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Usage-Based Models of Language
This book brings together papers by the foremost representatives of a range of theoretical and empirical approaches converging on a common goal: to account for language use, or how speakers actually speak and understand language. Crucial to a usage-based approach are frequency, statistical patterns, and, most generally, linguistic experience. Linguistic competence is not seen as cognitively-encapsulated and divorced from performance, but as a system continually shaped, from inception, by linguistic usage events. The authors represented here were among the first to leave behind rule-based linguistic representations in favour of constraint-based systems whose structural properties actually emerge from usage. Such emergentist systems evince far greater cognitive and neurological plausibility than algorithmic, generative models. Approaches represented here include Cognitive Grammar, the Lexical Network Model, Competition Model, Relational Network Model, and accessibility Theory. The empirical data come from phonological variation, syntactic change, psycholinguistic experiments, discourse, connectionist modelling of language acquisition, and linguistic corpora.
Attitudes de Se
"De se statements are emphatic assertions in which speakers make fundamental claims about either themselves or others. In English, they are usually conveyed via "I" statements or third person reflexive pronouns, e.g. "she herself," "he himself." De seattitudes appear often in our day-to-day lives, but they also pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume teases out what de se attitudes connote linguistically and also what these statements reveal about how humans think about themselves and how they understand the world around them. "--
Think Generic!
Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism.
Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics Volume I
Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, the first of the two volumes of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, brings together twenty essays which critically examine linguistic action and explore ways in which it can be accounted for. The articles presented in this collection are all focused on “doing things with words”, but in most cases do not subscribe to speech act theory in the tradition of John L. Austin and John R. Searle. The linking thread through the volume is not a theoretical commitment to one of the speech-act theoretical models, but the authors’ perspective on language as a means of action, how linguistic expressions become effective in context and how ...
The Study of Language
This textbook provides a straightforward and comprehensive survey of the basic issues and topics involved in the study of language. Its twenty chapters range over speculation about the origin of language, the relationship between language and animal communication, the principal concepts involved in linguistic analysis, the new fields of discourse analysis and computer understander systems, sign language, current views on how children acquire language and how adults learn new languages, how languages change over time and how language is affected by various social, cultural and regional factors. Written in a clear and lively style, with frequent examples from English and other languages, this ...
Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar
A natural language discourse is more than an arbitrary sequence of utterances; a discourse exhibits coherence. Despite its centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role in theories of linguistic phenomena that apply across utterances. In this book, Andrew Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships between utterances that is rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated by the philosopher David Hume - Resemblance, Cause or Effect, and Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the distribution of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including verb phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures, tense, a...
Revealing Structure
Drawing from a wide range of perspectives in the analysis of grammatical structures, the papers collected in this book are unified not by linguistic subfield, but by the investigative method they employ in revealing grammatical patterns. Revealing Structure explores this style of investigation across phonology, morphology, and syntax. Dedicated to celebrated linguist Larry Hyman, author of such books as A Theory of Phonological Weight, this volume also features data from diverse languages--with a special emphasis on the languages of Africa--making it unique among existing linguistics collections.
Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar
In the last 25 years foreign language teaching has been able to increase its efficiency through an orientation towards authentic language materials, pragmatic language functions and interactive learning methods. However, so far foreign language teaching has lacked a sufficiently strong theoretical framework to support the teaching of language in all its aspects. Arguably, such a linguistic theory has to be usage-based and cognition-oriented. Since cognitive linguistics - and especially cognitive grammar - is concerned with conceptual issues against the larger background of human cognition and because it is based on actual language use, it becomes a powerful tool for dealing adequately with t...
The Linguistics of Punctuation
Geoffrey Nunberg challenges a widespread assumption that the linguistic structure of written languages is qualitatively identical to that of spoken language: It should no longer be necessary to defend the view that written language is truly language, but it is surprising to learn of written-language category indicators that are realized by punctuation marks and other figural devices.' He shows that traditional approaches to these devices tend to describe the features of written language exclusively by analogy to those of spoken language, with the result that punctuation has been regarded as an unsystematic and deficient means for presenting spoken-language intonation. Analysed in its own ter...
