Linguistic Objects Research Articles

Paradygmat antropocentryczny jako kategoria lingwistyczna w badaniu obiektów językowych

This study constitutes an attempt to present views from contemporary cognitive linguistics on the definition and realization of the anthropocentric paradigm in the language system. On the basis of reseachers' opinions, the author comes to the conclusion that a language can be analyzed as a peculiar semantic system whose realization is related to a human being. The available results of linguistic object studies, which take into consideration the anthropocentric paradigm, prove that nowadays anthropocentrism should be presented as a linguistic category.

Terms between Standardization and the Mental Lexicon

Classical terminology, as reflected in the works of Eugen Wuster, assumes that the meaning of terms should be delimited precisely. Prototype theory can be seen as an existential threat to this approach, because it assumes that there is a gradual transition from clear instances of a concept to non-instances, without a natural cut-off point. The discussion of terms from a variety of different domains suggests that we should distinguish two types, called here terms in the narrow sense (TiNS) and specialized vocabulary . For specialized vocabulary, it is not a problem that concepts have a prototype structure. For TiNS, a clear delimitation of the meaning is required. The introduction of TiNS as a special kind of term raises the question of their status as linguistic objects. For a word, there is no purely empirical basis to determine whether it exists as a word of English (or any other language), because neither English as a language nor any of its words are empirical entities. They exist as theoretical generalizations about speakers’ competence. TiNS are different. They are argued to exist as abstract entities in the same way as pieces of music.

Structural and Semantic Features of People’s Memoirs in Internet Communication

People’s memoirs as a speech genre of Internet communication are discussed. The definition of people’s memoirs is given as memoirs, the author of which is not a professional writer, but an ordinary native speaker. The purpose of the author is dictated, firstly, by the linguistic interest in the study of memoirs from the perspective of one of the most actively developing directions of modern linguistics - genre studies within the context; secondly, by the need of studying the laws of change of the traditional (which had originally a paper base) genres in the process of developing the new communication space. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that for the first time in this paper, Internet-genre of people’s memoirs acts as a linguistic object of study - along with existing philological tradition of the study of literary genre and traditional speech genre beyond the professional literary creativity. The structural-semantic parameters of Internet-genre of people’s memoirs are analyzed according to genre model developed by L. Yu. Shipitsina. In the framework of the description of these parameters the structural organization of the genre is set and described, as well as the content embodied in its structural elements. It is proved that the structural and substantial features of Internet genre of people’s memoirs are subject to modification compared to the traditional genre of people’s memoirs with a paper substrate.

Listing between lexicon and syntax: focus on frame-naming lists

The goal of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we advocate the view that ‘listing’ (Masini et al. this issue) is a cross-level mechanism with cognitive grounding that manifests itself in various ways along the lexicon-syntax continuum. Indeed, we claim that some linguistic objects pertaining to the morphological and lexical level (as e.g. coordinating compounds, reduplications, (ir)reversible binomials) are structurally and functionally similar to freely created syntactic lists. On the other hand, we analyze a so far underdescribed type of lists in-between lexicon and syntax. Lists are often seen as instances of 'natural coordination' (Walchli 2005) where the conjuncts are lexico-semantically related; however, there are lists where the conjuncts are, rather, frame-related, i.e., by virtue of occurring in a list, they either evoke or build a frame, which may be either established or context-dependent. In this respect, we present two corpus-based case-studies from Italian concerning the V1+and+V2 construction (e.g. 'gratta e sosta' ‘scratch and park ticket’, lit. ‘scratch and park’) and he all+list construction (e.g. 'tutto casa e chiesa' ‘pious, churchy’, lit. ‘all home and church’). We discuss and analyze our data with the tools of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006) and Construction Morphology (Booij 2010)

Перспективы использования гнездового принципа систематизации при исследовании текста

The article contains the reasons and prospects of using the nest principle of classification of linguistic phenomena which is traditionally applied to classify language and speech units at derivational, lexical and syntactic levels of the languagesystem, while investigating sets of texts. The reason of using the nest principle of texts classification is isomorphism of nest structure at different levels of the language system, as well as unification of linguistic definitions. The main purposes of the nest principle of texts classification are to determine the degree of dynamic interaction between texts at the plane of content and at the plane of form, to define interaction and correlation of content and form, syntagmatic and paradigmatic as well as synchronic and diachronic aspects of interacting linguistic objects. Applying the nest principle of classification to the study of texts gives an opportunity to analyze sets of texts as dynamic units and to make a full-scale study of principles and consistent patterns of their development and functioning.

