysis?
Derek Bickerton 531544
Index  545553


Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com)
General Manager
John Benjamins Publishing Company
763 N. 24th St.
Philadelphia PA  19130
Phone: 215 769-3444
Fax: 215 769-3446
John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com 


From eitkonen at utu.fi  Tue May 26 09:10:39 2009
From: eitkonen at utu.fi (Esa Itkonen)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 12:10:39 +0300
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <4A1426CE.9080707@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.121039.0300.EITKONEN@UTU.FI>

Dear Tom: Thank you for your comments on "Concerning Dahl's (2004) notion of linguistic complexity". Contrary to what you seem to think, this is not about your relationship to Hermann Paul. Surely you are yourself the only person competent enough to write about such a topic (and about many, many other topics as well).
Esa

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen

----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:52 pm
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] pitfalls of complexity
To: Esa Itkonen <eitkonen at utu.fi>
Cc: funknet at mailman.rice.edu


> Well now, Esa. To take a youthful slogan out of context, not cite the 
> 
> fuller (some still erroneous, of course) details of the original 1971 
> 
> paper, not cite the considerable elaborations & corrections in "On 
> Understanding Grammar" (1979; chs 5,6), not cite the countless 
> following 
> papers that corrected & elaborated & expanded on the diachronic 
> relation 
> between morphology & syntax, not only mine but many others', and then 
> to 
> skip over altogether the recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
> 
> (2009), is not exactly an edifying way of reviewing the topic. While I 
> 
> do count Hermann Paul as my all-time guru in linguistics, with all do 
> 
> respect we do know some things now that the great IE tradition did 
> not. 
> Not much more, but some. And we do know them because some of them, 
> particularly H. Paul, pointed the way toward a broader 
> cross-disciplinary approach to language.  Best,  TG
> 
> ================
> 
> 
> Esa Itkonen wrote:
> > Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost 
> everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if 
> you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as 
> full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> > Esa
> >
> > Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
> >
> >   
> 


From martin.hilpert at frias.uni-freiburg.de  Tue May 26 09:58:35 2009
From: martin.hilpert at frias.uni-freiburg.de (martin.hilpert)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 11:58:35 +0200
Subject: 10 Ph.D. Scholarships, University of Freiburg
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.115835.0200.MARTIN.HILPERT@FRIAS.UNIFREIBURG.DE>

* Apologies for multiple postings *


10 Ph.D. Scholarships in Linguistics “Frequency effects in language”

The *University of Freiburg*, one of Germany’s nine Universities of 
Excellence, invites applications for 10 fully-funded Ph.D. scholarships 
in linguistics, beginning no earlier than October 1, 2009, and no later 
than March 1, 2010. Successful applicants will be members of the 
*Research Training Group* on “Frequency effects in language” 
(Graduiertenkolleg GRK 1624/1) funded by the German Research Foundation 
(DFG).

*Frequency* is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based 
models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. 
In the Ph.D. projects this determinant will be investigated with a view 
both to its explanatory potential and its limitations. The envisaged 
research integrates descriptive-linguistic and 
cognitivist-psycholinguistic approaches and is empirically based on 
corpora for standard and non-standard varieties of European languages.
We offer a *high-profile research environment*, an interdisciplinary 
*teaching programme*, a full* *grant of *13,200 € per annum* for a 
period of up to *3 years*, and additional grants covering travel and 
research expenses.
For more information on the Research Training Group, envisaged Ph.D. 
projects, and application details, please visit our website: 
*http://www.hpsl.uni-freiburg.de/grk-frequenz 
<http://www.hpsl.uni-freiburg.de/grk-frequenz>*

*Deadline for application: June 22, 2009***


From Julia.Ulrich at degruyter.com  Tue May 26 11:48:59 2009
From: Julia.Ulrich at degruyter.com (Ulrich, Julia)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 13:48:59 +0200
Subject: TOC  Language and Cognition Volume 1/Issue 1 (2009)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.134859.0200.JULIA.ULRICH@DEGRUYTER.COM>

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 
Volume 1/Issue 1 (2009)is now available   
http://www.reference-global.com/toc/langcog/current


TABLE OF CONTENTS

How do infants build a semantic system?
Suzy J. Styles, Kim Plunkett

The cognitive poetics of literary resonance
Peter Stockwell

Action in cognition: The case of language
Lawrence J. Taylor, Rolf A. Zwaan

Prototype constructions in early language acquisition
Paul Ibbotson, Michael Tomasello

The enactment of language: Decades of interactions between linguistic and motor processes
Sarah E. Anderson, Michael J. Spivey

Episodic affordances contribute to language comprehension
Arthur M. Glenberg, Raymond Becker, Susann Klötzer, Lidia Kolanko, Silvana Müller, Mike Rinck

Reviews


ABOUT THE JOURNAL

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION is an exciting new interdisciplinary journal of language and cognitive science. It is a venue for the publication of high quality peer-reviewed research of a theoretical, empirical and/or experimental nature, focusing on the interface between language and cognition. It publishes, and is open to, research from the full range of subject disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and analytical frameworks that populate the language and cognitive sciences, on a wide range of topics. Research published in the journal typically adopts an interdisciplinary, comparative, multi-methodological approach to the study of language and cognition and their intersection. 

The journal is edited by Daniel Casasanto (MPI Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), Seana Coulson (UCSD), Vyvyan Evans (Bangor University), Laura Michaelis (University of Colorado, Boulder), David Kemmerer (Purdue University) and Chris Sinha (Portsmouth University).

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION is the official journal of the UK-Cognitive Linguistics Association (UK-CLA). Individual members of the UK-CLA are entitled to free online access to LANGUAGE AND COGNITION. Membership is free in 2009 and reduced by 50% in 2010. The UK-CLA is open to all regardless of geographical base, nationality or theoretical background. For membership details, please refer to www.languageandcognition.net or contact Vyvyan Evans at v.evans at bangor.ac.uk. For more information on the journal, please see www.degruyter.com/journals/langcog



Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Julia Ulrich
Product Marketing Manager 
Genthiner Strasse 13
10785 Berlin
Germany

Email: julia.ulrich at degruyter.com
www.mouton-publishers.com
www.degruyter.com

Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. Genthiner Str. 13. 10785 Berlin. Sitz Berlin. Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HR A 2065. Rechtsform: Kommanditgesellschaft. 
Komplementär: de Gruyter Verlagsbeteiligungs GmbH, Sitz Berlin, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HR B 46487.
Geschäftsführer: Dr. Sven Fund, Beiratsvorsitzender: Dr. Bernd Balzereit.

  sustainable thinking...please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to


From thompsoc at ipfw.edu  Tue May 26 18:56:02 2009
From: thompsoc at ipfw.edu (Chad Thompson)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:56:02 -0400
Subject: Conference on Community-Based Language Revival, Aug. 28-30
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.145602.0400.THOMPSOC@IPFW.EDU>

2009 Conference on Community-Based Language Revival

Hosted by
The Three Rivers Language Center
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
August 28-30, 2009
http://www.ipfw.edu/trlc/

Community and tribal organizations, educators, linguists, and anyone
else interested are invited to participate in a conference on reviving
endangered languages. Special emphasis will be on the participation of
the language community. Abstracts are now being taken for conference
presentations, sessions, and workshops.

The keynote address will be given by Daryl Baldwin of the Myaamia
Project at Miami University and Scott Shoemaker of the Miami Nation of
Indiana. The conference will also include dinner with an Old Order Amish
family and a special viewing of original prints from the Curtis
collection.

Registration Form: http://www.ipfw.edu/trlc/Registration.pdf 

Chad Thompson
Conference on Community-Based Language Revival
Department of Anthropology
Indiana-University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
2101 Coliseum Blvd.
Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499
or
ThompsoC at ipfw.edu
Phone: 260-481-6101 
Fax: 260-481-6880


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Thu May 28 22:50:03 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 18:50:03 -0400
Subject: Temporal/parietal pathways
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.2009.185003.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090526140733.htm

If similar pathways exist in lower primates, can this imply that their vocalizations might sometimes be complex structurally?

As an elaboration of verb serialization, so-called bipartite constructions can include, in more productive systems such as in Yahgan, both pathway/position and manner/bodypart/instrument terms.

Something reminiscent of this (with opposite control) also appears to occur in the most elaborate ideophonic forms, as in Santali (Munda).

Are these systems 'maximal' in some sense? Do such strings involve a combination of processes from both pathways? Could some call systems in animals combine units in the same spirit?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From akbari_r at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 06:45:55 2009
From: akbari_r at yahoo.com (Ramin Akbari)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 23:45:55 -0700
Subject: International conference on applied linguistics: final call for
 papers
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.2009.234555.0700.AKBARIR@YAHOO.COM>

Final call for papers
 
The International Conference on Applied Linguistics: Developments, Challenges, and Promises will be held in Tehran ’s ( Iran )  Milad Tower Conference Hall on September 26-27, 2009. The conference aims at exploring some vital issues in applied linguistics that have shaped, and are still shaping the identity of the profession. Applied linguists from across the globe are invited to contribute to a lively debate that would include ideas from some of the prominent figures of the field. 
  
Different themes will be explored in the course of the two-day conference: applied linguistics and its definitions; globalization and its impact on ELT; applied linguistics and English as the world’s lingua franca; post method era and teacher qualifications; research debates in applied linguistics …. 
  
The keynote speakers for the conference are (alphabetically arranged): 
  
Professor Guy Cook, The Open University, London 
Professor Hossein Farhady, American University of Armenia 
Professor Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney 
Professor Barbara Seidlhofer, University of Vienna 
Professor Henry Widdowson, University of Vienna 
  
Pre-conference workshop (September 25): 
Alternative assessment: Dr. Chirstine Coombe, Higher College of Technology, UAE 
  
The deadline for abstract submission is June 14, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be sent by July 10. Early registration deadline is August 5; all the participants whose papers have been accepted must register before the deadline. 
  
To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website at: www.appliedlinguistics.ir 
  
For any queries, please contact me at: akbari_ram at yahoo.com 
 
 

Ramin Akbari
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
Department of ELT
Tarbiat Modares University
Tehran
Iran


      


From nino.amiridze at gmail.com  Sat May  2 07:07:40 2009
From: nino.amiridze at gmail.com (Nino Amiridze)
Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 09:07:40 +0200
Subject: 2nd Call for Abstracts: Workshop ''Advances in Kartvelian
 Morphology and Syntax', September 2009, Bremen, Germany
Message-ID: <SAT.2.MAY.2009.090740.0200.NINO.AMIRIDZE@GMAIL.COM>

[Apologies for multiple posting]

---------------------------------------------------------
ADVANCES IN KARTVELIAN MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX
(Caucasian Language Issues 10)

Workshop at the Festival of Languages
September 29-30, 2009, Bremen, Germany

Call Deadline: Monday, May 11, 2009

http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/kartvelian/
---------------------------------------------------------

2nd Call for Abstracts
==================
Submissions are invited for the workshop 'Advances in Kartvelian
Morphology and Syntax', which is the tenth in the series of
international conferences entitled Caucasian Language Issues
(Kaukasische Sprachprobleme). The previous event in this series,
'Kaukasische Sprachprobleme IX', was held in 2001 in Oldenburg,
Germany. The present workshop will take place in Bremen, Germany,
September 29-30, 2009 during the Festival of Languages
(http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de/).

The goal of the workshop is to discuss recent developments in the
study of morphology and syntax of the Kartvelian language family.
Abstracts for 20 minute talks (plus 10 minute discussion) will be
considered on topics relating to the synchronic or diachronic study of
Kartvelian languages from any theoretical perspective. Submissions
from any scholar (including graduate students) working on Kartvelian
morphology and syntax are welcome.

Invited Speakers
================
* Winfried Boeder (University of Oldenburg)
* Alice C. Harris (SUNY Stony Brook)
* Kevin Tuite (Universit? de Montr?al)

Important Dates
===============
Abstract submission: Monday, May 11, 2009.
Notification:        Monday, June 8, 2009.
Workshop:            Tuesday and Wednesday, September 29-30, 2009.

Organizers
==========
* Nino Amiridze (Utrecht University; Institute of
 Oriental Studies, Georgian Academy of Sciences)
* Tamar Khizanishvili (University of Bremen)
* Manana Topadze (Univerity of Pavia)

Publication
===========
If after the workshop there will be interest in publishing either a
proceedings or a special journal issue, then the organizers will take
responsibility of finding a suitable forum and will act as editors.

Submission
==========
Anonymous abstracts (in English, maximum 2 pages, including data and
references) have to be submitted electronically as portable document
format (.pdf) or Microsoft Word (.doc) files via the EasyChair
conference management system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=akms09.
Each abstract will be anonymously reviewed by independent reviewers.

Workshop Web Page
=================
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/kartvelian/

Conference Fees
===============
until July 1, 2009:  Full rate 100 E / Student rate 50 E
after July 1, 2009:  Full rate 150 E / Student rate 75 E

Contact Person
==============
Tamar Khizanishvili,  <tamarkh at uni-bremen.de>

This workshop is part of the "Conference Marathon" within the
three-weeks programme of the Festival of languages in Bremen.


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Wed May  6 05:38:12 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 01:38:12 EDT
Subject: Universals and the Evans/Levinson Paper
Message-ID: <WED.6.MAY.2009.013812.EDT.>

To the Funklist:
I was very interested in Stephin Levinson's response to Tom's 
middle-of-the-road approach to universals.   (I'm not sure that response was intended for 
the list to see, and so I hope it's okay to refer to it here.)

Levinson wrote: "I think you are right about development as key in biology, 
and also about exceptions. But the question is can we list the strong 
tendencies?"

