Speaker's Knowledge Research Articles

Sociocultural Commitment of Cognitive Linguistics via dimensions of context

The paper explores basic properties of language that can be explained by appealing to its main functions, namely, cognitive, communicative, and interpretive. Although the first two functions have always been recognized, it is only recently that the third one has been outlined (see Boldyrev, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014). Boldyrev claims that linguistic interpretation reveals static and dynamic processes of cognition shaping overall collective and individual knowledge of language speakers. Viewed from this perspective, linguistic interpretation involves selection, classification, and evaluation within contexts of knowledge that language speakers acquire as members of societies and cultures. These contexts are dependent on metaconcepts -Roles, Stereotypes, Values, Norms, Space, Time, Language Performance - that regulate language use. This paper examines static vs. dynamic, collective vs. individual and the metaconceptual dimensions of contexts of knowledge to suggest that they underlie the Sociocultural Commitment of Cognitive Linguistics.

Machine Meets Man: Evaluating the Psychological Reality of Corpus-based Probabilistic Models

AbstractLinguistic convention typically allows speakers several options. Evidence is accumulating that the various options are preferred in different contexts, yet the criteria governing the selection of the appropriate form are often far from obvious. Most researchers who attempt to discover the factors determining a preference rely on the linguistic analysis and statistical modeling of data extracted from large corpora. In this paper, we address the question of how to evaluate such models and explicitly compare the performance of a statistical model derived from a corpus with that of native speakers in selecting one of six Russian TRY verbs. Building on earlier work we trained a polytomous logistic regression model to predict verb choice given the sentential context. We compare the predictions the model makes for 60 unseen sentences to the choices adult native speakers make in those same sentences. We then look in more detail at the interplay of the contextual properties and model computationally how individual differences in assessing the importance of contextual properties may impact the linguistic knowledge of native speakers. Finally, we compare the probability the model assigns to encountering each of the six verbs in the 60 test sentences to the acceptability ratings the adult native speakers give to those sentences. We discuss the implications of our findings for both usage-based theory and empirical linguistic methodology.

The feeling of another's knowing: How "mixed messages" in speech are reconciled.

Listeners often encounter conflicting verbal and vocal cues about the speaker's feeling of knowing; these "mixed messages" can reflect online shifts in one's mental state as they utter a statement, or serve different social-pragmatic goals of the speaker. Using a cross-splicing paradigm, we investigated how conflicting cues about a speaker's feeling of (un)knowing change one's perception. Listeners rated the confidence of speakers of utterances containing an initial verbal phrase congruent or incongruent with vocal cues in a subsequent statement, while their brain potentials were tracked. Different forms of conflicts modulated the perceived confidence of the speaker, the extent to which was stronger for female listeners. A confident phrase followed by an unconfident voice enlarged an anteriorly maximized negativity for female listeners and late positivity for male listeners, suggesting that mental representations of another's feeling of knowing in face of this conflict were hampered by increased demands of integration for females and increased demands on updating for males. An unconfident phrase followed by a confident voice elicited a delayed sustained positivity (from 900 ms) in female participants only, suggesting females generated inferences to moderate the conflicting message about speaker knowledge. We highlight ways that verbal and vocal cues are real-time integrated to access a speaker's feeling of (un)knowing, while arguing that females are more sensitive to the social relevance of conflicting speaker cues. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Effect of Social Status and Gender on Realization of Refusal of Suggestion among Iranian EFL Intermediate Learners

The current study aimed at exploring the dependence of realized and applied strategies in refusal of suggestion on the people of different levels of social status (i.e., equal, low and high) and the gender differences. Teaching communicative rules, social conventions and values of the target nation can help EFL learners to avoid pragmatic failures. One of the important factors in realization of refusal strategies is the speaker's knowledge of the refusals usage to save the interlocutor's face and to be polite. The participants of this study consisted of 60 (30 females and 30 males) intermediate English Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Tehran, Iran. Discourse-completion test (DCT) with 18 situations was used. Chi- square indicated that learners employed more indirect strategies to people of equal social status. They used more direct strategies to people of low social status, and we can claim that they applied the same types of direct and indirect strategies to people of high social status. Learners utilized more adjunct strategies to people of equal social status and the frequency of realized and applied strategies in refusal of suggestion was not statistically different between the female and male participants in each of three levels of social status.

