From language structures to language use

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Chen ◽  
Jiansheng Guo
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Linguistic Intuition ◽  
Linguistic Structures ◽  
Language Type

The place of Mandarin Chinese in Talmy’s two-way typology of motion expressions has been a focus of debate. Based primarily on linguistic intuition, some researchers consider Mandarin a Satellite-framed language, and some others consider it a Verb-framed language. This paper reports results from analyses of three different types of data from speakers’ actual language use in narrative discourse (one from elicited adults’ spoken narratives, one from written narratives in nine contemporary novels, and one from elicited children’s spoken narratives from ages 3 to 9) that suggest otherwise. Specifically, Mandarin shows a unique discourse style that matches neither Satellite-framed nor Verb-framed languages. The data provide evidence for categorizing Mandarin Chinese as the third language type: an equipollently-framed language. It is argued that examination of language use in discourse can provide insights for solving nutty problems that may not be resolved by merely looking at static linguistic structures.

scholarly journals What is special about L3 processing?

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEES DE BOT ◽  
CAROL JAENSCH
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Third Language ◽  
The Core ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

While research on third language (L3) and multilingualism has recently shown remarkable growth, the fundamental question of what makes trilingualism special compared to bilingualism, and indeed monolingualism, continues to be evaded. In this contribution we consider whether there is such a thing as a true monolingual, and if there is a difference between dialects, styles, registers and languages. While linguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest differences in the processing of a third, compared to the first or second language, neurolinguistic research has shown that generally the same areas of the brain are activated during language use in proficient multilinguals. It is concluded that while from traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives there are grounds to differentiate monolingual, bilingual and multilingual processing, a more dynamic perspective on language processing in which development over time is the core issue, leads to a questioning of the notion of languages as separate entities in the brain.

scholarly journals Politeness and reputation in cultural evolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Mühlenbernd ◽  
Sławomir Wacewicz ◽  
Przemysław Żywiczyński
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Stability ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Social Image ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Politeness Strategies ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary

AbstractPoliteness in conversation is a fascinating aspect of human interaction that directly interfaces language use and human social behavior more generally. We show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model polite behavior. The recently proposed responsibility exchange theory (Chaudhry and Loewenstein in Psychol Rev 126(3):313–344, 2019) describes how the polite communications of thanking and apologizing impact two different types of an agent’s social image: (perceived) warmth and (perceived) competence. Here, we extend this approach in several ways, most importantly by adding a cultural-evolutionary dynamics that makes it possible to investigate the evolutionary stability of politeness strategies. Our analysis shows that in a society of agents who value status-related traits (such as competence) over reciprocity-related traits (such as warmth), both the less and the more polite strategies are maintained in cycles of cultural-evolutionary change.

scholarly journals Plural Marking in Spoken and Written Narratives: A Corpus-based Study of Japanese Learners of English

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 224
Author(s):  
Yumiko Yamaguchi ◽  
Hiroko Usami
Keyword(s):  
Picture Book ◽  
Developmental Sequence ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
Japanese Learners Of English ◽  
L2 Development ◽  
Plural Marking ◽  
Japanese Learners ◽  
Linguistic Structures

This paper aims to present the results of a learner corpus study on spoken and written narratives by Japanese learners of English using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998). PT assumes that there is a universal hierarchy of second language (L2) development and many studies (e.g., Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Pienemann, 1998) have shown support for PT stages for English L2. However, few PT studies have addressed the issues of whether learners use linguistic structures in the same way in spoken and written tasks. The current study focuses on learners’ use of plural marking on nouns, since contradictory results have been reported for the developmental sequence of lexical plural -s and phrasal plural -s (Charters, Dao, & Jansen, 2011). The participants in this study comprised 291 university students learning in English programs in Japanese universities. Each of them performed spoken and written narratives using a picture book titled Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) containing 24 wordless pictures. The learner corpus including both 291 audio-recorded and transcribed spoken narratives and 291 written narratives was compiled. The results of the analyses showed a connection between learners’ use of plural marker -s in speaking and that in writing, while a small number of students were found to perform differently in two different tasks. Moreover, this study demonstrated support for the developmental sequence of lexical and phrasal plural marking predicted in PT. 

