Linguistic Reference Research Articles

Demonstratives as bundlers of conceptual structure

Pronoun resolution has long been central to psycholinguistics, but research has mostly focused on personal pronouns (“he”/“she”). However, much of linguistic reference is to events and objects, in English often using demonstrative pronouns, like “that”, and the non-personal pronoun “it”, respectively. Very little is known about potential form-specific preferences of non-personal and demonstrative pronouns and the cognitive mechanisms involved in reference using demonstratives. We present a novel analysis arguing that the bare demonstrative “that” serves a different function by bundling, and making linguistically accessible, complex conceptual structures, while the non-personal pronoun “it” has a form-specific preference to refer to noun phrases mentioned in the previous discourse. In two English self-paced reading studies, each replicated once with slight variations, we show that readers are reading the demonstrative slower throughout, independently of frequency or complexity of the referent, as a reflection of differences in processing demonstratives vs. pronouns. These findings contribute to two distinct but connected research areas: First, they are compatible with an emergent experimental literature showing that pronominal reference to events is preferably done with demonstratives. Second, our model of demonstratives as conceptual bundlers provides a unified framework for future research on demonstratives as operators on the interface between language and broader cognition.

Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

Abstract The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.

The Referential Problem Space revisited: An ecological hypothesis of the evolutionary and developmental origins of pointing.

Pointing by great apes poses a significant challenge to contemporary theories about the evolutionary and developmental foundations of cognitive development, because pointing has long been viewed by theoreticians as an evolved, human-unique developmental stepping-stone to linguistic reference. Although reports of pointing by great apes have existed in the scientific literature for over a century, only in recent decades has it become clear that ape pointing is definitely an intentionally communicative signal, by the same criteria we adjudge human pointing to be intentionally communicative. Theoretical responses to this changed empirical landscape have generally taken the approach of asserting, without any direct evidence (indeed, in the absence of any possibility of direct evidence), that pointing by humans is psychologically distinct from and more cognitively complex than the pointing of apes. It is commonplace in the contemporary literature to appeal to imaginary, species-unique causal factors to account for human pointing, rendering a large body of contemporary theoretical work untestable with scientific methods: scientific arguments require the public availability of core theoretical entities. In this paper, I will analyze the circumstances of pointing by apes and humans and develop an alternative theoretical model of pointing that does not rely upon non-physical constructs. According to the view espoused, here, pointing develops as a solution to a particular kind of developmental problem, characterized by (a) a developing capacity for tool use, (b) barriers to direct action, and (c) a history of caregiver responsiveness. Pointing by both apes and humans is explicable without invoking imaginary, mental causes. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Comparative Psychology.

When the owner of information is unsure: Epistemic uncertainty influences evidentiality processing in Turkish

This study deals with the extent to which epistemic uncertainty influences processing of grammatical evidentiality – the linguistic reference to information source – in Turkish native speakers. Across a series of sentence reading experiments administered to groups of Turkish adult native speakers, this study showed that indirect evidentiality in firsthand witnessing contexts evoked greater post-interpretive disruptions (Experiment 1), and were found largely unfavourable (Experiment 2), suggesting that in Turkish, speaking about one's own information with indirect evidentiality leads to an inherent effect. Furthermore, a first-person's witnessed information marked with direct evidentiality is found to be rather unacceptable or unsettling under low epistemic certainty conditions, where the speaker is unsure of his/her own witnessing (Experiment 3), whilst a non-first-person's information blends well with uncertainty constraints for which, Turkish readers strongly favour the assumption marker (Experiment 4). This study indicates that Turkish speakers’ sensitivity to uses of evidentiality is influenced by the ‘uncertainty of information owner’. There is a semantic overlap and a complex interface between evidentiality and epistemic modality in Turkish, and this interface is mediated by the ownership of information (first-person versus non-first-person) and the owner's uncertainty about his/her information. Further implications are discussed.

The impact of schizotypy on pragmatics

High levels of linguistic referential failures are associated with liability to develop schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, and it has been shown that these failures can differentiate healthy subjects, high-schizotypal and schizophrenics groups. Nevertheless, few investigations have focused on whether or not schizotypal traits in nonclinical populations can also impact linguistic reference. In Brazilian Portuguese, only one previous study (acceptability judgements task) had been conducted, and its results suggest association between schizotypal traits and a more rigid preference for assignment of specific readings to definite singular DPs. Here, we present another experimental study in Brazilian Portuguese, a comprehension task designed to examine possible effects of schizotypal personality traits on the interpretation of definite singular DPs. The findings, in line with the previous results, support the conclusion that schizotypy does affect the interpretation of definite singular DPs in Brazilian Portuguese. Together, these two experiments suggest that schizotypal personality traits impact the integration of linguistic contextual information into the semantic meaning of definite DPs. This is consistent with the general hypothesis that schizotypy, similarly to schizophrenia, is associated with pragmatic difficulties. Yet, our results emphasize that the impact of schizotypal traits on pragmatics can be observed even in healthy (nonclinical) speakers.