Grammatical evidentiality and the unprepared mind

The aim of this paper is to investigate how evidentials are used to reflect the unprepared mind of the speaker. Lexical evidentials are typically used by speakers to encode the kinds of evidence they have for making statements about states, events and actions they did not personally witness or were a part of. However, under certain conditions evidentials can be used to express the surprise of the speaker. This is known in the literature under the label mirativity. The empirical factors that condition the mirative use of an evidential are first determined, and then using an information and schema-theoretic analysis it is shown that mirativity is the linguistic reflex of a series of mental events involving the processing of new information, coupled with other contextual factors involving speaker knowledge.

I Forget What That's Called! Children's Online Processing of Disfluencies Depends on Speaker Knowledge.

Speech disfluencies can convey information to listeners: Adults and children predict that filled pauses (e.g., uhh) will be followed by referents that are difficult to describe or are new to the discourse. In adults, this is driven partly by an understanding that disfluencies reflect processing difficulties. This experiment examined whether 3½-year-olds' use of disfluencies similarly involves inferences about processing difficulty. Forty children were introduced to either a knowledgeable or a forgetful speaker, who then produced fluent and disfluent utterances. Children exposed to the knowledgeable speaker looked preferentially at novel, discourse-new objects during disfluent utterances. However, children who heard the forgetful speaker did not. These results suggest that, like adults, children modify their expectations about the informativeness of disfluencies on a speaker-specific basis.

Arquitectura, crítica y géneros literarios

We often talk from hearsay. If we were 'serious', we should admit that the usual architect's discourse is not profound, concise nor sound. It often lacks 'rigor'; revealing an extreme 'amateurism': missing systematization, methodology, and framework. It has scarce accuracy and consistency: needy of technical clearance. It reveals fickle and winky; and at times, even embarrassing. SPEAKING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE. When an architect claims that “shape does not make the project” and “the project sprouts out of the idea” he understands himself very well. However, the unaware audience will find it hard to find the meaning of ordinary concepts such as 'idea', 'make', 'shape' or 'project'. It perceives it wrapped around impetuosity, suspiciously proportioned to its ambiguity. This phenomenon is meaningful. Whoever listens something like “the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth” will obviously experience the same feeling: it is not difficult to imagine the impact on alien ears of such emphatic statement, articulated in an implicit challenging mode. The reaction to it and its boastful grandiloquence. The foreign listener will have a hard time accepting is something more than a mere unsubstantial tautology, a boutade. The experience is generalized. Identical amazement will engulf the layperson when hearing a professional say that a construction or building 'is not architecture'. The unaware audience will wisely understand this words are used here in an accusing and sobering manner: with certain added connotations whose meaning ignores, confirming the speaker's knowledge and the additional attention that must be provided if he or she will explain them. The circle is soon completed: it all points out at the idea that if he or she talks about the 'modern regard', a 'contemporary attitude', a 'cold functionalism', the 'mystery of space', the 'built idea', the 'banality of language' or a 'superficial historicity', he or she knows very well what he or she wants to express and there are those who can follow and understand. The case of students before their professor or a prestigious author is not different. Anyhow we must detain to observe this matter: Is it such language clear and unambiguous? Is it presentable and understandable? Does it seem ripe? Does it correspond to a reliable reasoning? Does it not enclose an endless amount of rather crude, blurry and contrived statements?

Self-knowledge and communication

First-person present-tense self-ascriptions of belief are often used to tell others what one believes. But they are also naturally taken to express the belief they ostensibly report. I argue that this second aspect of self-ascriptions of belief holds the key to making the speaker's knowledge of her belief, and so the authority of her act of telling, intelligible. For a basic way to know one's beliefs is to be aware of what one is doing in expressing them. This account suggests that we need to reconsider the terms of the standard alternative between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” explanations of first-person authority. In particular, the natural view that the authority we accord to self-ascriptions reflects a distinctive way we have of knowing our own beliefs should not be conflated with the traditional epistemological thesis that such knowledge reflects a private “mode of access”.