Fuzzy Logic Based Teaching/Learning of a Foreign Language in Multilingual Situations

The concept of Fuzzy Logic (FL) has gained momentum in areas of artificial intelligence and allied researches because of its absolute ability to present efficient solutions to real life problems. Contrary to the paradigmatic approach to the solutions of being either absolutely true or false [0 or 1] the fuzzy sets provide a range of possible outputs with error prone inputs which are vague and inaccurate using linguistic objects instead of mere mathematical numbers. A multilingual situation poses a similar challenge for a language teacher/learner where languages exist in continuum. Learners with heavy mother tongue influence tend to use their natural languages instinctively in a way that can create their own fuzzy rules to encounter the situation of being taught an entirely new language. A typical Indian language classroom is highly multilingual where scope of errors is numerous though they are ignored. This leads to stress both for the teachers as well as the learners making the classroom ambience more mechanistic than human. To combat such situations FL based Three-Phase Model of language teaching has been proposed which derives its basis on the presumption that the language instructor is aware of general rules of linguistics. An empirical longitudinal study on 150 undergraduate technical students designed on the proposed framework has been conducted to establish the efficiency and the success of the model. Observing language pedagogy through the lens of fuzzy logic and fuzzy thinking will not only make the classroom more real-like but it will also tap the pre-existing linguistic knowledge of the learners. Language interference will be more of a resource than a challenge.

Argumentos y explicaciones causales ordinarios: distinción teórica

In this paper I will try to show in its main lines, from some of Frege’s and Margáin-Davidson’s thesis, the theoretical framework from which we can draw the distinction between ordinary reasonings and causal explanations. Such framework clearly arises observing that reasonings and explanations belong to different kinds of linguistic objects, and that there are at least four different types of explanations corresponding to four different senses of the term ‘cause’: cause as (necessary and/or sufficient) condition and cause as causal event. This emerges from such drawing: explanations presupposing the notion of cause in the conditional sense are reducible to reasonings; but not those presupposing it in the sense of causal event. The main point of all of this resides in the enormous similitude that exists between ordinary reasonings and explanations, and in that it has been sustained, inside the subject’s literature (remarkably in Hempel), that such explanations, being just a kind of enthymematic reasoning, are necessarily incomplete, provisional or mere sketches needed of justification; but they are not. The picture that eventually emerges on such distinctions is this: ordinary reasonings and explanations are two relatively distinct types of discourses with a vast common zone of intersection, but with huge disjunct or detached zones between them too.

Reality in a soft science: the metaphonology of historical reconstruction

All disciplines that deal with (apparent) recovery of objects from the past are faced by a fundamental question: what is the metaphysical status of these objects? Are they realia of some kind, or are they merely epistemic objects with no substance? This could be summed up from a debate still going on in quantum physics: do quantum systems have a real existence, or are they merely devices for calculation? In this paper I sum up the advantages of having an ontology, and the disadvantages of assuming that reconstructed linguistic objects are not real. I also discuss the uniformitarian position that makes this an unproblematic claim. I also deal with the neo-Saussurean claim that reconstructed items have no reality in themselves, but solely in terms of the systems they are in; and I suggest that this position (held by Meillet and Kuryłowicz among others), is fundamentally perverse.

The relationship between label-based and speech-based perceptual evaluations: The case of Enshi Mandarin regional varieties

The current study explored the relationship between participants’ label-based evaluations of six regional varieties in Enshi Prefecture, China, and their speech-based evaluations of talkers from these varieties using a label ranking task and a speaker evaluation task. The results revealed that under correct identification of talker dialect, participants’ evaluations of real talkers based on speech samples were different from their evaluations of ‘imagined’ county-based dialects, suggesting that speech-based talker evaluations are not solely governed by ideological values associated with dialects. Focusing on a small, understudied community in China, this study contributes to our understanding of the local language attitudes, and language use and maintenance in Enshi Prefecture. An integrated approach is needed to build a model of talker evaluation, which must include a complex set of linguistic, social cognitive, and situational objects. The current results suggest that the object(s) that primarily drives talker evaluations is not the talker’s dialect itself.