Targeting in Language: Unifying Deixis and Anaphora.

This article proposes that a single cognitive system underlies the two domains of linguistic reference traditionally termed anaphora and deixis. In anaphora, the referent is an element of the current discourse itself, whereas in deixis, the referent is outside the discourse in its spatiotemporal surroundings. This difference between the lexical and the physical has traditionally led to distinct theoretical treatments of such referents. We propose instead that language engages a single linguistic/cognitive system–“targeting”–to single out a referent, whether it is speech-internal or speech-external. To outline this system: As a speaker communicates with a hearer, her attention can come to be on something in the environment–her “target”–that she wants to refer to at a certain point in her discourse. This target can be located near or far in either the speech-external (deictic) or the speech-internal (anaphoric) environment. She thus needs the hearer to know what her intended target is and to have his attention on it jointly with her own at the relevant point in her discourse. The problem, though, is how to bring this about. Language solves this problem through targeting. First, at the intended point in her discourse, the speaker places a “trigger”–one out of a specialized set of mostly closed-class forms. English triggers include this/these, that/those, here, there, yonder, now, then, therefore, thus, so, such, yay, the, personal pronouns, relative pronouns, and tense markers. Next, on hearing the trigger, the hearer undertakes a particular three-stage procedure. In the first stage, he seeks all available “cues” to the target. Such cues belong to 10 distinct categories, representing 10 different sources of information about the target. In the second stage, he combines these cues so as to narrow down to the one intended target and rule out alternative candidates. In the third stage, he maps the concept of the target he has found back onto the original trigger for integration with the sentence’s overall reference. This article is based on the overview portion of a book–The Targeting System of Language, MIT Press, 2018.

Early linguistic reference to first and second person depends on social understanding as well as language skills: Evidence from Czech 30-month-olds

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to social understanding and language as pronouns. Very few studies have examined the relations between early person reference on the one hand and both social understanding and language development on the other. The present study used data on spontaneous language transcripts and language tasks from 58 Czech-speaking children aged 30 months to examine the relations between person reference, social understanding, and general language development. Social understanding was estimated from children’s use of the mental state language (MSL). The results confirm that both MSL and general language development show unique relations to person reference with pronouns as well as verbs.

The Results of the Regional and Final Stages of the All-Russian Olympiad of Schoolchildren in the Russian Language in 2019

The article describes main directions in the selection of test materials for the All-Russian Olympiad (hereinafter Olympiad) for schoolchildren in the Russian language, as well as forms of their presentation. An analysis of some tests in the regional and final stages of the Olympiad was carried out. It is shown that the process of selecting test materials for the Olympiad is influenced by such problems of teaching the Russian language at school as formation of normative literacy skills, ability to work with various types of linguistic dictionaries and reference books, ability to evaluate the processes occurring in the modern Russian literary language.

O mas nas crónicas de Ricardo Araújo Pereira: os valores refutativo retificativo e concessivo contra-argumentativo

The ‘mas’, as well as discursive markers, is, generally, associated with a great discussion among scholars regarding the characterization, as well as the most appropriate terminology for its linguistic reference. It is known, however, that it is essential to establish a contrast relationship between two textual segments, although, in fact, it may be associated with several values. The object of this study is to verify whether, in Ricardo Araújo Pereira’s columns, the ‘mas’ is more used for its rectifying refutative value or for its counter-argumentative concessional value, following the work of Anscombre & Ducrot (1977). For this, we selected 24 columns and analyzed and classified each occurrence found. This analysis allowed us to conclude that there is a strong tendency towards the use of the counter-argumentative concessional ‘mas’, which can be explained having in mind the textual gender in which the occurrences arise. In fact, we can face cases where gender conditions the language and, therefore, the value of the ‘mas’ used.

Grain size issues in constructicon building – and how to address them

Abstract Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.

