Emergent Grammar Research Articles

THE IDEA OF AN INDIGENOUS CHINESE GRAMMAR

As Chinese linguistics encounters a more developed general linguistics, two opposite reactions emerged. One is to learn and imitate, while the other is to learn and innovate. As a visionary, William S-Y. Wang (1999) innovates. He rejected purely formal theories such as the Generative Grammar and envisioned an Indigenous Chinese Grammar (ICG) that takes culture into consideration. Echoing Wang’s seminal vision, we offer a possible ICG. We focus on the perplexing pair of cai2 才 (‘necessary’) and jiu4 就 (‘sufficient’). Both cai2 and jiu4 have divergent meanings that may be closely related, well related, remotely related, or even dubiously related. (See for example, you3qian2 cai2 jia4 ta1 ‘Marry him only if he is rich’, ta1 cai2 lai2 ‘He has just come’, wo3 cai2 you3qian2 ‘I am the one that has money’, wo3 cai2 bu2 pao4 ne0 ‘I contrary to anybody’s expectation am not afraid’.) Traditional formal theories seem unable to explain this wide range of divergence. But an Emergent Grammar (EG) can. Given a composition, EG enables its two elements to ‘interact’ into a largely unpredictable result. Free interactions in a specific context produce flexible results, making the derived meanings often unpredictable, as one would expect from a Complex system as opposed to a Complicated system. Realized as a complex-systematic approach to Chinese grammar, Wang’s brilliant insight of ICG could well inspire and help launch a fresh advancement path in Chinese linguistics.

Conjuring the Caliphate: Race, Muslim Politics, and the Tribulation of Surveillance

ABSTRACT In light of the recent visibility of police violence, the American public has increasingly called for law enforcement reforms. What remains missing from these conversations is how reformist or counterinsurgency policing in the United States as developed during the domestic War on Terror depends on anti-Muslim racism and invokes the specter of a so-called “Islamist Caliphate.” This essay troubles racialized notions of the caliphate and narratives about Muslim youth radicalization by considering the relevance of the caliphate concept to Muslim Americans in the surveillance age. It examines how youth of color in Greater Los Angeles, CA, targeted by surveillance infrastructures, invoke stories from the Islamic past to reckon with their own tribulation under emergent regimes of antiterror policing. As such, it probes into how the emergent grammar of a caliphate of care enables ethico-political projects to create the time and space for Islamic virtue to thrive in Southern California.

How and When to Sign “Hey!” Socialization into Grammar in Z, a 1st Generation Family Sign Language from Mexico

“Z” is a young sign language developing in a family whose hearing members speak Tzotzil (Mayan). Three deaf siblings, together with an intervening hearing sister and a hearing niece, formed the original cohort of signing adults. A hearing son of the original signer became the first native signer of a second generation. Z provides evidence for a classic grammaticalization chain linking a sign requesting attention (HEY1) to a pragmatic turn-initiating particle (HEY2), which signals a new utterance or change of topic. Such an emergent grammatical particle linked to the pragmatic exigencies of communication is a primordial example of emergent grammar. The chapter presents the stages in the son’s language socialization and acquisition of HEY1 and HEY2, starting at 11 months, through his subsequent bilingual development in both Z and Tzotzil, jointly deploying other communicative modalities such as gaze and touch. It proposes a series of stages leading, by 4 years of age, to his understanding of the complex sequential structure that using the sign involves. Acquiring pragmatic signs such as HEY in Z demonstrates how the grammar of a language, including an emergent sign language, is built upon the practices of a language community and the basic expected parameters of local social life.

The Emergence of the Pragmatic Function of Construction "<i>Di-</i>Noun (of Person)"

The core viewpoint of Emergent Grammar is that grammatical structure and its meaning emerge in process of language use. The meaning of construction is the whole is greater than sum of parts, and conceptual integration of construction is process and meaning of its emergence. By discussing emergent process, motivation and mechanism of construction of Di-Noun (of person) in Shunde dialect, this paper holds that emergent meaning of construction generates from prototype structure to construction form, and its features of constructionalization emerge in aspects of syntactic structure, semantic and pragmatic functions. For one hand, degree of integration between forms and meanings of construction Di-Noun (of person) rises, thus its meaning can not be deduced from its literal meaning; semantic restriction on construction increases, which leads to increase of solidification of structure and meaning ; subjective interaction gradually becomes prominent, thus construction expresses speaker's subjective evaluation and concern towards hearer. On other hand, on-site, interactive and immediate nature of conversation is pragmatic condition for emergence of meaning and function of construction. Emergent Grammar offers important enlightenment to study of construction and constructionalization that not only effect of syntactic environment on construction but also role of conversational environment should be carefully examined.