Of course, "strong tendencies" are not quite "universals".   Is it true 
that "once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 
6-8000 languages" (as the abstract says) that all we can hope to find are strong 
tendencies?

And is it true that "Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum 
for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system 
which is fundamentally variable at all levels" (as the abstract says)?   

The abstract allows for "stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple 
design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the 
constraints of human cognition" -- but I take it these don't qualify as 
"universals".

I am extremely sympathetic to the basic points made in the paper, but I'd 
question whether these statements are going too far.   

One of the great difficulties that cognitive studies have run into is 
describing cogitive processes in a way that also describes what should be going 
on in the brain.   Forget human cognition or language.   I previously quoted 
Heinrich and Bugnyar on the paper wasp: ""By some process that still remains 
one of the great unsolved mysteries of biology, exquisitely precise 
behaviors can be genetically programmed in animals with brains no larger than a 
pinhead..."   If we have problems understanding how a tiny brain can process an 
insect's programmed behavior, it should not be a surprise that we have 
difficulty with a much larger brain and   behavior as bewilderingly complex as 
human language.

Cognitivists need to know that human language is diverse and that they are 
not looking for a discrete syntactic template that guides all human 
language.   And biologists should know that therefore simple equivalencies will not 
be likely in the brain.

But there are some things that may be "universal" or "strong tendencies" in 
the "the world's 6-8000 languages" the abstract mentions.   And they may be 
very useful to keep in mind when we talk about "cognition".

Number one, all of these languages would appear to be communal.   At least, 
I presume there is not one instance of a language spoken by a single 
individual and no one else.   Chomsky's "self-expression" function of language has 
not yielded any instances of private languages that I am aware of and I 
presume none of the thousands of languages the authors studied fell into this 
category.

So, no, it's not complete diversity.   It's not "every snowflake is unique" 
diversity.   It's not a hundred million language diversity or even close to 
the genetic diversity of a typical human population.   

This is very important because it should signal to the cognitivist that the 
nature of language may not   be found in only studying individuals or 
individual "cognitions."   If language is shaped communally, then the processes 
are communal.   I'm not speaking of extralinguistic "social" factors,.   I'm 
talking about the structure of language itself, which certainly does not 
exist as a whole in any one individual.

If you are looking for an analogy, look to the latest developments in 
computer networking, where such concepts as "cloud" are emerging.

Here's a stab at another universal -- the abstract mentions "meaning" as an 
example of diversity.   But meaning cannot be that diverse, can it?   There 
has to be some sense that speakers of these languages were not quite free 
to use words completely as they choose, no matter how grammatical or 
syntactical.   

The "strong tendency" here would be COMMON REFERENCE.   No matter what 
language we look at, we can expect all its speakers to strive to refer to the 
same things or circumstances with the same sounds (or symbols) in order to be 
understood.

This isn't trivial.   What constraint could be stronger than a need for a 
common meaning.   Tense, case, word order -- all aspect of language in 
whatever form or morphology, they are all forms of references -- and they all most 
basically depend on the speaker and listener having a common sense of what 
is being spoken about.   All vocabulary and grammatical variations of any 
kind make reference to an object, an action a process, a relationship in place 
and time with greater or lesser specificity.   If my reference is different 
than your reference, we do not understand what we are saying.   Which of 
the 6-800 languages consisted of speakers who did not understand one another?

Esa's example of Tamil's diachronic changes in endings tells us not that 
Tamil suddenly became incomprehensible to its users, but instead that it 
changed to stay comprehensible to its users.   

If this makes any sense, then I don't see why we can't say that the need 
for common reference is a "strong tendency." As close as we can get to a 
universal.   And one that should be a great help in telling linguistics as well 
as the cognitive science why languages are structured as they are.

Regards,
steve long




















**************
Big savings on Dell?s most popular laptops. Now starting at 
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From bischoff.st at gmail.com  Thu May  7 19:48:13 2009
From: bischoff.st at gmail.com (s.t. bischoff)
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 15:48:13 -0400
Subject: theories of syntax
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.2009.154813.0400.BISCHOFF.ST@GMAIL.COM>

Hi all,

I'm looking for a good introductory textbook for "An Introduction To
Syntactic Theory" course. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The
idea is to introduce the students to what syntactic theory is, how theories
differ, how theories are similar, some idea of what theories are out
there...

Thanks!
Shannon


From edith at uwm.edu  Thu May  7 20:19:09 2009
From: edith at uwm.edu (Edith Moravcsik)
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 15:19:09 -0500
Subject: theories of syntax
In-Reply-To: <1c1f75a20905071248t6a45a11l79a25dc2d13d42ab@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.MAY.2009.151909.0500.EDITH@UWM.EDU>

In 2006, I published a book titled "An introduction to syntactic theory" (New York: Continuum). The preface and table of contents are available on my website
(www.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/faculty/moravcsik.html).

Best,

Edith Moravcsik



-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of s.t. bischoff
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 2:48 PM
To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: [FUNKNET] theories of syntax

Hi all,

I'm looking for a good introductory textbook for "An Introduction To
Syntactic Theory" course. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The
idea is to introduce the students to what syntactic theory is, how theories
differ, how theories are similar, some idea of what theories are out
there...

Thanks!
Shannon


From acalude at gmail.com  Fri May  8 15:16:17 2009
From: acalude at gmail.com (Andreea Calude)
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 16:16:17 +0100
Subject: Paper on language evolution in Nature Reviews Genetics
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.2009.161617.0100.ACALUDE@GMAIL.COM>

Dear Funk-netters,

Following the recent fascinating discussion sparked by the Evans/Levinson
PNAS paper, I would like to take the somewhat bold opportunity to draw your
attention to another interesting paper which is similarly published in a
journal further afield of the typical focus of mainstream linguistics,
namely in *Nature Review Genetics*, which concerns language evolution and in
particular, what one can do with (/ask of) computational tools in this
research area. At the risk of being blamed for self-publicising work which
is coming out of the lab I am currently working in, please find below the
details of the paper.

With humble apologies,

Andreea Calude


Nature Reviews Genetics, advance online publication, Published online 7 May
2009 | doi:10.1038/nrg2560
Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator

Mark Pagel
<http://www.nature.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/nrg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nrg2560.html#top>
Abstract

Human languages form a distinct and largely independent class of cultural
replicators with behaviour and fidelity that can rival that of genes.
Parallels between biological and linguistic evolution mean that statistical
methods inspired by phylogenetics and comparative biology are being
increasingly applied to study language. Phylogenetic trees constructed from
linguistic elements chart the history of human cultures, and comparative
studies reveal surprising and general features of how languages evolve,
including patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements and social
factors that influence temporal trends of language evolution. For many
comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology,
historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more
relevant than those estimated from genes.


-- 
Dr. Andreea S. Calude
School of Biological Sciences
Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
University of Reading
Reading
RG6 6BX
United Kingdom
--
acalude at gmail.com
www.calude.net/andreea/andreea.html


From dcyr at yorku.ca  Fri May  8 23:45:15 2009
From: dcyr at yorku.ca (Danielle E. Cyr)
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 19:45:15 -0400
Subject: Paper on language evolution in Nature Reviews Genetics
In-Reply-To: <9c32037a0905080816t5b2f6167q6f32db0ad1f35420@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.MAY.2009.194515.0400.DCYR@YORKU.CA>

Please don't apologize for sending this most interesting piece of information.
The only problem is that one needs to have a login ID and password to access
the online paper. Is there another way to get it? I can't wait to read what's
under this thrilling title and abstract.

Cheers,
Danielle Cyr


Quoting Andreea Calude <acalude at gmail.com>:

> Dear Funk-netters,
>
> Following the recent fascinating discussion sparked by the Evans/Levinson
> PNAS paper, I would like to take the somewhat bold opportunity to draw your
> attention to another interesting paper which is similarly published in a
> journal further afield of the typical focus of mainstream linguistics,
> namely in *Nature Review Genetics*, which concerns language evolution and in
> particular, what one can do with (/ask of) computational tools in this
> research area. At the risk of being blamed for self-publicising work which
> is coming out of the lab I am currently working in, please find below the
> details of the paper.
>
> With humble apologies,
>
> Andreea Calude
>
>
> Nature Reviews Genetics, advance online publication, Published online 7 May
> 2009 | doi:10.1038/nrg2560
> Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator
>
> Mark Pagel
>
<http://www.nature.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/nrg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nrg2560.html#top>
> Abstract
>
> Human languages form a distinct and largely independent class of cultural
> replicators with behaviour and fidelity that can rival that of genes.
> Parallels between biological and linguistic evolution mean that statistical
> methods inspired by phylogenetics and comparative biology are being
> increasingly applied to study language. Phylogenetic trees constructed from
> linguistic elements chart the history of human cultures, and comparative
> studies reveal surprising and general features of how languages evolve,
> including patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements and social
> factors that influence temporal trends of language evolution. For many
> comparative questions of anthropology and human behavioural ecology,
> historical processes estimated from linguistic phylogenies may be more
> relevant than those estimated from genes.
>
>
> --
> Dr. Andreea S. Calude
> School of Biological Sciences
> Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
> University of Reading
> Reading
> RG6 6BX
> United Kingdom
> --
> acalude at gmail.com
> www.calude.net/andreea/andreea.html
>


"The only hope we have as human beings is to learn each other's languages.  Only
then can we truly hope to understand one another."

Professor Danielle E. Cyr
Department of French Studies
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
Tel. 1.416.736.2100 #310180
FAX. 1.416.736.5924
dcyr at yorku.ca


From david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu  Sun May 10 18:43:54 2009
From: david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu (David Kronenfeld)
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 11:43:54 -0700
Subject: {FUNKNET}new books on pragmatics and on kinship
Message-ID: <SUN.10.MAY.2009.114354.0700.>

Friends,
I just thought that, while I have a moment, I would circulate some 
information regarding my two new books. Together with my 1996 Plastic 
Glasses and Church Fathers (Oxford University Press) they offer a 
coherent and organized approach to the semantics and pragmatics of 
collectively held concepts, including the words of ordinary language.

Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies (2009, 
University of Illinois Press)
The publisher?s URL is 
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/33qps5ad9780252033704.html

Culture, Society, and Cognition: Collective Goals, Values, Action, and 
Knowledge (2008, Mouton Series in Pragmatics No. 3, Mouton de Gruyter)
The publisher?s URL is
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110206074-1

While the book is new, the studies that Fanti Kinship... brings together 
cover an extended, and still continuing and evolving, research project 
that began in 1965. This book
provides the solid and systematic empirical base for much of what 
follows in the other two. Because of the special nature of kinship, and 
the long history of its anthropological study, kinship provides a unique 
laboratory for careful and well-defined study of instances of a wide 
range of generally relevant linguistic and cultural phenomena. It offers 
especially tight empirical control of reference and contrast, of 
cultural norms and presuppositions, of conversational usage, and of the 
interrelationship between terminological categorization and the 
categorization of kinsfolk that is implicit in behavioral patterns. On 
the other hand, particular important aspects of kinship seem unique to 
kinship.
My first attempt to extend the theoretical insights of the kinship work 
to general language and culture came in Plastic Glasses and Church 
Fathers, which considers the semantics of ordinary, everyday 
words--words which lacked the kinds of special constraints seen in the 
terminological domains of kinship and color. Developed examples include 
words for drinking vessels, political factions, warring religious 
groups, and women?s and men?s household tasks in Los Angeles households. 
The analytic approach, a prototype-extension one, makes use of 
psychological work on conjunctivity, linguistic work on marked vs. 
unmarked categories, and general aspects of cognitive ease. 
Communicative function, context, and the role of form definitions figure 
importantly in the discussion.
The other new book, Culture, Society, and Cognition, continues where 
Plastic Glasses leaves off, and considers the pragmatics of collective 
distributed knowledge systems, that is, the kinds of systems of cultural 
knowledge that are required to understand the interactive and 
communicative force of language as well as of non-language culture. The 
book first explores the systematic implications of taking culture as the 
parallel distributed processing system of variably distributed knowledge 
that enables all levels of social systems to function and that enables 
our division of labor. It then considers the kinds of productive 
cultural knowledge systems that exist, paying extended attention to 
?cultural models of action? in which knowledge (including how to do 
stuff, who does which stuff, what stuff is good for, and so forth), 
goals, values, and emotions are brought together in scenarios that we 
use to construct our own actions and interpret the actions of others.

This is, I guess, sort of like a birth announcement--except that no 
presents are expected !





Best,
David

-- 
David B. Kronenfeld             Phone   Office          951 827-4340
Department of Anthropology              Message 951 827-5524
University of California                Fax             951 827-5409
Riverside, CA 92521             email   david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu
Department:     http://Anthropology.ucr.edu/
Personal:       http://pages.sbcglobal.net/david-judy/david.html


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 11 05:11:04 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 01:11:04 EDT
Subject: What the heck is "Common Reference"?
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.2009.011104.EDT.>

To the list:
I've been asked in a couple of private posts where I got the terminology 
"Common Reference" and what kind of peer-reviewed source it came from.   Valid 
question.

I suspect it's not difficult to understand what "common reference" means in 
the context of a lot of linguistic terminology (though not all).   

"Reference" here means the object, property, process, in time and place, 
that a word or other aspect of language stands for, symbolizes or refers to.   
This is reference as in "sense and reference" (Sinn und Bedeutung) pretty 
much as Frege defined it back in the 1890s.   The reference a word (or other 
parts of language structure) makes corresponds to some thing or some process 
or situation in the world, the universe or alternative universes or 
imaginary worlds.   It can even be a reference to other words in the same sentence, 
but that's in no way a limitation on the broader sense in which "reference" 
is used here.