Эпистемология и логика в индийской философии

Публикация представляет обзор содержания специальной дисциплины праманавады (учения об инструментах достоверного познания), сформировавшейся в индийских системах мировоззренческого знания — даршанах. Обзор начинается с установления сходств праманавады с западными эпистемологией и логикой, определения её структуры и небольшого экскурса в историю её формирования; отмечается влияние грамматики Панини (IV в. до н.э.) на выбор концептуального каркаса дисциплины Акшападой (III–IV вв.). Структура праманавады определена на основе «Ньяя-сутр» Акшапады, сочинений буддиста Дигнаги (ок. 450–520 гг.) и джайнских канонических сочинений Умасвати (II–III вв.) и Кундакунды (III–IV вв.); содержание логико-эпистемологических концептов раскрывается по базовым сочинениям восьми даршан. Автор обращает внимание на роль концепта вьявахара (конвенциональное словоупотребление и повседневная практика), повлиявшего на специфику критического дискурса в Индии, описывает характерные для индийской традиции философствования представления о лингвистической референции. Содержание базовых концепций праманавады (субъект познания, познающее сознание, воспринимающие способности, сверхъестественные познавательные способности, идеалы познания, цель познания, истина, повседневная практика, инструменты достоверного познания, вывод у найяиков и буддистов, «точки зрения» джайнов, теория полемики) раскрывается через их сопоставление с западными логико-эпистемологическими идеями. Специфика праманавады усматривается наряду со своеобразием решения теоретических проблем в отсутствии символического языка для анализа рассуждений, в наличии особого формализма (закрепления традиционных способов ведения полемики) и в сохранении ограниченной свободы критического дискурса в формализованном скептицизме.

Killer Drones, Legal Ethics, and the Inconvenient Referent

I offer a close reading of the legal and political discourses by means of which the United States government recently has sought to legitimate its use of weaponized drones to carry out targeted assassinations of suspected anti-U.S. combatants abroad. Situating my analysis in the context of philosophical approaches to the problem of truth and linguistic reference, I examine official government speeches, legal documents, and reports of civilian casualties. My semiological critique of these texts is carried out both within and against the “humanitarian” framework of just war theory, my dual approach being necessitated by the twofold strategy of the government’s justificatory rhetoric: on the one hand, the government’s public discourse distorts the accepted meaning of certain unambiguous and pragmatically functional legal signifiers (the jus ad bellum use of terms such as self-defense, imminence, and necessity, for example); on the other hand, it exploits the uncertainty that is endemic to some of those very same terms (necessity and proportionality in particular) when they are used to refer to the jus in bello quantification and valuation of incommensurable variables—of, typically, a particular number of civilian casualties relative to the amount of “military advantage” to be derived from the attack that “unintentionally” produces those casualties.

Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has on language processing. We report evidence from three visual‐world eye‐tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences.

Analysis of Dickens' Critique and Humanity Spirit in Oliver Twist Based on the Appraisal Theory

As the greatest representative of English critical realism, Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist reflects the complex social reality in his time and manifests the author’s humanity spirit especially to the poor and the lower class. The paper uses the attitude sub-system in appraisal theory as analytical framework, chooses the attitude resources related to the protagonist Oliver as research material, mainly analyzes his personality characteristics at lexical level. The study aims to reveal the author’s humanity spirit that lurked in the discourse after construing Oliver’s image in that social background and his critique spirit to the society, in the hope of deepening our understanding of the significance of the theme of the novel, and providing a linguistic reference for the appreciation of literature work. At the same time, this study further confirms the value of appraisal theory in discourse analysis and appreciation.

What Determines the Reference of Names? What Determines the Objects of Thought

It is fairly widely accepted that Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others showed in the 1960s–1980s that proper names, in particular uses by speakers, can refer to things free of anything like the epistemic requirements posited by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. This paper separates two aspects of the Frege–Russell view of name reference: (1) the metaphysical thesis that names in particular uses refer to things in virtue of speakers thinking of those things and (2) the epistemic thesis that thinking of things requires a means of determining (in the sense of figuring out or identifying) which thing one is thinking of. My question is whether the Kripke–Donnellan challenge should lead us to reject (1), (2), or both. Contrary to a popular line of thinking that sees practices or conventions, rather than singular thinking, as determinative of linguistic reference, my answer is that we should reject only the epistemic thesis, not the metaphysical one.

Shakespeare Terminology with Special Reference to Shakespeare Arden Dictionaries

The paper is devoted to the description of a special group of reference works in English author lexicography – terminological (or LSP) dictionaries of different subject areas explored in Shakespeare’s works: ethics, religion, military and naval activities, medicine, music, politics and society, philosophy, theatre, etc. As stated by scholars, Shakespeare is considered to be an expert in nineteen subject fields whose terms are used in their direct and figurative meaning in the Bard’s creative works. Among more than one hundred types of Shakespeare’s linguistic and encyclopaedic reference works, his terminological dictionaries play a significant role, registering and describing special groups of terms from the author’s plays. Shakespeare LSP reference books are combined today into Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries. The article discovers specific features of the architecture of Shakespeare LSP dictionaries: mega-, macro- and microstructure, using the recently published dictionary “Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens” (2016). Detailed analysis of the unique Shakespearean use of plant and garden names contribute to better understanding of their symbolism and aesthetic value in Shakespeare’s plays.