scholarly journals ENGLISH PERFECT IN COGNITION OF SLOVAK ISCED3 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH – PRELIMINARY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomáš Hlava
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Proficiency Test ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Declarative Knowledge ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Language Instruction ◽  
Different Types

In English language instruction in Slovakia, a strong preference for declarative knowledge at the expense of procedural knowledge development has been reported over the last two decades. However, the cognitive aspects of language attainment predict no impact of instructional efforts, since mental representations of language to be attained are told to be supported by different cognitive systems than associative learning develops. Language variation materializes differences among languages based on differences in digitalizing the experience and thus understanding the world. For Slovak learners, the English present perfect is one such anomaly in categorization. This paper aims to answer what the specific interactions between past simple and present perfect are and how the predicted cognitive aspects of language attainment influence the use of different types of knowledge. A proficiency test focusing on declarative knowledge and language use without context and in context was distributed to 600 Slovak learners of English at the ISCED3a level. In Past simple conditions, students proved highly proficiency in all 3 types of tasks. In present perfect conditions, declarative knowledge strongly dominated over language use in context. In Present perfect conditions, substitutions by past simple were significantly more frequent than substitutions of present perfect by past simple. Cognitive funneling was recognized as a process inhibiting fast proceduralization of the English present perfect compared to fast and reliable proceduralization of the past simple.

Going beyond motion events typology: The case of Basque as a verb-framed language

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
Keyword(s):  
Motion Verbs ◽  
High Tolerance ◽  
Motion Events ◽  
Lexical Resources ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Written Narratives ◽  
Motion Event ◽  
New Information ◽  
Different Types

AbstractThe concept of motion is present in all the world’s languages. However, the ways in which speakers of different languages codify motion do not seem to be so universal. Languages offer different types of structures to express motion, and speakers pay attention to different elements within the motion event. The goal of this paper is to examine in great detail how motion events are described and expressed in Basque oral and written narratives. This study focuses on three main areas: motion verbs, elaboration of Manner and elaboration of Path. Although Basque can be classified in Talmy’s terms as a verb-framed language, it is argued that it is not a prototypical example of this group with respect to the lexicalisation of Path. Unlike other verb-framed languages, the description of Path in Basque motion events is very frequent and detailed, not only in situations when it adds new information, but also in pleonastic cases. This characteristic seems to be related to Basque’s rich lexical resources for motion and space, as well as to its high tolerance for verb omission. On the basis of these data, the scope of Talmy’s binary typology is questioned. It is suggested that the verb- and satellite-framed language typology should be revised in order to account for these intra-typological differences.

Factuality lens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danjie Su
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Talk Show ◽  
Passive Construction

Abstract Why do speakers choose the Mandarin Chinese unmarked passive construction (UP) in conversation when they have other grammatical alternatives with roughly the same semantics? From the perspective of subjectivity, this study identifies the Factuality lens, a lens through which a situation is presented as a “fact” or a “truth” regardless of reality. My analysis of a video corpus of spontaneous talk show conversations using the discourse adjacent alternation method reveals that speakers tend to choose UP over other constructions to present a transitive event through the Factuality lens by emphasizing the factuality of a fact or making a non-fact appear as a fact – either deceivingly or openly in a fictitious narrative or a joke. The findings reveal that grammatical constructions can linguistically recreate a situation different from reality. The conclusion that Factuality lens is a factor that could influence speakers’ grammatical choice casts light on pragmatic consequence of grammatical choice and subjectivity in language use.