Screen Image Of Muslim Women In The Popular Post-9/11 Films On War On Terror

The purpose of this study is to deconstruct the screen image of Muslim women in the post- 9/11films on American war on terror. The data was drawn from four popular films (i.e., American Sniper-2014, Jarhead 2: Field of Fire-2014, Zero Dark Thirty- 2012 and Body of Lies-2008) depicting the post 9/11American war on terror in the Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Oman, and Syria (henceforth ‘the Muslim society’). The study built its theoretical foundation by drawing from discourse analysis, critical theory and deconstruction. It is observed that social reality projected in the selected films hinges on different discursive practices manifested through linguistic styles, actions, objects, settings, graphic illustrations and sound tracks. In addition to the identification of the Muslim women in the oppressive discourses, the study unlocks some hidden meanings by acknowledging their professional contributions in the social institutions. The Western Caucasian women, usually empowered to exercise their rights, present a huge contrast to the Muslim women who are dangerously marginalized mostly if not always by the abrogation of rights. The study suggests that the representation of educated and professional women along with those who are oppressed can be a powerful strategy to resist misogynist discourse prevailing in the Muslim society.

Kingsbury Brunetto, K. (2015). Performing the Art of Language Learning: Deepening the Language Learning Experience through Theatre and Drama. Blue Mounds, WI: Deep University Press.

In this book, Kingsbury Brunetto describes her research on the language learning experience through theatre. Doing so, she analyses interviews with undergraduate students, which she collected from two theatre-based language courses (French and Spanish as L2) at different survey dates. The focus lies on the use of language as a social act that demonstrates the multifaceted nature of theatre-based language learning. Language is not only seen as something shown in evident linguistic objects here; rather it is a result of activities in complex contexts. The author wants to find out how learners of a second language function within a theatre-based language learning environment. She tries to understand the complexity of language learning as a socially situated human activity by looking at the perspectives of the participants. The particular charm of the book is that it is structured like a theatre play. Kingsbury Brunetto refrains from classic terms such as "theoretical background" or "research method", and instead entitles the chapters analogously to the procedure for a theatre performance, such as "Playbill", "Before the Curtain Rises" or "The Critics’ Reviews". In the beginning, Kingsbury Brunetto presents her approach to this research by briefly sketching her own background and providing a short insight ...

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky

Reviewed by: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco O.P. Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. By Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 215. $22.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-262-03424-1 (cloth), 978-0-262-53349-2 (paper). What, if anything, distinguishes Homo sapiens, made in the image and likeness of God, from all the other animal species in creation? Today, this is a highly disputed question that comes with a plethora of often contradictory answers from biologists, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and many others. However, for Robert C. Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics, and Noam Chomsky, an institute professor and internationally renowned linguist, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the specific difference that defines our species is clear: human language, properly understood, is what uniquely separates us from the other animals. In this relatively short but fascinating book, Berwick and Chomsky provide philosophers and theologians—indeed, basically any nonspecialist who is not familiar with evolutionary theory or linguistics—with an overview of contemporary biolinguistics, which is the study of language as an object in the biological world. It is a summary of what we know about the nature and the evolutionary history of human language, written by two of the world’s foremost practitioners in the field. First, for Berwick and Chomsky, human language, rightly understood, is the product of an evolved biological capacity that gives human beings “the ability to construct a digitally infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions with determinate interpretations” (110). This ability can be reduced to a basic compositional operation that they call “Merge.” It is an operation that takes two linguistic objects as arguments—say, the words “read” and “books”—and returns a combination of the two as a new linguistic object, for example, the phrase “read books.” Merge can then recursively build on this new object, yielding more and more complex hierarchical representations, such as the sentence “he read books.” To illustrate the hierarchical structure of language made possible by Merge, consider the sentence “Peter is too angry to eat.” It has two possible meanings. First, most obviously, it could mean that Peter is too angry to eat anything. However, it could also mean that Peter is too angry for me to eat him! The same linear sequence of words has two meanings depending on how it is hierarchically understood. According to Berwick and Chomsky, Merge is the specific difference that distinguishes human language from the other vocal communication systems found in the animal kingdom. Animals may be able to produce linear left-to-right vocal representations, but none are able to generate a hierarchically structured communication system akin to human language. Even the celebrity chimpanzee named Nim “never progressed to the point of producing embedded, clearly hierarchically structured sentences, which every normal [End Page 618] child by age three or four can do” (145). (Incidentally, in my own view—and I cannot defend this claim here—this ability to understand and to generate hierarchical language is a sign of the immateriality of our intellects.) The authors also make the striking claim that the architecture of human language reveals that it evolved, not as an external tool for communication between individuals but as an internal mental tool that allows an individual to conceptualize and to imagine his world. Speaking a language came only after thinking in a language. As evidence for this, they point to studies that showed that the internal hierarchical structure of language carries no information about the left-to-right order of phrases, words, or other linguistic elements. A language is spoken vocally or signed manually in an order that is imposed, not by its inherent structure but by the demands of the specific mode of externalization, whether by the production of sound or the movement of hands. This would not have been the case if language had evolved first and primarily as an external tool for human communication. Finally, Berwick and Chomsky propose a narrative for the evolution of human language. Based on numerous paleontological and genomic studies, they think...

