Model Of Language Use Research Articles

Book Review: Cognitive Neuroscience of Natural Language Use

Book Review: Cognitive Neuroscience of Natural Language Use

The US Intelligence Community's Mathematical Ideology of Technical Communication

ABSTRACTReading historical intelligence community documents primarily through the lens of Kenneth Burke's essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning,” this article explores the history and stakes of the intelligence community's ongoing commitment to a problematic model of language use. The essay argues that the intelligence community's pursuit of a “mathematical” ideology of language is an attempt to render language “neutral” and to divorce rhetoric from ethics in ways that Burke anticipated, and with negative consequences for the generation of written intelligence reports and national policy decisions.

The Emergence of Online Community Leadership

Compared to traditional organizations, online community leadership processes and how leaders emerge are not well studied. Previous studies of online leadership have often identified leaders as those who administer forums or have high network centrality scores. Although communication in online communities occurs almost exclusively through written words, little research has addressed how the comparative use of language shapes community dynamics. Using participant surveys to identify leading online community members, this study analyzes a year of communication network history and message content to assess whether language use differentiates leaders from other core community participants. We contribute a novel use of textual analysis to develop a model of language use to evaluate the utterances of all participants in the community. We find that beyond communication network position—in terms of formal role, centrality, membership in the core, and boundary spanning—those viewed as leaders by other participants, post a large number of positive, concise posts with simple language familiar to other participants. This research provides a model to study online language use and points to the emergent and shared nature of online community leadership.

Modelling linguistic diversity at school: the excluding impact of inclusive multilingualism

This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It illustrates that teachers’ preference for maintaining the school’s monolingual policy did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices that temporarily alleviated the friction between the school language policy and the reality of pupils’ linguistic repertoires, and promoted the construction of an agreeable classroom climate. The paper argues, however, that these multilingual interstices also suggested ideal models of language use across differently valued discursive zones at school, and that the inclusion of unofficial linguistic resources in specific discursive slots implied their exclusion in other, more important ones. The scarce openings for linguistic diversity that teachers made, in other words, at the same time socialized pupils into the broader sociolinguistic hierarchy that creates their own disfluency and problematization.

Conceptualizing ‘interaction’ in interpersonal pragmatics: Implications for understanding and research

Studying interaction between persons is central in the emerging sub-discipline of interpersonal pragmatics. Following Krippendorff (1970), the particular metaphor, model, or theory one employs in conceptualizing interaction both affords and constrains not only one's theorizing, but also one's research on language use between persons. This paper examines metaphors and models commonly employed in studying interaction, arguing that their entailments are deeply consequential in framing one's understanding, as well as one's choices in observing, generating and analyzing data, and interpreting the results of research. These issues are exemplified in examining the implications of conceptualizing interaction in terms of the common encoding/decoding model of language use, versus in terms of an interactional achievement model of human communication.

How hierarchical is language use?

It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and computer science.

‘Education is the key of life’: Language, schooling, and gender in Tanzanian beauty pageants

This paper discusses how education, and especially its key product English, shape Tanzanian beauty pageants both implicitly and explicitly. Discourses within these events extol education as the primary resource for social mobility and the most promising solution to society’s and individuals’ problems. Furthermore, contestants and observers plug into English-language, school-based models of speaking, listening, and manifesting knowledge, a process facilitated by the configuration of contestants as schoolgirls. Yet the data presented here demonstrate a mismatch between the social construction of education and the realities that it offers on and off stage. This article will thus outline the mobility of educational models of language use in urban Tanzania, and how, once mobile, they are subject to reinterpretation, revision, and hierarchical reorganization.

Using Short Stories to Teach Language Skills

The notion that the main objective of EFL teaching is to help students to communicate fluently in the target language cause many teachers still believe that an EFL class should focus on mastering linguistic elements only. However, recent trend in EFL teaching indicates the necessity of integrating literature because of its rich potential to provide an authentic model of language use. Among literary genres, short stories seem to be the most suitable choice for this due to its potential to help students enhance the four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing—more effectively because of the motivational benefit embedded in the stories. The purpose of this article is to familiarize EFL instructors with the effectiveness of using short stories in EFL instruction. After presenting criteria for selecting a short story, discussion is focused on how to exploit a short story for enhancing students’ language skills.