"Common" here means shared in common with other people.   It does not mean 
here frequently or commonly occuring or average.   Very simply put, when two 
people use the same word to stand for the same thing, that's Common 
Reference.

Now there are all kinds of little logic games that you can play to show 
that no two people can ever share the same reference, but for now I think most 
of us can confirm that common reference works pretty well for most of us 
most of the time.   If I say, "Bring me the book", chances are pretty good that 
the person I am talking to will pick up a physical book, carry it over and 
hand it to me -- without falling into a metaphysical vortex where an 
infinite of potential meanings collide.   The problem that shared references can 
only be approximations doesn't mean they don't work, but rather tell us how 
they work to change language.

You'll find "common reference" used in the way descrbed here, of course, in 
many disciplines and institutions that feel the need for standardized 
specialized terminology among its members, especially among doctors, engineers 
and computer scientists.   So that everybody uses the same terms to refer to 
the same things.   This usage of "common reference" simply takes the same 
sense and applies it beyond specialist terminology to all language.

The IMPORTANT point here is that common reference is NOT 100% present in 
any instances of use of language.   The idea is instead that it is the most 
fundamental objective in all language -- and in that it is the closest we come 
to a universal in language.  Among language users, common reference is not 
a framework, it is an on-going quest that creates frameworks. 

If I ask -- in English -- a person who only speaks Mandarin to "Bring me 
the book", we can expect an absence of common reference.   The sounds I've 
made do not correspond to objects or processes I am referring to, in the 
language of my listener.   If i wish to change that circumstance, I will need to 
find a way to share all or most of my references with that listener.   On a 
much less extreme level, that may be the task with every sentence we speak, 
even every utterance we make.

There is at least one field of research that is supporting the idea that 
finding common reference is a pervasive problem throughout language use.    If 
you try to build a robot that uses human language, and make syntactic   
structure what happens first, you get a very confused and confusing robot.   
But if you make a robot's first job finding common reference, you actually 
start to see a robot developing its own pragmatics. 

What's led me to the use of the "common reference" is my time to time 
involvement with businesses involved in interactive robotics.   In this field, 
there has been a very long but most convincing drift towards this idea, or 
ideas very much like it, to describe the first and recurring steps an 
artificial intelligence must take in the real world to use human language.   A lot of 
this trend is going on in a commercial context which does not generate a 
lot of publicly published findings, but some has made its way into the public 
dialogue.

An incredibly enlightening paper regarding robotic interactive language use 
-- and one that defines the term "common reference" operationally if not 
formally is:
Yoko YAMAKATA, Tatsuya KAWAHARA, Hiroshi G. OKUNO and Michihiko MINOH: ?
Belief Network based Disambiguation of Object Reference in Spoken Dialogue 
System?, Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 
Vol.?19, No.?1, pp.47-56 (2004).The paper can be downloaded at:
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/tjsai/19/1/19_47/_article/-char/en

This paper has been very influential among a number of human-robotic 
language developers because it provided a way of overcoming the hurdle of how 
robots should be designed to respond to the starting block problem of obviously 
non-human, pre-programmed language generation.   (The paper is one reason 
that I and some others came to use the term "common reference", although 
terminology in this field is hardly uniform, because a lot of the concept naming 
is private.)

Here's part of the abstract: "... In addition to the ambiguity of the 
object reference, the actual system must cope with two sources of uncertainty: 
speech and image recognition. We present the belief network based 
probabilistic reasoning system to determine the object reference. The resulting system 
demonstrates that the number of interactions needed to find a COMMON 
REFERENCE is reduced as the user model is refined." (caps added)    The word 
"belief" here is actually a quantitive system of measuring confidence levels by the 
robot, as it restructures its language based on human responses.   The 
robot's success in all interactions in these tests were enhanced by anything 
that increased common reference.

The term common reference appears in a number of other papers where 
robotics has attempted functioning use of human language.

Bauer A, Gonsior B, Wollherr D, Buss M. Heuristic Rules for Human-Robot 
Interaction Based on Principles from Linguistics - asking for directions, AISB 
(2009).   The paper can be downloaded at:
www.lsr.ei.tum.de/fileadmin/publications/aisb09_bauer.pdf

In this research, the term "common reference" turned from a question of 
spatial coordinates to one of linguistic rules.   The authors cite Karl 
Buhler's The Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language (1934), 
but don't use Buhler's broad definition of Deixis -- following instead 
Levinson and others who limit deitic to a narrower category of words and 
constructions.   That the rules had to be heuristic simply reflects the fact that 
simple syntactic or semantic rules would not solve the real-world tasks the 
robots were given.

Finally, there's also the work of Luc Steels, who has been associated with 
the SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris, and has generated a good deal of 
research that relates to the idea of "common reference" as a driving objective 
in artificially reproducing human language, though not always under that 
name.   One of Steels' points is that the the need for shared connotation and 
adaptive processes puts the study of language at a higher order of 
rule-making than can be established by structural approaches or even those focusing on 
discourse.

A very informative article from a 2004 commercial applications blog on how 
Steels' approach relates to progress on information sharing technologies and 
a process that starts with dismbiguation through common reference (or 
"shared cognitions") and then moves on to the rest of language:
http://www.headshift.com/blog/2005/02/can-robot-learning-teach-us-ho.php

There are a number of Luc Steels' recent papers downloadable on the web, 
and they can be found by Googling his name.

I'll try to post something about how the idea of "common reference" relates 
to pragmatic concepts like deixis and indexicality in a future post.

Any questions or comments would be appreciated.

steve long































  


**************
An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
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From langconf at bu.edu  Mon May 11 14:58:51 2009
From: langconf at bu.edu (BUCLD BUCLD)
Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 10:58:51 -0400
Subject: Deadline Approaching - BUCLD 34 submissions
Message-ID: <MON.11.MAY.2009.105851.0400.LANGCONF@BU.EDU>

CALL FOR PAPERS

THE 34th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
NOVEMBER 6-8, 2009

Keynote Address
?Developing Fluency in Understanding: How it matters?
Anne Fernald, Stanford University

Plenary Address
?Innate Syntax - Still the Best Hypothesis?
Virginia Valian, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center

Lunch Symposium
?Recent Advances in the Study of Production and Comprehension:  
Implications for Language Acquisition Research?
John Trueswell, University of Pennsylvania
Mike Tanenhaus, University of Rochester
Kay Bock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submissions which present research on any topic in the fields of  
first and second language acquisition from any theoretical  
perspectives will be fully considered, including Bilingualism,  
Cognition & Language, Creoles & Pidgins, Dialects, Discourse and  
Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input &  
Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics,  
Pragmatics, Pre-linguistic Development,  Reading and Literacy, Signed  
Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception & Production.

ABSTRACTS

?      Abstracts must represent original, unpublished research.
?      Abstracts should be anonymous, clearly titled and no more than  
500 words in length. Please note the word count at the bottom of the  
abstract.
?      Detailed information regarding abstract format, content, and  
evaluation criteria can be found at our website: http://www.bu.edu/ 
linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

?      Abstracts must be submitted using the form available at the  
conference website:
http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/abstract.htm
?      The submission period will begin on April 1st.
?      This year we are enacting a new author policy: Although each  
author may submit as many abstracts as desired, we will accept for  
presentation a maximum of 1 first authored paper/poster.  There is no  
limit on the number of additional acceptances of papers/posters in  
any other authorship status.

DEADLINE

?      All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15,  
2009.  There will be no exceptions.

JEAN BERKO GLEASON AWARD

BUCLD is proud to introduce the Jean Berko Gleason Award for the best  
student
papers.  In honor of Jean Berko Gleason, Professor Emerita of  
Psychology at
Boston University, three awards will be given at the Plenary address  
on Saturday night.
All students who are first and presenting authors on a paper will be  
considered for the
award.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Questions about abstracts should be sent to abstract at bu.edu

Boston University Conference on Language Development
96 Cummington Street, Room 244
Boston, MA 02215
U.S.A.
Telephone: (617) 353-3085


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Sun May 17 19:09:45 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 15:09:45 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.2009.150945.EDT.>

(First, my deep appreciation to this forum for an opportunity to try out 
these ideas and to those kind enough to consider them.)

It?s striking how the term "deixis" has shrunk in meaning since it was 
first coined in linguistics. 

It's common these days to say that deictic words are a special class of 
words or utterances that "need external context", or "require contextual 
information" or "depend on an external frame of reference."   And to use 
demonstratives (this, that) as examples.   And to make a comparison to anaphora, 
another "special class" of expressions.

But in reading Karl Buhler, whom I think first used deixis as a formal 
linguistic term, you don't find those kind of limitations.   It seems that 
originally deixis was not just a class of expressions but the ?fundamental? base 
of all "linguistic messages" or all "intercourse using language."

This is from Buhler's The Theory of Language (the English translation from 
1991):
"...in linguistic messages there are two closely interlocked fundamental 
processes which we can and must distinguish in order to understand what is 
going on.   In intercourse using language there is first pointing: things and 
processes are indicated.   That is demonstratio; I prefer the Greek word 
deixis.   Second, there is also representing... Objects and states of affairs 
are given a formulation in language and are symbolized by words that designate 
them in the symbolic field of language."

It's not easy to read the segment above and think that Buhler was writing 
about a "special class" of expression.   And it's also difficult to think 
that Buhler meant "pointing" literally.   (The Greek word deixis in its most 
basic sense meant the act of bringing something to light, un-hiding, 
revealing; more abstractly showing proof, demonstrating, or more concretely an 
imaging.)

How deixis got linguistically limited to where the pointing has to be 
almost explicit, I'm not sure.   But that contraction in definition might perhaps 
have been unfortunate, as it perhaps made deixis a bit more difficult to 
explain.

The authors of the Handbook of Pragmatics (2006) in introducing the subject 
write: 
?One persistent complication for any theory of reference is the ubiquity of 
deictic or indexical expressions.   Deixis characterizes the properties of 
expressions like I, you, here, there, now, hereby, tense/aspect markers, 
etc., whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary...?

Now, there's a peculiar linguistic beast -- meaning stays constant, but 
referent varies!   Some would say that a different referent equals a different 
meaning.   How is ?meaning? defined here, if it doesn?t include reference?  
 How do we separate the two ideas for the sake of defining deixis?

Here?s an example of the difficulty. Recently, I've met different persons, 
each one introduced with the phrase, "This is John."   The referents 
definitely varied. Does "John" have the same meaning but varying referents ? more 
than one John?   So therefore is ?John? a deictic?

Stephen Levinson, in the same volume, goes on to explore in detail the many 
paradoxes and ambiguities of this narrowly defined linguistic ?deixis? 
(along with the akin philosophical ?indexicality,? using Charles Pierce?s 
terminology.)

Levinson, points to the many ambiguities that deixis can create in 
describing time, place, space, person, etc.   And they CAN be confusing!   Like: 
today referred to today yesterday. But, today, today refers to a different day. 
  Or, of course, I is I if I say I, but if you say I, you mean you, not I.
There are many more, needless to say.

And because of this, we learn from Levinson that ?semantic deficiency? is 
a defining characteristic of deixis (or ?indexicality?.) 

Now, this might seem contrary to our more common understanding ? deixis 
would seem in fact to remove ambiguity, not add it.   Even definite articles 
are not as definite as some deictics.   "The car is mine" could refer to any 
one of millions of cars.   But "THAT car is mine" suddenly becomes more 
specific, less ambiguous.   "Truths" can refer to millions of different truths, 
but "we hold THESE truths to be self evident" tells us that all the truths 
are going to be narrowed down.   ?I?ll get it to you today,? promises a more 
specific time than ?I?ll get it to you.?

Even when the deictic must be ambiguous to be accurate -- ?Somewhere out 
there.? -- it still contributes to a greater specificity by the most elemental 
logic, being unambiguously ambiguous ? ?Not here, but somewhere out there.?
   The absence of the object, not ?being here,? is quite definite.

How can this be?   How is that this special class of expressions can 
linguistically increase ambiguity, when we seem to use it for the exact opposite 
purpose? Is it that deictic language, in promising to be specific, is held to 
a higher standard than language that doesn?t make reference to ?external 
context??

The answer, according to Levinson, seems to have something to do with what 
linguists traditionally study and some kind of a conclusion from somewhat 
dubious animal psychology: 
?Students of linguistic systems tend to treat language as a disembodied 
representational system which is essentially independent of current 
circumstances, that is, a system for describing states of affairs in which we 
individually may have no involvement? It is these properties of language that have 
been the prime target of formal semantics and many philosophical approaches to 
language ? and not without good reason, as they appear to be the exclusive 
province of human communication. The communication systems of other primates 
have none of this ?displacement? as Hockett (1958: 579) called it.?

So, compared to ?language as a disembodied representational system? ? one 
with no or at least relatively few ambiguities ? deixis seems replete with 
them. Here we are using ?this? and ?that?, ?I? and ?you?, ?today? or ?
next week? to be more specific, and it ends up we are being more ?
semantically deficient,? according to this point of view.

Obviously, one way to find deictic expression guilty of ambiguity is to 
assume away the ambiguity in non-deictic expression.   Say ?Socrates is a man? 
and you are fine, but say ?Socrates is that man? and you are in trouble.
 
Of course, these ambiguities just get an awful lot worse if we literally 
follow what Buhler seems to be saying and consider that all "linguistic 
messages" as grounded in deixis ? not just a special class of expressions.   (cf., 
Lyons (1972) ?Deixis as the Source of Reference?)

It should also be pointed out that Buhler makes deixis just part one in a 
two part ?interlocking? process.   The second part is ?representing... 
Objects and states of affairs are given a formulation in language and are 
symbolized??