A dynamic network analysis of emergent grammar

For languages to survive as complex cultural systems, they need to be learnable. According to traditional approaches, learning is made possible by constraining the degrees of freedom in advance of experience and by the construction of complex structure during development. This article explores a third contributor to complexity: namely, the extent to which syntactic structure can be an emergent property of how simpler entities – words – interact with one another. The authors found that when naturalistic child directed speech was instantiated in a dynamic network, communities formed around words that were more densely connected with other words than they were with the rest of the network. This process is designed to mirror what we know about distributional patterns in natural language: namely, the network communities represented the syntactic hubs of semi-formulaic slot-and-frame patterns, characteristic of early speech. The network itself was blind to grammatical information and its organization reflected (a) the frequency of using a word and (b) the probabilities of transitioning from one word to another. The authors show that grammatical patterns in the input disassociate by community structure in the emergent network. These communities provide coherent hubs which could be a reliable source of syntactic information for the learner. These initial findings are presented here as proof-of-concept in the hope that other researchers will explore the possibilities and limitations of this approach on a larger scale and with more languages. The implications of a dynamic network approach are discussed for the learnability burden and the development of an adult-like grammar.

Spontaneous spoken English: An integrated approach to the emergent grammar of speech by Alexander Haselow

Spontaneous spoken English: An integrated approach to the emergent grammar of speech by Alexander Haselow

Book review: Alexander Haselow, Spontaneous Spoken English: An Integrated Approach to the Emergent Grammar of Speech

Book review: Alexander Haselow, <i>Spontaneous Spoken English: An Integrated Approach to the Emergent Grammar of Speech</i>

Alexander Haselow, Spontaneous spoken English: An integrated approach to the emergent grammar of speech (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 326.

Alexander Haselow, Spontaneous spoken English: An integrated approach to the emergent grammar of speech (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 326. - Volume 54 Issue 3

Multimodal existential constructions in German: Manual actions of giving as experiential substrate for grammatical and gestural patterns

AbstractTaking an Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1998) approach to multimodal usage events in face-to-face interaction, this paper suggests that basic scenes of experience tend to motivate entrenched patterns in both language and gesture (Fillmore 1977; Goldberg 1998; Langacker 1987). Manual actions and interactions with the material and social world, such as giving or holding, have been shown to serve as substrate for prototypical ditransitive and transitive constructions in language (Goldberg 1995). It is proposed here that they may also underpin multimodal instantiations of existential construsctions in German discourse, namely, instances of the es gibt ‘it gives’ (there is/are) construction (Newman 1998) that co-occur with schematic gestural enactments of giving or holding something. Analyses show that gestural existential markers tend to combine referential and pragmatic functions. They exhibit a muted degree of indexicality, pointing to the existence of absent or abstract discourse contents that are central to the speaker’s subjective expressivity. Furthermore, gestural existential markers show characteristics of grammaticalization processes in spoken and signed languages (Bybee 2013; Givón 1985; Haiman 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003). A multimodal construction grammar needs to account for how linguistic constructions combine with gestural patterns into commonly used cross-modal clusters in different languages and contexts of use.

Frequency effects and structural change - the Afrikaans preterite

According to emergent grammar and exemplar theory in cognitive linguistics, the frequency of an item affects its behaviour in terms of structural change. In this article, I illustrate how high frequency items, such as preterital modal auxiliaries and copulas in Afrikaans, resist regularising with the rest of the Afrikaans verbal system. Items with a moderately high frequency can resist change for a time, but succumb to it eventually, such as mog (“might”) and wis (“knew”). While the course of change can also be affected by other factors, such as het (“have”) and had (“had”), and dink (“think”) and gedink/dag/dog (“thought”) show, the data in diachronic Afrikaans corpora from 1911 to 2010 confirm that high frequency items resist structural change to a large extent, while low frequency items do not. This links with the cognitive representation of language and language processing, and illustrates how the use of language shapes the structure of language.