Towards a people-centered theory of translation

Translation has become a metaphor for contemporary life, and thus translation theories demand a paradigm shift from binary opposition between ‘self and other’, or between ‘original and target’, towards negotiation and dialogic interaction. This article argues that translation as dialogue in the ‘in-between space’ – or what Mary Louise Pratt termed a ‘contact zone’ – involves a new model of language use that can incorporate both cultures and languages without prioritizing any. Anna Wierzbicka's concept of linguistic universals and Eva Hoffman's experiences of integrating bilingual and bicultural aspects are elicited to illustrate the tentative translation strategies for ‘translation as a dialogue’. The article proposes the importance of understanding and empathy, or, at least, a will to believe in translatability. It also maintains, drawing on Edward Sapir's insight that language is the index to culture, that translation should be not only about content but also about relation between ‘self and other’, and that translators should realize the importance of learning vocabularies as a sensitive index to a culture. These requirements ask translators to be more attentive to what people are and what people do, thus proposing a more people-oriented translation theory.

Can I say “bobobo” and mean “There's no such thing as cheap talk”?

The theory of cheap talk, evaluated as a model of language use, is shown to mismatch the reality of communication in five respects: real talk is conflict dampening, is more than assertion, is dear, is not literal, and is beholden to its medium. The linguistic theory of pragmatics is employed to demonstrate formally that every utterance creates a coordination game whose resolution reveals evidence of similarity and of a shared mental model, so there is no neutral style of communication: an utterance must affect the relationship between the players. This alteration, in turn, will affect any game allowing for communication.

A call for more dialogue and more details

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) argue that contemporary models of language use are inadequate. This has resulted largely because of an experimental focus on monologue rather than dialogue. I agree with the need for increased experimentation that focuses on the interplay between production and comprehension. However, I have some concerns about the Interactive Alignment model that the authors propose.

Workplace perceptions and attitudes toward standard English use

This study investigated the perceptions and attitudes of Malaysian civil sector and private sector workers toward the use and acceptance of Malaysian English, a variety of nonstandard English. A survey using a 20-item Likert Scale questionnaire highlighted some language issues: current perceptions and attitudes about and use of standard English, international intelligibility, public models of language use, and behavioral intentions of civil sector and private sector Malaysians toward standard English. The major findings for the combined sectors were 1) a recognition of the importance of attaining international intelligibility of English in their interactions with foreigners and 2) mixed reactions toward the use of standard English language within their Malaysian society. Differences were found for some items between the civil sector and private sector workers as well as for the factors of age, gender and ethnicity. Studies like this one can be used as a model for replication to find out more about language perceptions and attitudes in other countries and are significant for raising the language awareness needed by educators to better help their students succeed in finding employment, by employers to gain insight into employees’ perceptions and attitudes toward and use of English in order to enhance communication. In addition, the study raises important questions and issues such as about the growth and acceptance of non-native varieties of English in Malaysia and other countries.

Some Recent Trends in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics: A Few Pointers Towards a More Comprehensive Model of Language Use

Despite a slow start, one of the major trends in current Biblical Hebrew research is the use of structuralist-oriented approaches to identify and describe linguistic phenomena in terms of their distributional patterns. Designing more effective tools to carry out this type of research electronically leads to a situation where both the benefits and boundaries of structuralist approaches are starting to show. There is a growing need for more adequate theoretical frames of reference to interpret and complement the taxonomies of distributional patterns. In light of developments in the fields of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics, some pointers are formulated that may assist scholars in their quest for a more comprehensive model of language and language use. It is believed that such a model, on the one hand, will help Biblical Hebrew scholars in defining more adequate heuristic tools for the investigation of specific problems, and, on the other hand, may serve itself as an integrating frame of reference for the interpretation of research results of various problems.