Language – The transparent tool: Reflections on reflexivity and instrumentality

'There are no first-order objects of any kind' in language, as Nigel Love puts it. And yet first-order linguistic communication is crowded with identifiable 'linguistic objects' of innumerable kinds – from names, labels, lists, and words of one syllable to requests, greetings, interviews, jokes and lies. Such metalinguistic reflexivity is fundamental to our linguistic experience and testimony to the 'transparency' of communicative acts and events in relation to the social practices to which they contribute. The paper sets out to explore a range of scholarly insights into this communicational 'transparency' in pursuit of answers to the following questions:1. Is there value in extending Heidegger's notion of ‘transparent technology’ to linguistic and metalinguistic activity?2. Is Love's distinction between ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ language better viewed as a relationship between different ‘first-order’ linguistic or communicative practices?3. How does the vital communicational transparency on display in lay analytic linguistic reflection differ from the analytic discourse of the professional linguist?In coming to a position on each question, the paper argues that an understanding of the 'socio-transparency' in evidence in language use warrants a distinction between the 'instrumental abstraction' of the ordinary language user and the 'formal abstraction' of the linguist.

Applying the Canonical Text Services Model to the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly research and citation practices, the structure of the textual data, and the data management workflow.

“Cognitive Linguistics: Looking back, looking forward”

AbstractSince its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.

Sentential homophony: A case study of if-clauses in Russian

In this paper I argue that one can distinguish between two different types of esli-clauses (if-clauses) in Russian: (i) conditional clauses and (ii) experiencer clauses. I argue that these clauses differ syntactically: Conditional clauses are syntactic adjuncts, while experiencer clauses are syntactic complements. Evidence for this is drawn from the valence of the main predicate, word order, and a comparison with complement that-clauses. I also posit that there are two homophonous conjunctions esli in Russian: (i) conditional esli and (ii) experiencer esli. The homophonous conjunctions esli introduce syntactically distinct types of clauses: adjuncts vs. complements. This work provides additional evidence to back up findings from previous research, in which I argued that homophonous linguistic objects differ not only in meaning, but also in syntactic structure.

Ethos Presidencial de Autoridade: Análise da Modalidade Deôntica nos Discursos de Tomada de Posse do Estado Novo

Under the scope of Discourse Analysis, this article analyses the construction of an authority presidential ethos (Amossy, 2010; Maingueneau, 1999) of the President of the Republic in 6 presidential inaugural addresses given during the Estado Novo. This study uses a qualitative approach to focus on the deontic modality (linguistic categories, obligation source, target and object) and its analysis falls into two headings: a) the President’s duties and b) the People’s duties. We have concluded that distinct and multiple images of authority (that serve Estado Novo’s political and ideological agenda) are built of and/or by the President.