Editorial: Is the Language Faculty Nonlinguistic?

Editorial: Is the Language Faculty Nonlinguistic?

Rethinking format: An examination of requests

AbstractThis study explores the formulation of requests in an American English-speaking shoe repair shop. Taking prior work on request formats as our starting point, we explore the two primary syntactic moods (declarative and interrogative) in our collection and two of the commonly noted subtypes of these moods,need/want-declaratives andcan-interrogatives. While our findings in very general terms match those of previous studies, we also find significant grammatical variation within each of these formats, and note interactional uses for each variation. Our examination yields insight into facets of requesting that were previously undescribed. We offer an Emergent Grammar perspective on the complexity of lexicosyntax in the social action of requesting. (Requests, formats, Emergent Grammar, Conversation Analysis, American English, service encounters)*

Verb–object compounds with Spanish dar ‘give’: an emergent gustar ‘like’-type construction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a usage-based approach to psychological constructions with dar ‘give’ in Spanish (e.g. me daba vergüenza pedir dinero en casa ‘I was embarrassed to ask for money at home’). Previous studies [Cuervo, Cristina. 2010. Two types of (apparently) ditransitive light verb constructions. In Karlos Arregi, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Silvina Montrul & Annie Tremblay (eds.), Romance linguistics 2008: Interactions in romance. Selected papers from the 38th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Urbana-Champaign, April 2008, 139–56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins] analyze these constructions as intransitive gustar ‘like’-type constructions. However, this analysis can only account for 40% of the examples we find in our corpus. Using natural occurring data taken from the oral section of Corpus del español [Davies, Mark. 2002. Corpus del español (100 million words, 1200s–1900s) (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org)] we provide an ‘emic’ or bottom-up approach [Hopper, Paul. 1998. Emergent grammar. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to linguistic structure, 155–75. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Erlbaum; Hopper, Paul. 2004. The openness of grammatical constructions. Chicago Linguistic Society 40/2. 153–75] to these constructions by studying their recurrent grammatical patterns. The analysis of the examples we extract from the corpus reveals an emergent construction, namely [indirect object – dar + noun – subject] toward which specific tokens of use are moved. This construction is, however, open-ended, with fuzzy boundaries and constitutes the end-point of a grammaticalization process that is never reached. What we find in the data is a collection of examples that relate to each other through formal and functional resemblances.

Phonology without universal grammar.

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the human mind. The articulation patterns of American English rhotics illustrate categorization and systems; the distribution of vowels in Bantu vowel harmony uses frequencies of particular sequences to argue against Universal Grammar and in favor of Emergent Grammar; prefix allomorphy in Esimbi illustrates the Emergent symbolic system integrating phonological and morphological generalizations. The Esimbi case has been treated as an example of phonological opacity in a Universal Grammar account; the Emergent analysis resolves the pattern without opacity concerns.

Alignment in vision-based syntactic language games for teams of robots using stochastic regular grammars and reinforcement learning: The fully autonomous case and the human supervised case

This paper approaches the syntactic alignment of a robot team by means of dialogic language games and by applying online probabilistic reinforcement learning algorithms. The syntactic alignment is studied under two different configurations of the robot team: (a) when the team is formed exclusively by robots and (b) when a human is included in the team, in which case the human is endowed with a natural language to communicate with the other members of the team. For the two above mentioned cases, we are interested in the analysis of the convergence of the team to an optimal common language. The main contribution of the paper is the application of stochastic regular grammars, with learning capability, to generate the robots team’s language. Apart from the analysis of the convergence to a common language in the case of a fully autonomous robot team without human intervention we are also particularly interested in analyzing how the syntactic alignment of the robot team can be influenced or mediated by humans. The paper is organized as follows: first, we describe the syntactic language games, in particular the type of grammar and syntactic rules of the robots team’s language and the dynamic process of the language games which are based on dialogic communicative acts and a reinforcement learning policy that allows the robot team to converge to a common language. Afterwards, the experimental results are presented and discussed. The experimental work has been organized around the linguistic description of visual scenes of the blocks world type. The general conclusion of our experiments can be briefly stated in this way: “for the fully autonomous case (only robots) the final emergent grammar is arbitrary, while in the second case of including a human in the team the final emergent grammar is the one used by the human”.