So that in Buhler?s system, deixis is not even a class of expressions at 
all, but what happens before something ? whatever it is, an object, a process, 
an idea or even another word ? can be translated into a representation, a 
symbol or a ?linguistic message.?   If that?s the case, then deixis is 
pretty much an individual event, even a private one, since it occurs before 
language can be used to share it.

There are a number of interesting ways to look at ambiguity in language ? 
even ambiguity in syntax.   But one way of looking at it is a problem created 
by a hundred million personal deictic events becoming representations, 
symbols that can be in some way and to some degree unambiguously shared by a 
hundred million speakers of the same language.   How is that accomplished?

Thus our focus shifts from ambiguity as a problem -- the common approach -- 
to how language solves that problem.
 
steve long 












**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2 
Easy Steps! 
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bcd=Maystrongfooter51709NO115)


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 18 02:21:39 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 22:21:39 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <SUN.17.MAY.2009.222139.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/17/09 3:17:13 PM, eitan.eg at gmail.com writes:
<<I agree with what you say, especially with the general tone. However, I 
would point out that a nicer conception of deixis is found in quite a lot of 
works: I would note the late Suzanne Fleischmann's wonderful "Tense and 
Narrativity" for tense as a deictic category in dialogue (as opposed to 
narrative), and Lenore Grenoble's excellent "Deixis and Information Structure in 
Russian". There's also some neat work on Yiddish spoken discourse (Gertrud 
Reershemius). There might be a mistake in the titles or spelling, since it's 
from my admittedly bad memory.
Best wishes, Eitan>>

Hi, Eitan.   Thanks for these other sources.   I'll try to post a 
bibliography at some point that might also add to this.

The reason I choose Stephen Levinson's piece on Deixis in the Handbook of 
Pragmatics is partly because he was mentioned on the list recently in 
connection with the Myth of Universals paper and partly because the Handbook is 
recent (2006).   To be fair, he does write that the article "does not attempt 
to review either all the relevant theory (see e.g. the collections in Davis 
1991, Section III, or Kasher 1998, Vol. III) or all of what is known about 
deictic systems in the world?s languages (see e.g. Anderson & Keenan, 1985, 
Diessel 1999)."

What I think Levinson does do is resort to the "disembodied proposition," 
free of external context, like a kee-jerk reflex, to make deixis seem so 
especially paradoxical, ambiguous and "semantically deficient."

That's probably the only way that the special deficiencies shows up -- when 
you assume that language can be rightly just studied as a logic system, an 
algorithm or independent framework for semantics.   Deixis becomes a 
convenient "special" category, or catch-all, for when the language itself doesn't 
allow you to stay within its self-logic.

That deixis is a special class of expressions is now pretty common 
throughout the literature so far as I can tell.   Grenoble, who you mentioned, and 
other practitioners of text linguistics have the broadest definition it seems 
-- probably because it was established long ago, with that approach, how 
inadequate generative grammer is once you get past the sentence.   

Various approaches speak of internal deictic versus external deictic, or 
primary and secondary deictic, or even of diectic tenses versus non-diectic 
tenses (as per D. N. Shankara Blat, who uses the terms in place of the 
traditional absolute vs relative tenses.)

Even from the diachronic perspective, dietic has not been treated as a 
basic phenomenon, but rather something special layered on language to effect a 
semantic shift.   See, e.g., Davidse, Breban and Van Linden (2008), where 
deictification ?is a type of grammaticalization and semantic shift in the NP 
analogous to auxiliarization in the VP? where a general relation? is given a 
reference point in or relative to the speech event.?

Part of the difficulty for all these approaches I think is caused by the 
fact that reference/deixis is not limited to external things.   Expressions 
can also refer to other representations, i.e., the referent can be a symbol as 
well as an object or state of affairs.   This drops us into a spiral of 
references where there's often no start point or end. 

And that's why it is easier to limit deixis to the orientational, aspectal 
or ostensive parts of language.   

But it's not how Buhler first used the word.   And perhaps using his 
broader concept of deixis might clear up some of these difficulties.   

At some point, I'd like to make a comment on how Levinson dismissed the 
idea that deixis might be the source of all reference (Lyons 1972), because 
that idea deserves not to be dismissed. 

Regards and thanks for your help,
steve long





















**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2 
Easy Steps! 
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From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 07:16:21 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:16:21 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <cfa.583d4e17.3741baf9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.091621.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content, but the one can predomiante over the other in a specific instance.
Tahir

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/17/09 9:09 PM >>>
(First, my deep appreciation to this forum for an opportunity to try out
these ideas and to those kind enough to consider them.)

It?s striking how the term "deixis" has shrunk in meaning since it was
first coined in linguistics.

It's common these days to say that deictic words are a special class of
words or utterances that "need external context", or "require contextual
information" or "depend on an external frame of reference."   And to use
demonstratives (this, that) as examples.   And to make a comparison to anaphora,
another "special class" of expressions.

But in reading Karl Buhler, whom I think first used deixis as a formal
linguistic term, you don't find those kind of limitations.   It seems that
originally deixis was not just a class of expressions but the ?fundamental? base
of all "linguistic messages" or all "intercourse using language."

This is from Buhler's The Theory of Language (the English translation from
1991):
"...in linguistic messages there are two closely interlocked fundamental
processes which we can and must distinguish in order to understand what is
going on.   In intercourse using language there is first pointing: things and
processes are indicated.   That is demonstratio; I prefer the Greek word
deixis.   Second, there is also representing... Objects and states of affairs
are given a formulation in language and are symbolized by words that designate
them in the symbolic field of language."

It's not easy to read the segment above and think that Buhler was writing
about a "special class" of expression.   And it's also difficult to think
that Buhler meant "pointing" literally.   (The Greek word deixis in its most
basic sense meant the act of bringing something to light, un-hiding,
revealing; more abstractly showing proof, demonstrating, or more concretely an
imaging.)

How deixis got linguistically limited to where the pointing has to be
almost explicit, I'm not sure.   But that contraction in definition might perhaps
have been unfortunate, as it perhaps made deixis a bit more difficult to
explain.

The authors of the Handbook of Pragmatics (2006) in introducing the subject
write:
?One persistent complication for any theory of reference is the ubiquity of
deictic or indexical expressions.   Deixis characterizes the properties of
expressions like I, you, here, there, now, hereby, tense/aspect markers,
etc., whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary...?

Now, there's a peculiar linguistic beast -- meaning stays constant, but
referent varies!   Some would say that a different referent equals a different
meaning.   How is ?meaning? defined here, if it doesn?t include reference?
 How do we separate the two ideas for the sake of defining deixis?

Here?s an example of the difficulty. Recently, I've met different persons,
each one introduced with the phrase, "This is John."   The referents
definitely varied. Does "John" have the same meaning but varying referents * more
than one John?   So therefore is ?John? a deictic?

Stephen Levinson, in the same volume, goes on to explore in detail the many
paradoxes and ambiguities of this narrowly defined linguistic ?deixis?
(along with the akin philosophical ?indexicality,? using Charles Pierce?s
terminology.)

Levinson, points to the many ambiguities that deixis can create in
describing time, place, space, person, etc.   And they CAN be confusing!   Like:
today referred to today yesterday. But, today, today refers to a different day.
  Or, of course, I is I if I say I, but if you say I, you mean you, not I.
There are many more, needless to say.

And because of this, we learn from Levinson that ?semantic deficiency? is
a defining characteristic of deixis (or ?indexicality?.)

Now, this might seem contrary to our more common understanding * deixis
would seem in fact to remove ambiguity, not add it.   Even definite articles
are not as definite as some deictics.   "The car is mine" could refer to any
one of millions of cars.   But "THAT car is mine" suddenly becomes more
specific, less ambiguous.   "Truths" can refer to millions of different truths,
but "we hold THESE truths to be self evident" tells us that all the truths
are going to be narrowed down.   ?I?ll get it to you today,? promises a more
specific time than ?I?ll get it to you.?

Even when the deictic must be ambiguous to be accurate -- ?Somewhere out
there.? -- it still contributes to a greater specificity by the most elemental
logic, being unambiguously ambiguous * ?Not here, but somewhere out there.?
   The absence of the object, not ?being here,? is quite definite.

How can this be?   How is that this special class of expressions can
linguistically increase ambiguity, when we seem to use it for the exact opposite
purpose? Is it that deictic language, in promising to be specific, is held to
a higher standard than language that doesn?t make reference to ?external
context??

The answer, according to Levinson, seems to have something to do with what
linguists traditionally study and some kind of a conclusion from somewhat
dubious animal psychology:
?Students of linguistic systems tend to treat language as a disembodied
representational system which is essentially independent of current
circumstances, that is, a system for describing states of affairs in which we
individually may have no involvement* It is these properties of language that have
been the prime target of formal semantics and many philosophical approaches to
language * and not without good reason, as they appear to be the exclusive
province of human communication. The communication systems of other primates
have none of this ?displacement? as Hockett (1958: 579) called it.?

So, compared to ?language as a disembodied representational system? * one
with no or at least relatively few ambiguities * deixis seems replete with
them. Here we are using ?this? and ?that?, ?I? and ?you?, ?today? or ?
next week? to be more specific, and it ends up we are being more ?
semantically deficient,? according to this point of view.

Obviously, one way to find deictic expression guilty of ambiguity is to
assume away the ambiguity in non-deictic expression.   Say ?Socrates is a man?
and you are fine, but say ?Socrates is that man? and you are in trouble.

Of course, these ambiguities just get an awful lot worse if we literally
follow what Buhler seems to be saying and consider that all "linguistic
messages" as grounded in deixis * not just a special class of expressions.   (cf.,
Lyons (1972) ?Deixis as the Source of Reference?)

It should also be pointed out that Buhler makes deixis just part one in a
two part ?interlocking? process.   The second part is ?representing...
Objects and states of affairs are given a formulation in language and are
symbolized*?

So that in Buhler?s system, deixis is not even a class of expressions at
all, but what happens before something * whatever it is, an object, a process,
an idea or even another word * can be translated into a representation, a
symbol or a ?linguistic message.?   If that?s the case, then deixis is
pretty much an individual event, even a private one, since it occurs before
language can be used to share it.

There are a number of interesting ways to look at ambiguity in language *
even ambiguity in syntax.   But one way of looking at it is a problem created
by a hundred million personal deictic events becoming representations,
symbols that can be in some way and to some degree unambiguously shared by a
hundred million speakers of the same language.   How is that accomplished?

Thus our focus shifts from ambiguity as a problem -- the common approach --
to how language solves that problem.

steve long












**************
A strong credit score is 700 or above.  See Yours in Just 2
Easy Steps!
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222585011x1201462751/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
bcd=Maystrongfooter51709NO115)


From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 07:30:53 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:30:53 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <c80.4f1b891c.37422033@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.093053.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/18/09 4:21 AM >>>
Part of the difficulty for all these approaches I think is caused by
the
fact that reference/deixis is not limited to external things.  
Expressions
can also refer to other representations, i.e., the referent can be a
symbol as
well as an object or state of affairs.   This drops us into a spiral
of
references where there's often no start point or end.

'External' is probably a red herring. At the risk of sounding like
Durkheim one might say that discourse facts are also things. One can
talk about James Bond just as much as one can talk about Winston
Churchill. What makes both of them concrete (rather than external) is
their presence in episodic memory. Someone who doesn't have either of
these in memory cannot refer to them.
Tahir


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Mon May 18 13:40:38 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:40:38 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.094038.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
--I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a 
small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to 
do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of 
concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to 
universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as 
an ideational content--

Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity arises in 
two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created by external 
context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but the most apparent are the 
most basic -- "from the infant?s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
hall of mirrors: my ?I? is your ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?here?
, your ?there?, and so forth."

Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be definite, i.e., 
to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but this car.   The irony 
here is that what decreases ambiguity also increases ambiguity, since we are 
not in Kansas anymore when we accept deictic reference into our study of 
expression.

The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we really 
have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
John knew that.
That was exactly what I was thinking.
Do you believe this?
Here is where we part thinking.
That is diectic and this is not.
Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.

So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme abstracts -- 
which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the point before the "pointing" 
became representation or symbolic.   Perhaps because the process changes 
after that, if we are pointing to an abstract.

regards and thanks,
steve long













**************
A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
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bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Mon May 18 16:39:46 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 10:39:46 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <ce5.508cbb9d.3742bf56@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.103946.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the infant's 
point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors", we ought 
perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants actually acquire 
communicative expression of reference, starting from deixis and going on 
to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES transcript of communication in 
the first year of life shows that the prerequisite to reference is the 
care-giver's intense exercise in establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The 
reason why this will become first deictic reference is obvious--in early 
childhood, all communication is about here-and-now, you-and-I, 
this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech situation. 
There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning sessions. On 
the contrary, the process capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and 
the child's innate propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, 
compactly-shaped, fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the 
child is also acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and 
communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering 
OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own 
(inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential 
communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. 
Joint-attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional 
sessions.

Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared situation 
in early childhood is done by various pointing means--touching, 
approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the child's 
position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic expressions. Verbs of 
perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or "touch" are prominently used 
in the care-giver's verbal "obligato" that accompanies these 
joint-attention (or joint-reference) sessions. Early nominal vocabulary 
is also prominently introduced at these sessions. And early uses of 
determiners ('this', 'the', 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by 
discourse but still by the deictic situation.