Variation of the types of a popular scientific online article’s subject organization as a way to involve the reader in its subject con

This article describes the mechanisms of authentication and addressing involved in the creation of the effect of the reader’s involvement in the interaction with a linguistic object (the object of a popular scientific linguistic article). This technique is considered as a means of implementing the supportive task of the popular scientific text that is awakening and maintaining the reader’s interest. The article describes two ways of representing a linguistic object. The first way represents the object as the one separated from communicants and the pragmatic situation (traditional one), while the second way represents it as the one that incorporates them. The latter appears to be more efficient to perform the task of the text. Based on the example of a popular scientific article on linguistics, the author demonstrates a technique of analysing the interaction of participants of the pragmatic situation and characters of the text (the subject organization of the text), which resulted in: (1) the description of the types of such an interaction (the object type, in which the interaction does not occur, and several varieties of the subject type, in which the author and the pragmatic addressee are the potential referents of different types of characters); (2) the identification of authorization and addressing means, enabling the reader to relate oneself and the author to the characters of the text, and (3) an attempt to rank these means in accordance to the probability of this correlation, which often turns out to be potential, rather than explicate.

Phonology of Muna Language (Theoretical Review of Optimality)

This article discusses the language Muna from the corner Phonological with optimality theory. Optimality theory is a continuation of the theory of generative transformation. Optimality theory using the model of linguistic analysis by utilizing the candidate as an input and output that has a relation between the two. The relationship between input and output is mediated in a formal mechanism in the form of plant and assessors. Generating create linguistic object and record the relationships of obedience in the input. Assessor in the hierarchy constraint is used to select the best candidates from the input as an optimal candidate produced by the plant. The analysis showed that the peak of the property syllables in the language Muna has one vowel, property onset syllable preceded single consonant, property complexes, only one consonant at the edge of the tribe, the property nocoda syllable ends with a vowel.

Especificidade de uma disciplina de interpretação (a análise do discurso no Brasil): alguns apontamentos

A Análise do Discurso é o modo de leitura dos fenômenos registrados em falas e em textos, que se localizam no espaço da discursividade. Na relação com a língua, a Análise do Discurso compartilha tríplice especificidades que traduzem o seguinte: os funcionamentos sintáticos não se limitam na competência da frase. Os três compartilhamentos são: (1) com a tradição lexicométrica, com estruturas sintáticas sob a sequência de unidades lexicais; (2) com as tradições semiológicase semióticas, a tarefa de apreender e descrever as condições estruturais de existência do sentido; (3) com a perspectiva arqueológica foucauldiana, a tarefa de levar em conta as condições históricas de existência de discursos na sua heterogeneidade, visando reintroduzir explicitamente a problemática da língua (Pêcheux, (1984a) 2011, p. 228). Esses “compartilhamentos” mencionados pelo autor são pensados em relação aos funcionamentos sintáticos no “real da língua” (Pêcheux, 1981). A posição epistemológica da Análise de Discurso de Michel Pêcheux compreende a concepção de língua “como um real específico formando o espaço contraditório do desdobramento das discursividades” (Pêcheux, (1984a) 2011, p. 228). Neste presente trabalho, proponho desenvolver o compartilhamento (3) com a arqueologia (derivada dos pressupostos de Michel Foucault, em especial a obra Arqueologia do Saber, publicada em 1969). Serão exemplos desse compartilhamento pesquisas de Nascimento (2011) e Gregolin; Mazzola (2012). Esses autores adotam as perspectivas teórico-metodológicas de Foucault e de Pêcheux. Com os alertas de Michel Pêcheux sobre as transformações do discurso político e das novas materialidades, este trabalho demonstra alguns desdobramentos promissores no campo do discurso em que diversos objetos linguísticos se inscrevem como materialidades: depoimento (Nascimento, 2011) e charge, e pintura (Gregolin; Mazzola, 2012). A relevância dos compartilhamentos mencionados por Pêcheux (1984a), de interesse à Análise do Discurso, promovem deslocamentos a outras disciplinas que só contribuem ao campo discursivo, em sua tarefa primeira: ler e interpretar textos.