A Hybrid Unsupervised Segmentation Algorithm for Arabic Speech Using Feature Fusion and a Genetic Algorithm (July 2018)

Speech is the most natural form of human communication. Major achievements have been made in developing systems that automatically recognize human speech and respond to it. An important preprocessing step in speech recognition systems (and other applications) is segmentation. Such a step is important in identifying the high-level semantics of speech sounds, including syllables, consonants, vowels…, and so on. There are basically two general approaches used for speech segmentation, namely, explicit and implicit (so-called with and without linguistic reference). Explicit segmentation uses a bottom-up process based on the concept of fixed-size frames. Such a framework is usually used on conjunction with hidden Markov models. The varying frame size or sample-by-sample approaches are mainly used in implicit segmentation techniques, which are based on the detection of spectral distortions. The main objective of this paper is to develop a novel speech segmentation algorithm for Arabic language. In this application, we focus on the accurate segmentation of Quran recitation. The proposed system starts with a set of initial segmentations using three basic speech features: entropy, zero crossings, and energy. The segmentation results obtained are then fused at the output level using a genetic algorithm-based optimization scheme. Together with the segmentation results, we also introduce the concept of speech units to model the fundamental entities representing Quran recitation. Our results show an enhanced performance in segmentation of about 20% over that of traditional single-feature-based segmentation techniques.

<b>Identification of the most common phraseological units in the English language in academic texts: contributions coming from corpora

Academic-scientific phraseological units in the English language play a key role in the communication of/to experts, once they reproduce frequent and expected expressions in varied disciplines. This paper aims at identifying and analyzing the 100 non-specialized academic-scientific phraseological units (constituted of 4 words) in the English language, present in eight major fields of knowledge. The theoretical background referred to Phraseology and Corpus Linguistics. Regarding methodology, an academic corpus was compiled with more than 120 million words. The software WordSmith Tools was used for the linguistic-textual process. Through the Juilland dispersion coefficient and use coefficient, the most frequent phraseological units were identified in the academic texts. The list was eventually validated by the Wilcoxon rank sum test (α = 0.05), indicating that the phraseological units identified show a higher use in the academic communication when compared to the use in the general language. The most relevant units are ‘the case of’, ‘as a result of’ and ‘at the end of’. The list with the most functional phraseological units in the English language might provide a valuable pedagogical linguistic reference for the study of the academic genre.

Discourse Analysis of Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Pragmatics

As a great representative of the British realism literature in the 19th century, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is set in foggy city London, but reflects the complex social reality in that time. Many domestic scholars studied and analyzed this novel from different perspectives, while most of them paid much attention to the literature translation and analysis of the characters’ image, few studied it from the perspective of pragmatic theories. In view of it, this paper selects plenty of dialogues from the novel and they are classified and analyzed on the basis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle. After analyzing the characters’ conversational implicature, this paper aims to provide a linguistic reference for the appreciation of characters’ image and social significance of the novel. The paper consists of introduction, main body and conclusion three parts. Introduction part gives a simple introduction of the author Charles Dickens and the novel, then states the previous researches on the subject as well as the research angle, goal and method. The body (consists of two chapters) firstly gives a detailed introduction of the theoretical framework, then analyzes the selected dialogues on the basis of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle respectively. Conclusion part puts forward that people always express their ideas indirectly and implicitly in their speech communication to violate the Cooperative Principle, that is out of consideration of politeness to others, namely observing Politeness Principle.

Terminología e información gramatical en textos didácticos y diccionarios

Este artículo plantea el distinto enfoque con el que creemos que se deberían tratar las discrepancias y la disparidad de términos gramaticales en los libros de texto y en las obras de referencia lingüísticas, sobre todo, cuando tales obras están diseñadas para los distintos cursos de enseñanza obligatoria en primaria y en secundaria. A partir de una experiencia de trabajo editorial de casi treinta años, y mediante ejemplos representativos tomados de diccionarios y de gramáticas de latín, francés, inglés y español, este artículo pretende demostrar, en primer lugar, cómo el nivel de complejidad de la información gramatical que se incluye en las obras de referencia didácticas debería ser inversamente proporcional al grado de conocimiento del usuario sobre dicha lengua. Y, en segundo lugar, analizaremos cómo, por desgracia, es práctica casi generalizada que los equipos de trabajo editoriales opten para la redacción de sus materiales por un enfoque teórico que luego no siguen en el desarrollo de los materiales educativos a lo largo de los distintos cursos.