With the gradual change during the second year to communication about 
non-present objects and future and past events, the move from deictic to 
other types of reference is phased in, together with more sophisticated 
grammatical devices that point at remembered or imagined referents. 
Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the basic principle 
established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION--remains as the leitmotif 
of all referential gestures, verbal & otherwise: Make sure that you & I 
are attending to the same thing. This is, of course, deeply embedded in 
the human capacity to consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory 
of Mind, empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the 
evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps 
worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire 
complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
deals in some detail with the child reference data during years 2-3-4).

Cheers, TG

==============


In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd year,

Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it has much to 
> do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more like the pole of 
> concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or specific as opposed to 
> universal. So a linguistic expression will tend to have a deictic content as well as 
> an ideational content--
>
> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity arises in 
> two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created by external 
> context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but the most apparent are the 
> most basic -- "from the infant???s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
> hall of mirrors: my ???I??? is your ???you???, my ???this??? is your ???that???, my ???here???
> , your ???there???, and so forth."
>
> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be definite, i.e., 
> to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but this car.   The irony 
> here is that what decreases ambiguity also increases ambiguity, since we are 
> not in Kansas anymore when we accept deictic reference into our study of 
> expression.
>
> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we really 
> have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
> John knew that.
> That was exactly what I was thinking.
> Do you believe this?
> Here is where we part thinking.
> That is diectic and this is not.
> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>
> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme abstracts -- 
> which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the point before the "pointing" 
> became representation or symbolic.   Perhaps because the process changes 
> after that, if we are pointing to an abstract.
>
> regards and thanks,
> steve long
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **************
> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
> Steps! 
> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>
>   


From dlevere at ilstu.edu  Mon May 18 16:53:59 2009
From: dlevere at ilstu.edu (Daniel Everett)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 12:53:59 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <4A118F52.7020108@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.125359.0400.DLEVERE@ILSTU.EDU>

And of course Mike Tomasello (whom Hrdy acknowledges) has been talking  
about this stuff for years, looking at cross-species data among  
different primates.

Dan



On 18 May 2009, at 12:39, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the  
> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in  
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first  
> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication  
> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both  
> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to  
> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process  
> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate  
> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped,  
> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also  
> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and  
> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering  
> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own (inter- 
> subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential  
> communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. Joint- 
> attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional  
> sessions.
>
> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at  
> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
> deictic situation.
>
> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more  
> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the  
> basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind, empathy).  
> There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of  
> this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps worth  
> reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire  
> complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
> during years 2-3-4).
>
> Cheers, TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
> year,
>
> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>
>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created  
>> by external context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but  
>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant?s point of  
>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my ?I? is your  
>> ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?here?
>> , your ?there?, and so forth."
>>
>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>
>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>> example:
>> John knew that.
>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>> Do you believe this?
>> Here is where we part thinking.
>> That is diectic and this is not.
>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>
>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>> to an abstract.
>>
>> regards and thanks,
>> steve long
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> **************
>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>
>>
>


From macw at cmu.edu  Mon May 18 17:11:31 2009
From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 19:11:31 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <4A118F52.7020108@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.191131.0200.MACW@CMU.EDU>

Tom,

     Yes, this is all quite right.  In his book Infant Speech from  
about 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9 month  
range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with attention  
to objects.  Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of attention to the  
issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me that the issue of  
"why da?" is more fundamental.  Whether it is da, there, di, do, or  
itt, these early dental syllables have a clear pointing function.  And  
Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976 analysis of the association of  
pointing with vocalization and looking at the interlocutor.  As Tom  
says, you can find plenty of these early deictics in the earliest  
CHILDES transcripts.  Moreover, they form one of the most solid bases  
for syntactic learning in item-based frames such as "this X" or "that  
X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
    However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue  
comes from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic-developmental  
account of symbol formation and the growth of language and thought.   
Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they talk about the  
mother-child-object triangle.  Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is  
the one in which they show how a therapist can reestablish a  
schizophrenics contact with reality by resurrecting this triangle.   
Very 60s.   Dan is right that Mike Tomasello has taken this analysis  
one step further and shown parallels across primates, while  
emphasizing the extent to which these activities are even sharper in  
humans.  I haven't yet read the Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite  
compatible.
     Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis?  Of  
course not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and  
concrete from the beginning.

--Brian MacWhinney

On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the  
> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in  
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first  
> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication  
> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both  
> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to  
> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process  
> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate  
> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped,  
> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also  
> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and  
> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering  
> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own (inter- 
> subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential  
> communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. Joint- 
> attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional  
> sessions.
>
> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at  
> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
> deictic situation.
>
> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more  
> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the  
> basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind, empathy).  
> There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of  
> this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps worth  
> reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire  
> complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
> during years 2-3-4).
>
> Cheers, TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
> year,
>
> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>
>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created  
>> by external context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but  
>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant?s point of  
>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my ?I? is your  
>> ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?here?
>> , your ?there?, and so forth."
>>
>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>
>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>> example:
>> John knew that.
>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>> Do you believe this?
>> Here is where we part thinking.
>> That is diectic and this is not.
>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>
>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>> to an abstract.
>>
>> regards and thanks,
>> steve long
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> **************
>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>
>>
>
>


From dlevere at ilstu.edu  Mon May 18 17:24:47 2009
From: dlevere at ilstu.edu (Daniel Everett)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:24:47 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <756FF8FC-EE03-46A8-BB9F-0728C3977226@cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.132447.0400.DLEVERE@ILSTU.EDU>

On establishing joint attention in the development of deixis, other  
species do seem to show primitive signs of this. Some dogs, for  
example (mine is one instance), regularly get their owners to focus on  
a third object. So my dog paws me to get me to look at someone sitting  
on the sofa in my dog's spot. I will be sitting talking to the person  
and the dog approaches. The dog paws me and then, when I make eye  
contact with the dog, he looks at the person sitting on the sofa. He  
keeps looking to me and then towards the offending person until I ask  
the person to move. Then he gets into his place on the sofa.

This seems to me like a joint-attention-getting event. It is possible  
that this comes from the dog's close contact with humans and  
represents a learning strategy available to canines but perhaps not  
always used. I don't know of studies of this in any form, certainly  
not studies comparing domestic canines with wild canines. I know,  
however, that Tomasello's group in Leipzig is studying canine  
communication/cognition. I am sure there must be other groups.

Surely Tomasello, Givon, Hrdy and others are on to something here in  
the looking at the importance of deixis, especially joint-attention,  
in the development of language. But, as Tom just said, it is  
principally in the 'other minds' recognition ability that humans  
shine. My dog gives me no reason to believe that he thinks of me as  
having a mind like his.

Recognizing and cooperating with entities that have minds like one's  
own seems to be a/the crucial evolutionary step in developing  
language. Once you have this, you can use just about anything to  
communicate, though speech works best.

Dan



On 18 May 2009, at 13:11, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> Tom,
>
>    Yes, this is all quite right.  In his book Infant Speech from  
> about 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9  
> month range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with  
> attention to objects.  Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of  
> attention to the issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me  
> that the issue of "why da?" is more fundamental.  Whether it is da,  
> there, di, do, or itt, these early dental syllables have a clear  
> pointing function.  And Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976  
> analysis of the association of pointing with vocalization and  
> looking at the interlocutor.  As Tom says, you can find plenty of  
> these early deictics in the earliest CHILDES transcripts.  Moreover,  
> they form one of the most solid bases for syntactic learning in item- 
> based frames such as "this X" or "that X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
>   However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue  
> comes from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic- 
> developmental account of symbol formation and the growth of language  
> and thought.  Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they  
> talk about the mother-child-object triangle.  Perhaps the most  
> fascinating chapter is the one in which they show how a therapist  
> can reestablish a schizophrenics contact with reality by  
> resurrecting this triangle.  Very 60s.   Dan is right that Mike  
> Tomasello has taken this analysis one step further and shown  
> parallels across primates, while emphasizing the extent to which  
> these activities are even sharper in humans.  I haven't yet read the  
> Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite compatible.
>    Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis?  Of  
> course not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and  
> concrete from the beginning.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
> On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>
>>
>> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
>> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
>> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
>> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
>> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
>> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that  
>> the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise  
>> in establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become  
>> first deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all  
>> communication is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that  
>> accessible to both of us in the shared speech situation. There is  
>> nothing confusing to the infant in these learning sessions. On the  
>> contrary, the process capitalizes on the shared perceptual field  
>> and the child's innate propensity to attend to salient objects-- 
>> colorful, compactly-shaped, fast-moving, or pointed to by the care- 
>> giver. But the child is also acquiring another important  
>> prerequisite to reference--and communication in general--during the  
>> first year of life: Considering OTHER MINDS as having a perspective  
>> distinct from one's own (inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So  
>> the acquisition of referential communication is deeply embedded in  
>> these early capacities. Joint-attention sessions are indeed early  
>> theory-of-mind instructional sessions.
>>
>> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
>> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
>> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
>> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
>> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
>> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
>> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
>> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced  
>> at these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
>> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
>> deictic situation.
>>
>> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
>> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
>> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with  
>> more sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
>> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands,  
>> the basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
>> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
>> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
>> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
>> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind,  
>> empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the  
>> evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is  
>> perhaps worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children  
>> acquire complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
>> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
>> during years 2-3-4).
>>
>> Cheers, TG
>>
>> ==============
>>
>>
>> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
>> year,
>>
>> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>>
>>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem  
>>> created by external context.   Levinson describes these on all  
>>> levels, but the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the  
>>> infant?s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
>>> mirrors: my ?I? is your ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?here?
>>> , your ?there?, and so forth."
>>>
>>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>>
>>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>>> example:
>>> John knew that.
>>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>>> Do you believe this?
>>> Here is where we part thinking.
>>> That is diectic and this is not.
>>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>>
>>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>>> to an abstract.
>>>
>>> regards and thanks,
>>> steve long
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> **************
>>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy  
>>> Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx 
>>> ?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
>>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Mon May 18 17:39:37 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 11:39:37 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <64F13618-3EBB-4ACA-86CA-B641A02A6A56@ilstu.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.113937.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

Yeah, I used to study this with Shaggy Dog in the early 1970s. First 
time I met Dave Premack ca. 1972, he told me "dogs can't interpret 
pointing". So I told him (he was already a bigshot, right after Sarah) 
"you haven't met my dog". Most mammal species point with their nose, 
eyes or posture/orientation. Even domestic cats can point, first they 
attract your attention with voice or coming to you, then they dart to 
the target they want to attract your attention to. And for that matter, 
horses have joint-attention gestures, tho I've never seen them do it 
among themselves, only with us. As Tomasello notes, species with 
rudimentary capacities can accelerate them under intensive contact with 
humans. And human pointing gestures vary enormously cross cultures. 
E.g., the Utes point with their lips. A very distinct gesture. Cheers, TG

===============

Daniel Everett wrote:
> On establishing joint attention in the development of deixis, other 
> species do seem to show primitive signs of this. Some dogs, for 
> example (mine is one instance), regularly get their owners to focus on 
> a third object. So my dog paws me to get me to look at someone sitting 
> on the sofa in my dog's spot. I will be sitting talking to the person 
> and the dog approaches. The dog paws me and then, when I make eye 
> contact with the dog, he looks at the person sitting on the sofa. He 
> keeps looking to me and then towards the offending person until I ask 
> the person to move. Then he gets into his place on the sofa.
>
> This seems to me like a joint-attention-getting event. It is possible 
> that this comes from the dog's close contact with humans and 
> represents a learning strategy available to canines but perhaps not 
> always used. I don't know of studies of this in any form, certainly 
> not studies comparing domestic canines with wild canines. I know, 
> however, that Tomasello's group in Leipzig is studying canine 
> communication/cognition. I am sure there must be other groups.
>
> Surely Tomasello, Givon, Hrdy and others are on to something here in 
> the looking at the importance of deixis, especially joint-attention, 
> in the development of language. But, as Tom just said, it is 
> principally in the 'other minds' recognition ability that humans 
> shine. My dog gives me no reason to believe that he thinks of me as 
> having a mind like his.
>
> Recognizing and cooperating with entities that have minds like one's 
> own seems to be a/the crucial evolutionary step in developing 
> language. Once you have this, you can use just about anything to 
> communicate, though speech works best.
>
> Dan
>
>
>
> On 18 May 2009, at 13:11, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>
>> Tom,
>>
>> Yes, this is all quite right. In his book Infant Speech from about 
>> 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9 month 
>> range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with 
>> attention to objects. Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of 
>> attention to the issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me 
>> that the issue of "why da?" is more fundamental. Whether it is da, 
>> there, di, do, or itt, these early dental syllables have a clear 
>> pointing function. And Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976 analysis 
>> of the association of pointing with vocalization and looking at the 
>> interlocutor. As Tom says, you can find plenty of these early 
>> deictics in the earliest CHILDES transcripts. Moreover, they form one 
>> of the most solid bases for syntactic learning in item-based frames 
>> such as "this X" or "that X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
>> However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue comes 
>> from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic-developmental 
>> account of symbol formation and the growth of language and thought. 
>> Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they talk about the 
>> mother-child-object triangle. Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is 
>> the one in which they show how a therapist can reestablish a 
>> schizophrenics contact with reality by resurrecting this triangle. 
>> Very 60s. Dan is right that Mike Tomasello has taken this analysis 
>> one step further and shown parallels across primates, while 
>> emphasizing the extent to which these activities are even sharper in 
>> humans. I haven't yet read the Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite 
>> compatible.
>> Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis? Of course 
>> not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and concrete from 
>> the beginning.
>>
>> --Brian MacWhinney
>>
>> On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the 
>>> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of 
>>> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants 
>>> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting 
>>> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES 
>>> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the 
>>> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
>>> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first 
>>> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication 
>>> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both 
>>> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to 
>>> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process 
>>> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate 
>>> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped, 
>>> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also 
>>> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and 
>>> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering 
>>> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own 
>>> (inter-subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of 
>>> referential communication is deeply embedded in these early 
>>> capacities. Joint-attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind 
>>> instructional sessions.
>>>
>>> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared 
>>> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing 
>>> means--touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing 
>>> the child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic 
>>> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or 
>>> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato" 
>>> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference) 
>>> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at 
>>> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the', 
>>> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the 
>>> deictic situation.
>>>
>>> With the gradual change during the second year to communication 
>>> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from 
>>> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more 
>>> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or 
>>> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the 
>>> basic principle established in early 
>>> infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION--remains as the leitmotif of all 
>>> referential gestures, verbal & otherwise: Make sure that you & I are 
>>> attending to the same thing. This is, of course, deeply embedded in 
>>> the human capacity to consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, 
>>> Theory of Mind, empathy). There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah 
>>> Hrdy on the evolution of this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I 
>>> think is perhaps worth reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How 
>>> children acquire complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of 
>>> Syntactic Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference 
>>> data during years 2-3-4).
>>>
>>> Cheers, TG
>>>
>>> ==============
>>>
>>>
>>> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd year,
>>>
>>> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>>>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>>>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of 
>>>> it as a early stages ("see the kitty?").
>>>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it 
>>>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more 
>>>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or 
>>>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will 
>>>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>>>
>>>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment. Let me suggest that ambiguity 
>>>> arises in two ways with deixis. One is the simple problem created 
>>>> by external context. Levinson describes these on all levels, but 
>>>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant?s point of 
>>>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my ?I? is your 
>>>> ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?here?
>>>> , your ?there?, and so forth."
>>>>
>>>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be 
>>>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but 
>>>> this car. The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also 
>>>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we 
>>>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>>>
>>>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we 
>>>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes. For 
>>>> example:
>>>> John knew that.
>>>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>>>> Do you believe this?
>>>> Here is where we part thinking.
>>>> That is diectic and this is not.
>>>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>>>
>>>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme 
>>>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the 
>>>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic. 
>>>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing 
>>>> to an abstract.
>>>>
>>>> regards and thanks,
>>>> steve long
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> **************
>>>> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
>>>> Steps! 
>>>> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp; 
>>>>
>>>> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Mon May 18 19:01:13 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 15:01:13 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.150113.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