scholarly journals Smoothly moving through Mental Spaces: Linguistic patterns of viewpoint transfer in news narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kobie van Krieken ◽  
José Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Intermediate Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Mental Spaces ◽  
Linguistic Structures

AbstractThis article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projected here-and-now viewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from a there-and-then viewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpoint in-between the newsworthy events and the present. Viewpoint transfers and their markers were examined in a corpus of 100 Dutch crime news narratives published over a period of fifty years. The results reveal clear patterns, which indicate that both linguistic structures and narrative-based as well as genre-based inferences play a role in the processing of news narratives. The results furthermore clarify how these narratives have been gradually crystallizing into a genre over the past decades. These findings elucidate the complex yet fluent process of conceptually moving between mental spaces, thus advancing our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and the cognitive representation of narrative discourse.

What psycholinguistic studies ignore about literary experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-103
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs ◽  
Herbert L. Colston
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Psycholinguistic Research ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Literary Experiences ◽  
Literary Experience

Abstract Multiple decades of psycholinguistic research exploring people’s reading of different types of language has delivered much improved understanding of textual comprehension experience. Psycholinguistic studies have typically focused on a few cognitive and linguistic processes presumed to be central in reading comprehension of language, but this emphasis has omitted other processes and products readers commonly experience in their imaginative, aesthetic encounters with literature. Our paper describes some of the limitations of psycholinguistics for explaining people’s literary experiences. Nonetheless, we argue that recent research on embodied simulation processes may help close the gap between psycholinguistics, with its emphasis on generic processes of non-literary language use, and studies associated with the scientific study of literature with their focus on phenomenological, lived reactions to literary texts.

Forward and backward transfer of sentence processing cues in English and Mandarin Chinese: A call for approximate replication of Liu, Bates, and Li (1992) and Su (2001)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Stephen Skalicky ◽  
Victoria Chen
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Competition Model ◽  
Functional Explanation ◽  
L2 Proficiency ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
Forward Transfer ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Chinese And English

Abstract The Competition Model has served as a functional explanation of cross-linguistic influence and transfer for more than 30 years. A large number of studies have used the Competition Model to frame investigations of sentence processing strategies in different types of bilingual and multilingual speakers. Among the different bilingual speakers investigated, Mandarin Chinese and English bilinguals represent a clear testing ground for the claims of the Competition Model. This is because of purportedly stark contrasts in sentence processing strategies between the two languages. Previous studies investigating sentence processing strategies of English L2 and Mandarin L2 bilinguals suggests forward transfer of L1 cues to the L2, moderated by L2 proficiency. In this paper, we argue for replication of two of these studies, namely Liu, Bates, and Li (1992) and Su (2001). These studies continue to be cited today as evidence of differences between English and Mandarin sentence processing strategies which is in turn taken as support for the predictions of the Competition Model. However, both studies presented methodological limitations in terms of measures of proficiency, participant and stimuli selection, and the statistical analysis. We suggest approximate replication of both of these studies and provide suggestions for how such replications might be conducted.

Polysemous Features of Words of Perception in English, Chinese and Korean—A Case Study of mouth, 嘴/口 and입

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 2002
Author(s):  
Chengyu Nan
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Comparative Case Study ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Korean Language ◽  
Physiological Phenomenon ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Physical Features

Typologically, English, Chinese and Korean belong to three different types of language. English is inflectional, Chinese is isolating and Korean is agglutinative. Therefore, words of perception in these three languages show some different semantic features. But due to similar physical features and physiological phenomenon, people speaking English, Chinese or Korean language use the same word of perception to express the same meaning or feeling. This paper makes a comparative case study of mouth, 嘴/口 and입, which have rich polysemous features. Their meanings are extended from “the part of human body” to the concrete “entrance” or “person” and then to the abstract “speech act” or “way of speaking”. The meaning extension shows semantic symmetry and asymmetry both interlingually and intralingually in the expressions not only with mouth, 嘴/口 and입 and other words of perception in three languages.

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