Register-Specific Collocational Constructions in English and Spanish: A Usage-Based Approach

Abstract: Constructions are usage-based, conventionalised pairings of form and function within a cline of complexity and schematisation. Most research within Grammar has focused on the monolingual description of schematic constructions: Mainly in English, but to a lesser extent in other languages as well. By contrast, very little constructional analyses have been carried out across languages. In this study we will focus on a type of partially substantive construction from the point of view of contrastive analysis and translation which, to the best of our knowledge, is one of the first studies of this kind. The first half of the article lays down the theoretical foundations of the study and introduces Grammar as well as other formalisms used in literature in order to provide a construal account of collocations, a pervasive phenomenon in language. The experimental part describes the case study of V NP collocations with disease/enfermedad in comparable corpora in English and Spanish, both in the general domain and in the specialised medical domain. It is provided a comparative analysis of these constructions across domains and languages in terms of token-type ratio (constructional restriction-rate), lexical function, type of determiner, frequency ranking of the verbal collocate and domain specificity of collocates, among others. New measures to assess construal bondness will be put forward (lexical filledness rate and individual productivity rate) and special attention will be paid to register-dependent equivalent semantic-functional counterparts in English and Spanish and mismatches.Keywords: Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Phraseology, Collocations, TranslationIntroductionThe term Grammar (CXG) refers to a family of closely related grammars (or constructionist approaches) which are in contrast to Chomskyan's views on language and idiomaticity. CXG aims at providing a comprehensive account of language that explains all aspects of a speaker's knowledge about their language. As Hoffmann (2013: 326) puts it, Construction Grammar does not only focus on the idiosyncratic periphery of language, but [that] is a full-fledged grammatical theory that it is observationally, descriptively as well as explanatorily adequate.Within constructional approaches, linguistic knowledge is acquired through repeated experience with actual instances of constructions and their generalisations. Usage frequency appears to play a crucial role in the emergence of constructions or cognitive schemata (mental representations) and their storage strength in memory (entrenchment).Contrary to mainstream Generative Grammar, constructions are not the result of a limited set of transformations or derivations, but symbolic units which are linked to each other and constitute complex networks (Goldberg, 1995; 2006). Thus, language is conceived as an idiomatic continuum of which constructions are the building blocks and general patterns and idioms stand on an equal footing (Kay and Fillmore, 1999: 1).In this study we will adopt a constructionist approach to collocation in line with CXG postulates. In addition, we will take an observational stance toward a corpusbased analysis of constructions in English and Spanish, with a special emphasis on equivalent semanticfunctional counterparts and potential mismatches.This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 (On the Construal Nature of Collocations) provides a theoretical framework for collocation within competing linguistic approaches. As we will argue, collocations have a clear construal nature, as evidenced by their lexical filledness restrictions, semantic dependency and coercion along a cline of complexity and schematisation. Section 3 (Constructions in Contrast: A Case Study) furnishes a fine-grained characterisation of the V NP construction with disease/enfermedad in two comparable reference and specialised medical corpora in English and Spanish. …

Ignorance and Inference: Do Problems with Gricean Epistemic Reasoning Explain Children’s Difficulty with Scalar Implicature?