Tom Givon pointed out the variability of human pointing gestures, and the fact that animals often point with their noses. It is interesting that the rostral end of the body is used- this is where most of the major senses reside in their most developed form, the end that gets there first in quadrupeds (at least when not evading something in reverse, and even then they continue to attend to what they try to get away from). It is very interesting to watch a dog, for instance, trying to decide whether to approach or avoid something- as if the parts of the brain controlling the rear quarters and forequarters were actively slugging it out with visible symptoms there for all to see.

Brian McWhinney asks 'why da?'. Crosslinguistically dental/alveolar phonemes, in initial position in roots, seem to have very strong connections to dull, blunt impacts, non-bonded contacts, rebounds directed on elongated paths prototypically at higher angles towards presented surfaces. This might make them just right for the pre-linguistic function. Avoidance (lack of fusion, penetration, etc.) despite approach. Palatals (when present) are the other way round, but preserve the elongated path from Jakobson's acute feature- that is approach despite avoidance (such as straining to reach and grab something from a position of general safety, with a ten foot pole with a hook, etc.).

One question, though: is the child's use un-(or under-) differentiated between these extremes, at least at first?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From twood at uwc.ac.za  Mon May 18 14:03:40 2009
From: twood at uwc.ac.za (Tahir Wood)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 16:03:40 +0200
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
In-Reply-To: <ce5.508cbb9d.3742bf56@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.160340.0200.TWOOD@UWC.AC.ZA>

>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/18/09 3:40 PM >>>
The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we
really
have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For example:
John knew that.
That was exactly what I was thinking.
Do you believe this?
Here is where we part thinking.
That is diectic and this is not.
Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.


Steve, when I mentioned this I had in mind something that is concretely
known in terms of either episodic memory, or working memory or
perception. In each of your examples there is a concrete
interpretation:

John knew that. This means that John knew something which is in focus
for both interlocutors, e.g. John knew that what you just said is true.
It is not abstract, because it is precisely in episodic memory for you
and for me and is activated, other wise we couldn't have referred to it.
it is therefore both concrete and specific. Something we refer to can be
a specific mental state or a stimulus. These are not abstract in
themselves. The contents of epiosdic memory are in a sense factual
knowledge and just as concrete as the contents of perception. All of
your examples are the same in this regard. Your mistake IMHO lies in
thinking that for reference to occur it must involve a concrete, unitary
object. Not so. One can refer to an utterance, a memory, a thought, a
text, a dream.
Tahir


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 03:10:04 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 23:10:04 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (2)
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.231004.EDT.>

Tom wrote:
--The CHILDES transcript of communication in the first year of life shows 
that the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first deictic 
reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication is about 
here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech 
situation.   There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning 
sessions.--

Tom - Very appreciative of your wisdom on all this.   And I would not 
contest with you on any of these points, except one -- because it is important to 
my premise at this point -- though of course I always stand to be 
corrected.

How could it be that: "There is nothing confusing to the infant in these 
learning sessions"?

If that is the case, is it the only instance where experiencing a new 
environment isn't confusing to a human (or an animal)?   Doesn't some confusion 
come before every learning situation?

Perhaps it's too early to speak of ambiguity (my point) when we are only 
talking about joint attention rather than using language, but certainly if 
it's learned it should be a matter of hit or miss from early on.   Is mom 
pointing to the toy bear or the ribbon on the bear or the chair the bear is on -- 
or is she pointing out that the bear is sitting on a chair -- or am I being 
asked if I want the bear? Whether or not that confusion is disturbing or 
not, it is fairly easy for mom to be unclear at this early stage in our 
communications. 

(After all, pointing or gesturing or saying "look at this" doesn't always 
solve the problem of what someone is asking me to attend to, much less a 
child.   Is it the lamp?   Is there something wrong with the lamp?   Is it the 
lampshade?   Is it the bulb?   Oh, it's the fact that the light was left on, 
wasting electricity.   Never would have guessed.)

In any case, if I'd guess what might motivate a child to seek joint 
attention, one thing would be that it to some degree alleviates confusion.   
Attention is after all as much a matter of exclusion as anything else.   We need 
to see the forest and not the trees, or vice versa.   Joint attention gives a 
child something specific to attend to, rather than attending to everything 
that's shiny or colored or in motion -- and even in a poor environment, that 
can be many many things.

A bigger question.   Let's imagine a child who is never invited at all to 
join in joint attention with a care giver.   Would such a child be incapable 
of learning language?

We have a simple technical, mechanical reason to avoid gross ambiguity in 
the language we speak with one another.   Otherwise we can't share the same 
words or even the same syntax.   I suspect that the inability to share 
attention is an even deeper mechanical problem and one that would undermine 
language use.   And to that extent I don't think I am disagreeing with you.

Regards and thanks,
steve long




























**************
A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 04:00:29 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:29 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (3)
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.000029.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 12:54:28 PM, dlevere at ilstu.edu writes:
-- And of course Mike Tomasello (whom Hrdy acknowledges) has been talking?
> about this stuff for years, looking at cross-species data among?
> different primates.--
> 
Dan - Christine Kenneally, in her book "The First Word" tells of how 
Tomasello was "brought over" to the belief that chimps do point by a video 
presentation by David Leavens, where a chimp consistently points and Leavens 
consistently retrieves.   Afterwards, Leavens said "I submit there is a 
well-trained primate in this video, but it is not the chimpanzee."

Tomasello thinks that chimps rarely point in the wild because they are not 
as cooperative a species as humans.   However, I do not know of any research 
that proves that humans point in the wild, either -- if by "in the wild" we 
mean not contact with human culture.

Leavens, Hopkins and Bard published a wonderful paper in 2005 called 
"Understanding the Point of Chimpanzee Pointing" where they quote the title of an 
article by George Butterworth , "Pointing is the Royal Road to Language for 
Babies."

On the other hand, Stephen Levinson barely mentions "ostensive definition" 
in his article in the Handbook of Pragmatics and he denies chimps can really 
point or understand a pointing gesture, citing Kita and Povinelli.

But once again Levinson treats deixis not as a basis of language, but 
rather as a special class of expressions.   That is why he argues that deixis 
appears late in development in part of the article which reads as follows (and 
includes the line about hall of mirrors that Tom objected to):

"Linguists have argued similarly, that deixis is the source of reference, 
i.e. deictic reference is ontogenetically primary to other kinds (Lyons 
1975). But the actual facts concerning the acquisition of deictic expressions 
paint a different picture, for the acquisition of many aspects of deixis is 
quite delayed (Tanz 1980, Wales 1986), and even though demonstratives figure 
early, they are often not used correctly (see Clark 1978). This is hardly 
surprising because, from the infant?s point of view, deixis is as confusing as a 
hall of mirrors: my ?I? is your ?you?, my ?this? is your ?that?, my ?
here?, your ?there?, and so forth . The demonstratives aren?t used correctly 
in English till well after the pronouns ?I? and ?You?, or indeed till 
after deictic ?in front of?/ ?in back of?, that is not till about 4 (Tanz 
1980:145)."

Again, Levinson is defining deixis narrowly, but that it is fairly common 
in the literature.

regards,
steve long
































**************
A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Tue May 19 04:12:26 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 22:12:26 -0600
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (2)
In-Reply-To: <c5f.51fd7c0d.37437d0c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.MAY.2009.221226.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

All higher cognitive capacities (cortex, mid-brain), in us as well as in 
other animals, require an interaction between innate capacities and 
learning experience ("triggers"). This was, by the way, Kant's 
conclusion about (what he considered, and I guess I do too) the futile 
eternal argument between rationalists & empiricists. So he was 'only' a 
philosopher, but he got it right anyway. In the case of your question, I 
hope nobody will ever do the crucial experiment with children. Sarah 
Hrdy describes some horrible experiments of this type done on children 
in the 1930's (raising them in the first few months without affective 
human touch). Thank God we have the Human Subject Committees nowadays. 
But similar experiments were done on newborn kittens. If raised for the 
first 90 days in the dark, their visual system will never develop. 
Likewise with barn owls, where visual deprivation in the first 3 months 
will prevent them for developing their AUDITORY spatial orientation 
(vision trains audition). Nobody would claim that mammal & avian vision 
is not a highly innate capacity. But it still need the triggering of 
experience. Only old-brain (vagus, pons, medula) functions are fully 
automated, and on line, at birth. Slow neurological maturation is the 
hallmark of learning species. Best,  TG

==========



Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> Tom wrote:
> --The CHILDES transcript of communication in the first year of life shows 
> that the prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in 
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first deictic 
> reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication is about 
> here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both of us in the shared speech 
> situation.   There is nothing confusing to the infant in these learning 
> sessions.--
>
> Tom - Very appreciative of your wisdom on all this.   And I would not 
> contest with you on any of these points, except one -- because it is important to 
> my premise at this point -- though of course I always stand to be 
> corrected.
>
> How could it be that: "There is nothing confusing to the infant in these 
> learning sessions"?
>
> If that is the case, is it the only instance where experiencing a new 
> environment isn't confusing to a human (or an animal)?   Doesn't some confusion 
> come before every learning situation?
>
> Perhaps it's too early to speak of ambiguity (my point) when we are only 
> talking about joint attention rather than using language, but certainly if 
> it's learned it should be a matter of hit or miss from early on.   Is mom 
> pointing to the toy bear or the ribbon on the bear or the chair the bear is on -- 
> or is she pointing out that the bear is sitting on a chair -- or am I being 
> asked if I want the bear? Whether or not that confusion is disturbing or 
> not, it is fairly easy for mom to be unclear at this early stage in our 
> communications. 
>
> (After all, pointing or gesturing or saying "look at this" doesn't always 
> solve the problem of what someone is asking me to attend to, much less a 
> child.   Is it the lamp?   Is there something wrong with the lamp?   Is it the 
> lampshade?   Is it the bulb?   Oh, it's the fact that the light was left on, 
> wasting electricity.   Never would have guessed.)
>
> In any case, if I'd guess what might motivate a child to seek joint 
> attention, one thing would be that it to some degree alleviates confusion.   
> Attention is after all as much a matter of exclusion as anything else.   We need 
> to see the forest and not the trees, or vice versa.   Joint attention gives a 
> child something specific to attend to, rather than attending to everything 
> that's shiny or colored or in motion -- and even in a poor environment, that 
> can be many many things.
>
> A bigger question.   Let's imagine a child who is never invited at all to 
> join in joint attention with a care giver.   Would such a child be incapable 
> of learning language?
>
> We have a simple technical, mechanical reason to avoid gross ambiguity in 
> the language we speak with one another.   Otherwise we can't share the same 
> words or even the same syntax.   I suspect that the inability to share 
> attention is an even deeper mechanical problem and one that would undermine 
> language use.   And to that extent I don't think I am disagreeing with you.
>
> Regards and thanks,
> steve long
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **************
> A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
> Steps! 
> (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322941x1201367178/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=115&amp;
> bcd=Mayfooter51809NO115)
>
>   


From Salinas17 at aol.com  Tue May 19 04:14:00 2009
From: Salinas17 at aol.com (Salinas17 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 00:14:00 EDT
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity (4)
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.001400.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/18/09 3:03:43 PM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
> Your mistake IMHO lies in
> thinking that for reference to occur it must involve a concrete, unitary
> object. Not so. One can refer to an utterance, a memory, a thought, a
> text, a dream.
> 
Tahir - Not my mistake.   The use of "secondary deixis" as pertaining to 
abstractions rather than concrete object that can be literally be pointed to 
appears to be somewhat common.   I cited a paper on diachronic changes that 
used the term, and I believe that Grenoble uses it in this way in her paper 
on Deixis in Russian.