Complementation in linear and dialogic syntax: The case of Hebrew divergently aligned discourse

AbstractThis study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer še- ‘that’, via a question word, or via the conditional conjunction 'im ‘if ’). However, the dialogic alignment of these forms with their preceding utterances reflects a complex picture, in which some patterns are still definable by linear syntax, but others are not accounted for by these traditional terms. Rather, the application of the Dialogic Syntax framework calls into question defining such constructions from a purely structural perspective and supports a more fluid, Emergent Grammar approach. Moreover, we illustrate how dialogic actions in fact motivate the interaction-based grammaticization of new constructions, culminating, in the case of the constructions examined here, in the emergence of discourse markers.

The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ with a bare English infinitive

This study examines the bilingual compound verb hacer ‘to do’+VerbEng, consisting of the Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ and a bare English infinitive (e.g. hacer smoke ‘to smoke’). In studies of Spanish/English bilingual speech, hacer+VerbEng has received attention due to its linguistically hybrid nature. Examining 116 tokens of hacer+VerbEng from 12 speakers of the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, we test the claim that this construction has developed out of a higher cognitive load or lexical gap experienced by bilingual speakers, create a discourse profile of the construction, and propose an overview of the bilingual behaviors that contribute to the emergence of this bilingual compound verb. The construction is not found in conjunction with significantly higher rates of disfluencies, which weakens the previously made assertions that it is produced to compensate for a lexical gap. We find that hacer+VerbEng is a productive bilingual construction in which hacer serves as a tense, aspect and mood marker and the English infinitive provides the lexical content. Linguistic behavioral profiles reveal that combining languages within a single prosodic unit is correlated with higher rates of hacer+VerbEng.

Fingerprint, bellwether, model event: Climate change as speculative anthropology

The climate change fingerprint, bellwether and model event are three epistemic figures through which it may be possible to know the future through attention to specific material relations. They offer an emergent grammar to help make sense of the rapid transformations in planetary ecology over the past decade due to climate change. What was before experienced as modeled scenarios about future change is now increasingly confirmed. But the experience is characterized equally by uncertainties about the precise implications of these global changes. These terms demonstrate explicit reflection on uncertainty through material practices of thinking, what I identify as a kind of speculative materialism. What becomes apparent is that anthropology itself is at stake to the extent that anthropogenic climate change problematizes the ecological dimensions of Earth at home. I propose the term viability to explore thresholds of ecological value that are not uniquely tied to human observers and which call for imaginative and evaluative judgment about the subtle yet pervasive changes at work in planetary ecology.

Decreolization as emergent grammar(s)

A restructured variety of Spanish spoken by small communities of Afro-descendents in Bolivia differs from modern Spanish in exhibiting no noun-adjective agreement for gender or number. Only a few individuals continue to speak this most basilectal variety; the majority of speakers exhibit at least some gender and number concord, in a fashion that proceeds generally rightward, from determiners and other prenominal modifiers to head nouns, postnominal modifiers, and predicate nominatives/adjectives. Number concord (plural marking) usually appears before gender concord in mesolectal varieties, and occurs at a higher rate than gender concord across the entire range of Afro-Bolivian speakers. A variationist analysis based on a corpus of recorded material suggests that this gradual emergence of (feminine) gender and plural marking represents a systematic form of decreolization governed largely by structural principles, namely the stepwise activation of agreement projections. Decreolization is represented as a series of nested intermediate grammars, each of which properly contains the preceding one(s).

Vers de nouvelles approches théoriques du langage et du plurilinguisme

Atemporal and context-free views of langue have been replaced by models focusing on context-bounded processes of sense-making and a strong determination of linguistic forms by the socio-cognitive functions of language. However, the view of separate, closed rule systems for each single language still prevails. Based on Hopper’s emergent grammar and socio-constructivist models of language acquisition, we argue, firstly, that language is a praxis rather than a structure, i.e. an open, dynamic and complex system that undergoes change each time it is used. We also strongly question the endoxa that different languages are bound to geographically and politically separate spaces. Highly polyglossic societies are the rule, where plurilingual repertoires represent resources upon which interlocutors can draw to solve their communicative tasks either by sticking to one language at a time or by blended combinations or multilanguaging. It is well known that such mixing follows norms which represent a multilingual emergent grammar. Finally, we call for language theories to explain multilanguaging as one of several forms of normal language behaviour.