Journal of Semantics Advance Access published December 4, 2014 Journal of Semantics, 0, 2014: 1–29 doi:10.1093/jos/ffu015 LARA HOCHSTEIN University of California, San Diego ALAN BALE Concordia University DANNY FOX The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Massachusetts Institute of Technology DAVID BARNER University of California, San Diego Abstract Unlike adults, children as old as 9 years of age often fail to infer that a sentence like, ‘Some of the children slept’ implies the falsity of its stronger alternative, ‘All of the children slept’—an inference referred to as a ‘scalar implicature’. Several explanations have been proposed to account for children’s failures with scalar implicature, including domain-general processing limitations, pragmatic deficits or an inability to access the relevant alternatives in a lexical scale (e.g. all as an alternative to some). Our study focused on the role of Gricean epistemic reasoning in children’s failures by testing their ability to compute ‘ignorance implicatures’, which require reasoning about speaker knowledge and informativeness but which differ from scalar implicature with respect to the alternative statements that are involved. We administered two matched tasks to 4- and 5-year-old children: one that assessed their ability to compute ignorance implicatures, and another that assessed their ability to compute scalar implicatures. Five-year-olds successfully computed ignorance implicatures despite failing to compute scalar implicatures, while 4-year-olds failed at both types of inference. These results suggest that 5-year-olds are able to reason about speaker knowledge and informative- ness, and thus that it is difficult to explain their deficit with scalar implicature via these factors. We speculate about other possible sources of their difficulties, including pro- cessing limits and children’s access to the specific scalar alternatives required by scalar implicature. s The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, San Diego on December 5, 2014 Ignorance and Inference: Do Problems with Gricean Epistemic Reasoning Explain Children’s Difficulty with Scalar Implicature?

Social perception in adults with Parkinson's disease.

Our study assessed how nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) interpret the affective and mental states of others from spoken language (adopt a "theory of mind") in ecologically valid social contexts. A secondary goal was to examine the relationship between emotion processing, mentalizing, and executive functions in PD during interpersonal communication. Fifteen adults with PD and 16 healthy adults completed The Awareness of Social Inference Test, a standardized tool comprised of videotaped vignettes of everyday social interactions (McDonald, Flanagan, Rollins, & Kinch, 2003). Individual subtests assessed participants' ability to recognize basic emotions and to infer speaker intentions (sincerity, lies, sarcasm) from verbal and nonverbal cues, and to judge speaker knowledge, beliefs, and feelings. A comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation was also conducted. Patients with mild-moderate PD were impaired in the ability to infer "enriched" social intentions, such as sarcasm or lies, from nonliteral remarks; in contrast, adults with and without PD showed a similar capacity to recognize emotions and social intentions meant to be literal. In the PD group, difficulties using theory of mind to draw complex social inferences were significantly correlated with limitations in working memory and executive functioning. In early PD, functional compromise of the frontal-striatal-dorsal system yields impairments in social perception and understanding nonliteral speaker intentions that draw upon cognitive theory of mind. Deficits in social perception in PD are exacerbated by a decline in executive resources, which could hamper the strategic deployment of attention to multiple information sources necessary to infer social intentions.

Bilingual perceptual benefits of experience with a heritage language

Research on the linguistic knowledge of heritage speakers has been concerned primarily with the advantages conferred by heritage language experience in production, perception, and (re)learning of the heritage language. Meanwhile, second-language speech research has begun to investigate potential benefits of first-language transfer in second-language performance. Bridging these two bodies of work, the current study examined the perceptual benefits of heritage language experience for heritage speakers of Korean in both the heritage language (Korean) and the dominant language (American English). It was hypothesized that, due to their early bilingual experience and the different nature of unreleased stops in Korean and American English, heritage speakers of Korean would show not only native-like perception of Korean unreleased stops, but also better-than-native perception of American English unreleased stops. Results of three perception experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that benefits of early heritage language experience can extend well beyond the heritage language.

Developing biases.