My point is that whether a reference is to "an utterance, a memory, a 
thought, a text, a dream" it will always carry some degree of ambiguity when it 
is shared in language.   And the more abstract the reference ("liberty", 
"knowledge", "thinking") the more likely the ambiguity.

regards,
steve long










**************
An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy 
Steps! 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221823248x1201398651/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&amp;hmpgID=62&amp;
bcd=MayExcfooter51609NO62)


From phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk  Tue May 19 18:24:03 2009
From: phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk (Philippe De Brabanter)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 18:24:03 +0000
Subject: CFP: Utterance Interpretation & Cognitive Models III
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.182403.0000.PHDEBRAB@YAHOO.CO.UK>

First call for
papers: Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models 3
 
The third edition of the Brussels conference on Utterance
Interpretation and Cognitive Modelswill take place on February 5-7, 2010, under the auspices
of the Belgische Kring voor Lingu?stiek / Cercle Belge de
Linguistique. 
The first edition addressed the issue of the semantics/pragmatics
interface from a cognitive perspective and drew essentially on the work of
semanticists, pragmaticists and philosophers of language. The second broadened
the perspective by inviting the views of scholars from the related subfields of syntax, cognitive linguistics and evolutionary
linguistics. For this third edition, the focus will
be on the developmental and cognitive determinants of utterance
interpretation. On the one hand, the ontogenetic development of our ability to
interpret linguistic utterances provides invaluable insights into adult
cognition; on the other, the methods of cognitive psychology, with their
emphasis on experimental inquiry and empirical results raise crucial
epistemological questions for the progress of research in the field. The focus of this third edition is fully in keeping with
our continued ambition to reach across disciplinary boundaries and bring
together researchers who, though belonging to different schools or traditions,
all take a view of interpretation that is informed by cognitive concerns and
share the assumption that the ultimate test for any theory of utterance
interpretation is its psychological plausibility. 
 
Keynote speakers:
 
Bart
Geurts (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) 
Jean-Marie Marandin
(CNRS, Universit? Paris 7) 
Anna
Papafragou (University of Delaware)
Josef Perner (Universit?t Salzburg)
Dan
Sperber (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod)
 
Abstract submissions: 
 
In addition to keynote lectures, the conference will
feature parallel sessions with contributed papers. We welcome submissions of
abstracts for 25-minute papers that focus on the psychological or cognitive
underpinnings of utterance interpretation or, conversely, address the
implications that theories of any aspect of utterance interpretation can have
for the psychology of language and for cognitive science at large. We also
welcome papers from scholars who study utterance interpretation in connection
with language development, impaired communication, non-verbal communication and
non-human communication. Abstracts will be anonymously refereed by members of
the program committee.
 
Important dates:
 
Deadline for abstracts: October 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance: November 15, 2009
Conference: February 5-7, 2010
 
Abstract format: 
 
- Only electronic submissions are accepted. 
- Abstracts should be submitted to the email address:
uicm3 at ulb.ac.be, with the following subject line: ''Utterance Interpretation
and Cognitive Models 3'' 
- The abstracts should be sent as an attachment to an email
message, in either MS Word (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf) or Adobe Acrobat
(.pdf ) format 
- The length of the submissions is a maximum of two A4
sides, using 2,5 cm (1 inch) margins and a 12 pt font. Each abstract should
clearly indicate the title of the talk, and may include references. In the
interest of fairness these constraints will be strictly enforced.
- The abstracts should be prepared for blind review, and
include no indication of the name(s) of the author(s). Only anonymous abstracts
will be considered.
- The body of the email message should contain the
following information: The name(s) of the author(s), affiliation, title of the
paper and contact details (postal and email address).
- A maximum of one submission as author, and one as
co-author will be considered
 
For further
information, please consult: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~uicm3/


      


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Tue May 19 21:32:04 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 17:32:04 -0400
Subject: Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity
Message-ID: <TUE.19.MAY.2009.173204.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

This was in the newsfeeds today:

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090518-monkey-mirror.html

>controlling one's attention and interpreting someone else's attention may involve the same neurons

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From eitkonen at utu.fi  Wed May 20 14:13:39 2009
From: eitkonen at utu.fi (Esa Itkonen)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 17:13:39 +0300
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.171339.0300.EITKONEN@UTU.FI>

Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
Esa

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen


From tgivon at uoregon.edu  Wed May 20 15:50:38 2009
From: tgivon at uoregon.edu (Tom Givon)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 09:50:38 -0600
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <fbc2b45d8857.4a143a43@utu.fi>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.095038.0600.TGIVON@UOREGON.EDU>

Well now, Esa. To take a youthful slogan out of context, not cite the 
fuller (some still erroneous, of course) details of the original 1971 
paper, not cite the considerable elaborations & corrections in "On 
Understanding Grammar" (1979; chs 5,6), not cite the countless following 
papers that corrected & elaborated & expanded on the diachronic relation 
between morphology & syntax, not only mine but many others', and then to 
skip over altogether the recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
(2009), is not exactly an edifying way of reviewing the topic. While I 
do count Hermann Paul as my all-time guru in linguistics, with all do 
respect we do know some things now that the great IE tradition did not. 
Not much more, but some. And we do know them because some of them, 
particularly H. Paul, pointed the way toward a broader 
cross-disciplinary approach to language.  Best,  TG

================


Esa Itkonen wrote:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>   


From oesten at ling.su.se  Wed May 20 16:12:42 2009
From: oesten at ling.su.se (=?iso-8859-1?Q?=D6sten_Dahl?=)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 18:12:42 +0200
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <4A1426CE.9080707@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.181242.0200.OESTEN@LING.SU.SE>

Hi Esa, on p. 7 of your paper you say:

"On p. 165 [of Dahl (2004)], zero is referred to as ?the final output of
grammaticalization?, and on the continuum of Figure 2, zero indeed
represents the logical end point of maturation. But it certainly cannot be
said to represent the highest degree of complexity. In this sense, then,
maturity and complexity are not identical."

...but if you care to re-read the page you quote, you may realize that the
phrase you are quoting is actually found in the context of the notion of a
critique of the model of grammaticalization proposed in Lehmann (1985), and
in fact what you say goes in the same direction. But it also follows from my
argument that zero cannot represent the highest degree of maturation, since
it does not presuppose any prehistory.

I may have more comments at a later point, this was just something I noticed
when browsing the paper.

- ?sten

References
Dahl, ?sten. 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization: synchronic variation and
diachronic change. Lingua e Stile, 20.203-218.



> ================
> 
> 
> Esa Itkonen wrote:
> > Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's
> agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to
> read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my
> homepage (click below).
> > Esa
> >
> > Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
> >
> >


From haspelmath at eva.mpg.de  Wed May 20 16:18:35 2009
From: haspelmath at eva.mpg.de (Martin Haspelmath)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 18:18:35 +0200
Subject: complexity/referring to WALS chapters
In-Reply-To: <fbc2b45d8857.4a143a43@utu.fi>
Message-ID: <WED.20.MAY.2009.181835.0200.HASPELMATH@EVA.MPG.DE>

Dear Esa,

Please refer to individual chapters of WALS (World Atlas of Language 
Structures), not to WALS as a whole. WALS is an edited volume, not a 
monograph, so you cannot attribute claims made in individual chapters to 
the whole work. Moreover, it's very important to acknowledge the 
contributions of individual authors.

In your complexity paper, you say

"Notice also that WALS (= Haspelmath et al. 2005) finds it appropriate to
adopt the following position: : ?less frequent inflectional methods like 
infixation,
tonal affixes, and stem changes [= ablaut] are ignored? (p. 110)"

Instead, you should have said:

"Notice also that Dryer (2005) finds it appropriate to adopt the 
following position: ..."

referring to Dryer 2005 (Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional 
Morphology, ch. 26 of WALS).

Sorry for insisting on this, but it's very important for large-scale 
collaborative works that the individual contributions are recognized as 
such.

Gretings,
Martin

Esa Itkonen schrieb:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>
>   


From hopper at cmu.edu  Fri May 22 08:39:20 2009
From: hopper at cmu.edu (Paul Hopper)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 04:39:20 -0400
Subject: Hermann Paul
In-Reply-To: <4A142D5B.4090708@eva.mpg.de>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.043920.0400.HOPPER@CMU.EDU>

Dear Funknetters,

Hermann Paul's name has cropped up a number of times recently, so I thought some of you might be interested in the titles presented at the Colloquy on Hermann Paul held last week at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

- Paul Hopper
---------------------------------------------------

Colloquy on Hermann Paul 

FRIAS/HPCL May 15, 2009
Venue: FRIAS, seminar room ground floor

Programme

14.00-14.45 
On the Perennial Issue of ?Influence? in Linguistic Historiography: Hermann Paul and Ferdinand de Saussure?
E.F.K. Koerner 

14.45-15.30 
Die Psychologie im Sprachdenken Hermann Pauls
Clemens Knobloch 

COFFEE BREAK

16.00-16.45 
Paul, Schuchardt, and Exemplar-Theoretic Models 
Robert Murray

16.45-17.30 
"Plus ?a change...": Hermann Paul and Recent Linguistic Theories
Paul Hopper 

17.30-18.00 
General discussion

Discussants: William Labov, Marga Reis
----------------------------------------------------

Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213


From paul at benjamins.com  Fri May 22 15:24:22 2009
From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 11:24:22 -0400
Subject: New Benjamins title- Mahiew/Tewrsis: Variations on Polysynthesis
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.112422.0400.PAUL@BENJAMINS.COM>

Variations on Polysynthesis
The Eskaleut languages
  Edited by Marc-Antoine Mahieu and Nicole Tersis
University Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle / CNRS-CELIA

Typological Studies in Language 86
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2086
2009. ix, 312 pp.
Hardbound  978 90 272 0667 1 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00
e-Book  978 90 272 8937 7 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00

This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme 
polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over 
the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the 
Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of 
the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in 
general linguistic terms, particularly with regard to polysynthesis. 
The degree of variation from more to less polysynthesis is evaluated 
within Eskaleut (Inuit-Yupik vs. Aleut), even in previously 
insufficiently explored domains such as pragmatics and use in 
context  including language contact and learning situations  and over 
typologically related language families such as Athabascan, 
Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Iroquoian, Uralic, and Wakashan.

Table of contents

Preface  vivii
Part I. Polysynthesis
Polysynthesis in the Arctic
Marianne Mithun 317
Polysynthesis as a typological feature: An attempt at a 
characterization from Eskimo and Athabaskan perspectives
Willem J. de Reuse 1934
Analytic vs. synthetic verbal constructions in Chukchi and West Greenlandic
Michael Fortescue 3549
Lexical polysynthesis: Should we treat lexical bases and their 
affixes as a continuum?
Nicole Tersis 5164
How synchronic is synchronic analysis? Siberian Yupik agglutinative 
morphology and language history
Nikolai Vakhtin 6580
Comparative constructions in Central Alaskan Yupik
Osahito Miyaoka 8194
Part II. Around the verb
The efficacy of anaphoricity in Aleut
Jerrold M. Sadock 97114
Objective conjugations in Eskaleut and Uralic: Evidence from Inuit and Mansi
Marc-Antoine Mahieu 115134
Complex verb formation revisited: Restructuring in Inuktitut and 
Nuu-chah-nulth
Christine M. Pittman 135147
Determining the semantics of Inuktitut postbases
Conor Cook and Alana Johns 149170
The marking of past time in Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language
Naja Frederikke Trondhjem 171182
Part III. Discourses and contacts
Tracking topics: A comparison of topic in Aleut and Greenlandic discourse
Anna Berge 185200
Arguments and information management in Inuktitut
Elke Nowak 201214
Space and structure in Greenlandic oral tradition
Arnaq Grove 215230
Grammatical structures in Greenlandic as found in texts written by 
young Greenlanders at the turn of the millennium
Karen Langg?rd 231247
Chat  New rooms for language contact
Birgitte Jacobsen 249260
Seward Peninsula Inupiaq and language contact around Bering Strait
Lawrence D. Kaplan 261272
Typological constraints on code mixing in InuktitutEnglish bilingual adults
Shanley Allen, Fred Genesee, Sarah Fish and Martha Crago 273306
Index of languages  307308
Index of subjects  309312

Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com)
General Manager
John Benjamins Publishing Company
763 N. 24th St.
Philadelphia PA  19130
Phone: 215 769-3444
Fax: 215 769-3446
John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com 


From paul at benjamins.com  Fri May 22 15:19:20 2009
From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau)
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 11:19:20 -0400
Subject: New Benjamins title- Givon/Shibatani: Syntactic Complexity
Message-ID: <FRI.22.MAY.2009.111920.0400.PAUL@BENJAMINS.COM>

Syntactic Complexity
Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution
  Edited by T. Giv?n and Masayoshi Shibatani
University of Oregon / Rice University
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=TSL%2085Typological 
Studies in Language 85

2009. vi, 553 pp.
Hardbound  978 90 272 2999 1 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00
Paperback 978 90 272 3000 3 / EUR 36.00 / USD 54.00
e-Book  Not yet available 978 90 272 9014 4 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00

Complex hierarchic syntax is considered one of the hallmarks of human 
language. The highest level of syntactic complexity, 
recursive-embedded clauses, has been singled out by some for a 
special status as the apex of the uniquely-human language 
facultyevolutionary but somehow immune to adaptive selection. This 
volume, coming out of a symposium held at Rice University in March 
2008, tackles syntactic complexity from multiple developmental 
perspectives. We take it for granted that grammar is an adaptive 
instrument of communication, assembled upon the pre-existing platform 
of pre-linguistic cognition. Most of the papers in the volume deal 
with the two grand developmental trends of human language: diachrony, 
the communal enterprise directly responsible for fashioning 
synchronic morpho-syntax; and ontogeny, the individual endeavor 
directly responsible for the acquisition of competent grammatical 
performance. The genesis of syntactic complexity along these two 
developmental trends is considered alongside with the cognition and 
neurology of grammar and of syntactic complexity, and the 
evolutionary relevance of diachrony, ontogeny and pidginization is 
argued on general bio-evolutionary grounds. Lastly, several of the 
contributions to the volume suggest that recursive embedding is not 
in itself an adaptive target, but rather the by-product of two 
distinct adaptive gambits: the recruitment of conjoined clauses as 
modal operators on other clauses and the subsequent condensation of 
paratactic into syntactic structures.