Cree Decision Making Concerning Language: A Case Study

In 1993, nine Cree communities on the east coast of James Bay (Québec, Canada) and inland began work on a pilot project to use Cree as the language of instruction (CLIP) in two communities, and have continued to extend this so that now Cree is the main language of instruction up to grade four (the target level) in many of the communities. We describe the complex context of language choice in schools before CLIP was implemented. In our analysis, four important threads of concern were identified: (1) locus of control (who had power in the communities and schools); (2) economies of scale (how the resources to accomplish Cree-medium teaching were created); (3) community visions of language and education (the evolution of attitudes, particularly of parents, towards the pertinent languages and their uses); and (4) the role of literacies (changes in community members' expectations of what literacy in Cree and English were good for). Our conclusion is that no simple models of language use are likely to be adequate for explaining or predicting outcomes in such complex situations. Documenting these cases longitudinally and in many facets provides unique local micro-analysis against which other circumstances can be compared.

Listening in on monologues and dialogues

A study compared the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Several extraneous variables could not account for the result. Two explanations for overhearers’ better performances on the dialogues are that the greater number of discourse markers helps overhearers follow the speech and that the perspectives of multiple interlocutors are more informative than one perspective. Extensions of the collaborative model of language use are discussed.

Making time for meaningful talk

It is our aim and responsibility to help children become confident communicators in their world. We present a powerful model of language use to children, yet often our talk is perceived by them to be mainly about management - we tell, command or judge when we speak to children and often give them too little time to respond to our questions. To encourage children to use talk as a means of learning,we need to be good listeners. We need to give children our full attention when listening, indicating that what children say has value.

The use of Herbert H. Clark's models of language use for the design of cooperative systems

The use of Herbert H. Clark's models of language use for the design of cooperative systems

Register and the redemption of relevance theory

The argument I wish to advance in this paper is that Gricean theory (Grice 1968, 1969, 1975, 1978, 1981) and, in particular, the potentially useful relevance theory which developed from it (Sperber & Wilson 1986), are flawed through their failure to consider cultural and social context; but that attempts to relate linguistic pragmatics to more socially-conscious models of language use, such as register/genre theory (Ure and Ellis 1977; Halliday 1978; Gregory and Carroll 1978; Ghadessy 1988, 1993; Swales 1988; Martin 1985, 1992 etc.) may produce interesting cross-fertilization and be beneficial to both. This essay falls into three sections. The first is a brief introductory critique of Grice's theory as an asocial idealized construct. The second section brings relevance theory and genre/register theory face to face and under the spotlight, hoping to reveal the weaknesses of each and show how, theoretically, they could compensate for and complement each other. In the third section I consider the case of metaphor, arguing that and demonstrating how the account of metaphor provided in Relevance: Communication and Cognition can be supplemented in practice by considering the kinds of register/genre in which metaphors find expression.

Modelling syntactic uncertainty in lexical acquisition from texts*

Abstract Ambiguity is so intrinsically connected to the various levels of linguistic competence that it affects language understanding tasks as well as all related applications (i.e. full‐text retrieval, machine translation). Mainly, in lexical acquisition systems, where increasing attention is devoted to models of language use, the linguistic bootstrapping perspective prevents one from hypothesizing competence models available at the different linguistic levels. This paper describes a generalization of the syntactic model (SSA) described in Basili et al., 1992. The extension is seen to account for some of the morphologic and syntactic ambiguities of the (Italian) language. The notion of elementary syntactic relation (esl) is extended by means of a systematic evaluation of its (syntactic) correctness, i.e. its plausibility. This model will provide a measure of uncertainty as it is dynamically generated by an SSA‐like grammar. Each derived collocate is assigned its plausibility, as a (partial) parse tree i...

Communicative Competence and the Dilemma of International Teaching Assistant Education

This paper examines the curriculum of international teaching assistant (ITA) programs within a sociolinguistic model of language use, the “communicative competence” model proposed by Hymes (1972) and, in its pedagogical applications, by Canale (1983), Canale and Swain (1980), and Savignon (1983). In the face of a growing number of ITA programs, at times with ad hoc curricular goals, the communicative competence framework provides an integrated, theoretically sound principle for ITA program development and assessment, and an appropriate basis for understanding the emerging models of ITA competence. In order to take advantage of such a framework, however, it is crucial that ITA program developers and instructors come to terms with the task of preparing their students for their new role in the classroom. This will necessarily entail training beyond traditional ESL concerns, although ESL professionals may have neither the mandate from their institutions nor the background to accomplish this.