German nouns may alternate from singular to plural in two different ways. Some singular forms that end in a voiceless obstruent have a plural in which this obstruent is voiced. Another alternation concerns the vowel. Some singular forms with a back vowel have a plural form in which this back vowel is front. For each noun it has to be established individually whether it alternates or not. The voicing alternation is phonetically grounded, but the vowel alternation is not. Knowledge about such alternations involves two things. First, it involves knowledge of which words alternate and which words do not and second, it involves the ability to extend the alternations to novel words. We studied the knowledge of which words alternate and the proportion to which they alternate in two corpus studies. We studied the knowledge of speakers concerning which words alternate and what generalizations can be based upon these words by means of a production study. The production study involved words and nonces. We asked twenty 5 year-olds, twenty 7 year-olds, and ten adults to produce the plural for a given singular word and a plural for a given singular nonce. In the corpus study we found that both alternations occur with the same frequency. In the production of alternations in words we found that participants in all age groups make few mistakes. With respect to the production of alternations in nonce words, we found that the proportion of voicing alternations decreases with age, while the proportion of vowel alternations increases. We explain this change in the ability to generalize the alternations to nonces on the basis of the confidence speakers can have in a generalization. Young children have a small lexicon and they can form relatively unreliable generalizations on lexical distributions. They are, however, proficient users of language and have great phonetic experience. They can more confidently form generalizations on the basis of this experience. Adults have a large lexicon and, as a consequence, they can confidently form generalizations based on their lexicon. In addition, they know that many alternations are not based on phonetic considerations.

Production of definite and indefinite articles in typically developing English-speaking children and children with SLI

The present paper examines the production of definite and indefinite articles in English-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Twenty four English-speaking children with SLI (mean age: 7;5), twenty nine TD age-matched (TD-AM) children (mean age: 7;5) and eleven younger (mean age: 5;5) TD vocabulary-matched (TD-VM) children participated in a production task involving short stories without picture props based on Schafer and de Villiers (2000). Article production was examined in two different semantic contexts for the definite article, namely in the anaphoric and the bridging context. In the anaphoric condition, definiteness is established via linguistic means, whereas in the bridging condition via shared world knowledge. Indefinite article production was examined in the referential specific, non-referential predicational, and non-referential instrumental contexts. The referential specific context involves [+speaker, −hearer] knowledge and the non-referential predicational and instrumental [−speaker, −hearer] knowledge. Results showed that in the definite article contexts, all three groups performed better on the bridging compared with the anaphoric condition; in the indefinite article contexts, they had better performance on the non-referential predicational vs. the referential specific and the non-referential instrumental conditions. In terms of errors, the TD-VM children and the children with SLI produced significantly more substitutions than the TD-AM children in the definite article contexts. In the indefinite article contexts, the three groups did not differ in terms of accuracy or error patterns. The present results point towards problems in the discourse integration of entities that are part of the speaker's and hearer's knowledge in children with SLI and TD-VM controls, especially in definite articles. These problems are accentuated in the children with SLI due to their grammatical impairment and suggest that children with SLI exhibit a delayed acquisition profile.

Knowledge of language in action

Knowledge of a language is a kind of knowledge, the possession of which enables a speaker to understand and perform a variety of linguistic actions in that language. In this paper, I pursue an agency-oriented approach to knowledge of language. I begin by examining two major agency-oriented models of knowledge of language: Michael Dummett's Implicit Knowledge Model and Jennifer Hornsby's Practical Knowledge Model. I argue that each of these models is inadequate for different reasons. I present an Acquaintance Knowledge Model, in which a speaker's knowledge of a language is a combination of the speaker's first-order linguistic ability and second-order acquaintance with his ability and actions.

Discovering the prehistory of multilingual situations in the lexicon. An empirical study on the Caucasian Urum vocabulary

Multilingual situations are reflected in the lexicon; by consequence, lexical borrowings are powerful evidence for language contact in the prehistory of linguistic communities. This article presents an empirical study on the lexical knowledge of Caucasian Urum speakers, i. e., ethnic Greek speakers in the Small Caucasus, who are bilingual in a variety of Turkish (Urum) and Russian. The analysis is based on the established assumption that certain concepts are cross-linguistically associated with a certain likelihood of borrowing. Based on this assumption the data from lexical knowledge allow for insights with respect to the substrate/superstrate status of the involved languages in a multilingual situation and provide evidence for the type of relation (genetic or contact-induced) between compared languages.