Table of contents

Introduction
T. Giv?n 120
Part I. Diachrony
 From nominal to clausal morphosyntax: Complexity via expansion
Bernd Heine 2352
Re(e)volving complexity: Adding intonation
Marianne Mithun 5380
Multiple routes to clause union: The diachrony of complex verb phrases
T. Giv?n 81118
On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam
Andrew Pawley 119144
A quantitative approach to the development of complex predicates: The 
case of Swedish Pseudo-Coordination with sitta "sit"
Martin Hilpert and Christian Koops 145162
Elements of complex structures, where recursion isn't: The case of 
relativization
Masayoshi Shibatani 163198
Nominalization and the origin of subordination
Guy Deutscher 199214
The co-evolution of syntactic and pragmatic complexity: Diachronic 
and cross-linguistic aspects of pseudoclefts
Christian Koops and Martin Hilpert 215238
Two pathways of grammatical evolution
?sten Dahl 239248
Part II. Child language
On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject 
and non-subject relative clauses
Holger Diessel 251276
'Starting small' effects in the acquisition of early relative 
constructions in Spanish
Cecilia Rojas-Nieto 277310
The ontogeny of complex verb phrases: How children learn to negotiate 
fact and desire
T. Giv?n 311388
Part III. Cognition and neurology
Syntactic complexity versus concatenation in a verbal production task
Marjorie Barker and Eric Pederson 391404
The emergence of linguistic complexity
Brian MacWhinney 405432
Cognitive and neural underpinnings of syntactic complexity
Diego Fernandez-Duque 433460
Neural mechanisms of recursive processing in cognitive and linguistic 
complexity
Don M. Tucker, Phan Luu and Catherine Poulsen 461490
Syntactic complexity in the brain
Angela D. Friederici and Jens Brauer 491506
Part IV. Biology and evolution
Neural plasticity: The driving force underlying the complexity of the brain
Nathan Tublitz 509530
Recursion: Core of complexity or artifact of analysis?
Derek Bickerton 531544
Index  545553


Paul Peranteau (paul at benjamins.com)
General Manager
John Benjamins Publishing Company
763 N. 24th St.
Philadelphia PA  19130
Phone: 215 769-3444
Fax: 215 769-3446
John Benjamins Publishing Co. website: http://www.benjamins.com 


From eitkonen at utu.fi  Tue May 26 09:10:39 2009
From: eitkonen at utu.fi (Esa Itkonen)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 12:10:39 +0300
Subject: pitfalls of complexity
In-Reply-To: <4A1426CE.9080707@uoregon.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.121039.0300.EITKONEN@UTU.FI>

Dear Tom: Thank you for your comments on "Concerning Dahl's (2004) notion of linguistic complexity". Contrary to what you seem to think, this is not about your relationship to Hermann Paul. Surely you are yourself the only person competent enough to write about such a topic (and about many, many other topics as well).
Esa

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen

----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:52 pm
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] pitfalls of complexity
To: Esa Itkonen <eitkonen at utu.fi>
Cc: funknet at mailman.rice.edu


> Well now, Esa. To take a youthful slogan out of context, not cite the 
> 
> fuller (some still erroneous, of course) details of the original 1971 
> 
> paper, not cite the considerable elaborations & corrections in "On 
> Understanding Grammar" (1979; chs 5,6), not cite the countless 
> following 
> papers that corrected & elaborated & expanded on the diachronic 
> relation 
> between morphology & syntax, not only mine but many others', and then 
> to 
> skip over altogether the recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
> 
> (2009), is not exactly an edifying way of reviewing the topic. While I 
> 
> do count Hermann Paul as my all-time guru in linguistics, with all do 
> 
> respect we do know some things now that the great IE tradition did 
> not. 
> Not much more, but some. And we do know them because some of them, 
> particularly H. Paul, pointed the way toward a broader 
> cross-disciplinary approach to language.  Best,  TG
> 
> ================
> 
> 
> Esa Itkonen wrote:
> > Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost 
> everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if 
> you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as 
> full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> > Esa
> >
> > Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
> >
> >   
> 


From martin.hilpert at frias.uni-freiburg.de  Tue May 26 09:58:35 2009
From: martin.hilpert at frias.uni-freiburg.de (martin.hilpert)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 11:58:35 +0200
Subject: 10 Ph.D. Scholarships, University of Freiburg
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.115835.0200.MARTIN.HILPERT@FRIAS.UNIFREIBURG.DE>

* Apologies for multiple postings *


10 Ph.D. Scholarships in Linguistics ?Frequency effects in language?

The *University of Freiburg*, one of Germany?s nine Universities of 
Excellence, invites applications for 10 fully-funded Ph.D. scholarships 
in linguistics, beginning no earlier than October 1, 2009, and no later 
than March 1, 2010. Successful applicants will be members of the 
*Research Training Group* on ?Frequency effects in language? 
(Graduiertenkolleg GRK 1624/1) funded by the German Research Foundation 
(DFG).

*Frequency* is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based 
models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. 
In the Ph.D. projects this determinant will be investigated with a view 
both to its explanatory potential and its limitations. The envisaged 
research integrates descriptive-linguistic and 
cognitivist-psycholinguistic approaches and is empirically based on 
corpora for standard and non-standard varieties of European languages.
We offer a *high-profile research environment*, an interdisciplinary 
*teaching programme*, a full* *grant of *13,200 ? per annum* for a 
period of up to *3 years*, and additional grants covering travel and 
research expenses.
For more information on the Research Training Group, envisaged Ph.D. 
projects, and application details, please visit our website: 
*http://www.hpsl.uni-freiburg.de/grk-frequenz 
<http://www.hpsl.uni-freiburg.de/grk-frequenz>*

*Deadline for application: June 22, 2009***


From Julia.Ulrich at degruyter.com  Tue May 26 11:48:59 2009
From: Julia.Ulrich at degruyter.com (Ulrich, Julia)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 13:48:59 +0200
Subject: TOC  Language and Cognition Volume 1/Issue 1 (2009)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.134859.0200.JULIA.ULRICH@DEGRUYTER.COM>

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION 
Volume 1/Issue 1 (2009)is now available   
http://www.reference-global.com/toc/langcog/current


TABLE OF CONTENTS

How do infants build a semantic system?
Suzy J. Styles, Kim Plunkett

The cognitive poetics of literary resonance
Peter Stockwell

Action in cognition: The case of language
Lawrence J. Taylor, Rolf A. Zwaan

Prototype constructions in early language acquisition
Paul Ibbotson, Michael Tomasello

The enactment of language: Decades of interactions between linguistic and motor processes
Sarah E. Anderson, Michael J. Spivey

Episodic affordances contribute to language comprehension
Arthur M. Glenberg, Raymond Becker, Susann Kl?tzer, Lidia Kolanko, Silvana M?ller, Mike Rinck

Reviews


ABOUT THE JOURNAL

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION is an exciting new interdisciplinary journal of language and cognitive science. It is a venue for the publication of high quality peer-reviewed research of a theoretical, empirical and/or experimental nature, focusing on the interface between language and cognition. It publishes, and is open to, research from the full range of subject disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and analytical frameworks that populate the language and cognitive sciences, on a wide range of topics. Research published in the journal typically adopts an interdisciplinary, comparative, multi-methodological approach to the study of language and cognition and their intersection. 

The journal is edited by Daniel Casasanto (MPI Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen), Seana Coulson (UCSD), Vyvyan Evans (Bangor University), Laura Michaelis (University of Colorado, Boulder), David Kemmerer (Purdue University) and Chris Sinha (Portsmouth University).

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION is the official journal of the UK-Cognitive Linguistics Association (UK-CLA). Individual members of the UK-CLA are entitled to free online access to LANGUAGE AND COGNITION. Membership is free in 2009 and reduced by 50% in 2010. The UK-CLA is open to all regardless of geographical base, nationality or theoretical background. For membership details, please refer to www.languageandcognition.net or contact Vyvyan Evans at v.evans at bangor.ac.uk. For more information on the journal, please see www.degruyter.com/journals/langcog



Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Julia Ulrich
Product Marketing Manager?
Genthiner Strasse 13
10785 Berlin
Germany

Email: julia.ulrich at degruyter.com
www.mouton-publishers.com
www.degruyter.com

Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. Genthiner Str. 13. 10785 Berlin. Sitz Berlin. Amtsgericht Charlottenburg HR A 2065. Rechtsform: Kommanditgesellschaft. 
Komplement?r: de Gruyter Verlagsbeteiligungs GmbH, Sitz Berlin, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HR B 46487.
Gesch?ftsf?hrer: Dr. Sven Fund, Beiratsvorsitzender: Dr. Bernd Balzereit.

?? sustainable thinking...please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to


From thompsoc at ipfw.edu  Tue May 26 18:56:02 2009
From: thompsoc at ipfw.edu (Chad Thompson)
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:56:02 -0400
Subject: Conference on Community-Based Language Revival, Aug. 28-30
Message-ID: <TUE.26.MAY.2009.145602.0400.THOMPSOC@IPFW.EDU>

2009 Conference on Community-Based Language Revival

Hosted by
The Three Rivers Language Center
Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
August 28-30, 2009
http://www.ipfw.edu/trlc/

Community and tribal organizations, educators, linguists, and anyone
else interested are invited to participate in a conference on reviving
endangered languages. Special emphasis will be on the participation of
the language community. Abstracts are now being taken for conference
presentations, sessions, and workshops.

The keynote address will be given by Daryl Baldwin of the Myaamia
Project at Miami University and Scott Shoemaker of the Miami Nation of
Indiana. The conference will also include dinner with an Old Order Amish
family and a special viewing of original prints from the Curtis
collection.

Registration Form: http://www.ipfw.edu/trlc/Registration.pdf 

Chad Thompson
Conference on Community-Based Language Revival
Department of Anthropology
Indiana-University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
2101 Coliseum Blvd.
Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499
or
ThompsoC at ipfw.edu
Phone: 260-481-6101 
Fax: 260-481-6880


From phonosemantics at earthlink.net  Thu May 28 22:50:03 2009
From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (jess tauber)
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 18:50:03 -0400
Subject: Temporal/parietal pathways
Message-ID: <THU.28.MAY.2009.185003.0400.PHONOSEMANTICS@EARTHLINK.NET>

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090526140733.htm

If similar pathways exist in lower primates, can this imply that their vocalizations might sometimes be complex structurally?

As an elaboration of verb serialization, so-called bipartite constructions can include, in more productive systems such as in Yahgan, both pathway/position and manner/bodypart/instrument terms.

Something reminiscent of this (with opposite control) also appears to occur in the most elaborate ideophonic forms, as in Santali (Munda).

Are these systems 'maximal' in some sense? Do such strings involve a combination of processes from both pathways? Could some call systems in animals combine units in the same spirit?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net


From akbari_r at yahoo.com  Sun May 31 06:45:55 2009
From: akbari_r at yahoo.com (Ramin Akbari)
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 23:45:55 -0700
Subject: International conference on applied linguistics: final call for
 papers
Message-ID: <SAT.30.MAY.2009.234555.0700.AKBARIR@YAHOO.COM>

Final call for papers
?
The International Conference on Applied Linguistics: Developments, Challenges, and Promises will be held in Tehran ?s ( Iran ) ?Milad Tower Conference Hall on September 26-27, 2009. The conference aims at exploring some vital issues in applied linguistics that have shaped, and are still shaping the identity of the profession. Applied linguists from across the globe are invited to contribute to a lively debate that would include ideas from some of the prominent figures of the field. 
? 
Different themes will be explored in the course of the two-day conference: applied linguistics and its definitions; globalization and its impact on ELT; applied linguistics and English as the world?s lingua franca; post method era and teacher qualifications; research debates in applied linguistics ?. 
? 
The keynote speakers for the conference are (alphabetically arranged): 
? 
Professor Guy Cook, The Open University, London?
Professor Hossein Farhady, American University of Armenia 
Professor Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney 
Professor Barbara Seidlhofer, University of Vienna 
Professor Henry Widdowson, University of Vienna 
? 
Pre-conference workshop (September 25): 
Alternative assessment: Dr. Chirstine Coombe, Higher College of Technology, UAE 
? 
The deadline for abstract submission is June 14, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be sent by July 10. Early registration deadline is August 5; all the participants whose papers have been accepted must register before the deadline. 
? 
To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website at: www.appliedlinguistics.ir 
? 
For any queries, please contact me at: akbari_ram at yahoo.com 
?
?

Ramin Akbari
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
Department of ELT
Tarbiat Modares University
Tehran
Iran