Knowing is not always knowing: The Korean cwul al- construction in mental-spaces theory

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the meaning of the construction ‘a relativizer-cwul [complementizer] -al- ‘know’ ’ in Korean, specifically on its semantic ambiguity between meaning ‘believe that . . .’ and meaning ‘know that . . .’. When it is followed exclusively by psych predicates in present-day Korean, particularly either al- ‘know’ or molu- ‘not.know,’ cwul comes to have its extended function as a complementizer from its original sense meaning ‘method,’ or ‘way.’ I argue that the ambiguity belongs to the overall construction, which is licensed by the neutral epistemic stance encoded by the complementizer cwul. I also contend that the cwul al- construction that contains the predicate al- ‘know’ shows asymmetrical usages of first and nonfirst-person subjects; the present-tense cwul al- construction with a first-person subject is not normally licensed. This paper employs mental-spaces theory to account for the ambiguity and the asymmetry, which stem from the covert interactions between the two viewpoints. I show that the theory captures the speaker's backgrounded knowledge with backgrounded information accommodation, a specific mental-space evocation mechanism, which is crucial in the construal of the construction.

Assertibility and Sensitivity

Epistemologists have proposed various norms of assertion to explain when a speaker is in an epistemic position to assert a proposition. In this article I propose a distinct necessary condition on assertibility: that a speaker should assert only what she sensitively believes, where a subject's belief is sensitive just in case the subject would not hold it if it were false. I argue that the Sensitivity Rule underwrites simple explanations for three key features of assertibility that pose explanatory challenges to other prominent proposals: the fact that assertibility is open under known entailment, the general impropriety of assertions that a lottery ticket has lost made purely on the basis of the speaker's knowledge of the odds, and the fact that assertibility varies widely with features of the conversational context. I close by considering three distinct roles the Sensitivity Rule might play in the overall theory of assertibility.

Lexical Organization and Access: A Developmental Cognitive Approach to the Acquisition of Morphology

<p><em>The present paper represents a further step in the work of Kahlaoui (2000) on lexical organization and access. It was argued in this paper that the distinction between regular and irregular morphology is counter cognitive as it deprives a good deal of the lexical elements from being processed via rule abstraction (Plunkett & Marchman, 1993) only because they are processed by minor rules (Mohanan, 1986). The lexicon is the modular mental component of a speaker's linguistic knowledge. It was also argued that the poor performance of dysphasic speakers on regular morphology is to be explained outside the non-natural and cognitively unwarranted distinction between regularity and irregularity. The lexicon is the sum of words – devoid of any internal structure -- known to the speaker. It was also argued that the set of word formation strategies generated/abstracted by the speaker in a developmental cognitive fashion constitutes his/her morphological system, which will be used for an automatic normal access to words. Automatic access is the normal access route via the central nervous system which is linguistically aware of the grammar it uses to access the modular the encapsulated lexicon. Access is performed through the strategy itself for both comprehension and production and happens in a non-modular fashion. Default – or emergency – access is performed in cases of accidental or mnemonic failure through a direct look-up procedure into the associative lexicon and through the central nervous system.</em></p>

Hearing-impaired recipients’ non-vocal action sets as a resource for collaboration in conversation

This article reports findings from a conversation analytic (CA) study concerning the occurrence of the non-vocal actions by the hearing-impaired (HI) recipients of talk and the consequences that these actions have for each speaker's ongoing turn in their dyadic interactions. The action sets that were analyzed include gaze shifts and leaning forward, turning one ear toward the speaker, the facial, expression of a frown, and following these, immobility. This article argues that these non-vocal actions are consequential actions of the HI recipient and they strengthen the recipient's collaboration with the speaker. These collaborative procedures are points on a continuum and these include perceptual strain, partial misperception, or more substantial misperception. The speakers interpreted the nonvocal actions according to the ongoing sequence, and for this reason, their responses varied, but they also reflected the speaker's knowledge of the HI recipient's hearing impairment. The non-vocal actions of trouble differ from the verbal other-initiations of repair (e.g. What?). This difference may serve a specific function in HI-conversations; the non-vocal actions that occur simultaneously with the speaker's turn enable the sharing of the HI recipient's perceptual uncertainty in a face-saving manner without explicitly disturbing the conversational flow.