Phrase structure grammars as indicative of uniquely human thoughts
Publication date: July 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 74Author(s): Eran AsoulinAbstractI argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of human thought and the underlying mechanis...
Source: Language Sciences - May 29, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Interlanguage: a perspective of quantitative linguistic typology
Publication date: July 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 74Author(s): Jingyang Jiang, Jinghui Ouyang, Haitao LiuAbstractThe study of interlanguage (IL) is crucial for the understanding of the acquisition and development of human languages. But there are very few empirical investigations into IL from a perspective of general linguistics or/and linguistic typology. Based on a dependency treebank of Chinese EFL learners' English writings from eight consecutive grades, we quantitatively analyzed the typological features of IL. It was found that: (1) Chinese EFL learners' IL linguistic system is a language with SV and VO pr...
Source: Language Sciences - May 7, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: May 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 73Author(s): (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - May 4, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Ecolinguistics of ethno-medicinal plants of the Dayak Ngaju community
This article describes aspects of the Dayak Ngaju language, specifically as they relate to plants used for medicinal purposes by the ethnic community. Data were gathered through participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and analysis of ritual incantations spoken by the traditional healers (shamans). Three important elements of the relationships between the ethnic culture and the language of ethno-botany in Dayak Ngaju were identified. These are: (1) the names of thirty six ethno-medicinal plants along with their components and medicinal functions; (2) the terminology used for the plants, which is based on th...
Source: Language Sciences - April 29, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
On trans-derivational operations: generative semantics and tree adjoining grammar
Publication date: July 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 74Author(s): Diego Gabriel KrivochenAbstractThe possibility of formulating conditions that made reference to multiple derivations was a staple of early work in Generative Semantics. In this paper we explore the possibility of having constraints arise from the interaction between derivations in an extended Generative Semantics-type (GS) grammar. In GS syntactic operations apply to semantic material in phrase structure trees; in our extension, these operations can apply within and across derivations. To this end, we will appeal to Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG; Josh...
Source: Language Sciences - April 23, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
How to speak “geocentric” in an “egocentric” language: A multimodal study among Ngigua-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals in a rural community of Mexico
Publication date: July 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 74Author(s): Eréndira Calderón, Stefano De Pascale, Evangelia AdamouAbstractIt has recently been shown that individuals residing in rural, indigenous communities rely on geocentric conceptualizations of space, e.g., north/south/east/west, even after they have shifted to a language that is known to favour egocentric conceptualizations, e.g., right/left. In this paper we explore how this combination works in practice by conducting a study in a previously non-investigated indigenous community of Mexico, the Ngiguas. We used a verbal localization task for community...
Source: Language Sciences - April 17, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: March 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 72Author(s): (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - March 4, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Pretonic alphabetic o in Present-day English
This article is concerned with the question of why, when immediately preceding primary stress, orthographic o is as a rule phonetically realized not only as the diphthongs /əʊ/, /oʊ/ but also as the qualitatively reduced short monophthong /ə/. For example, l/əʊˈ/cation ∼ l/əˈ/cation. It is argued that the instability of alphabetic o in this position is mainly due to 1) its frequent occurrences in intertonic position (e.g., ˌcompoˈnential), in which it is surrounded by two stressed syllables; 2) derivation from forms in which stress occurs upon the short monophthongs /ɒ/, /ɑ/ (e.g., Roberta ← Robert + -...
Source: Language Sciences - March 4, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial announcement
Publication date: Available online 22 February 2019Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Sune Vork Steffensen (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - February 22, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Nouns for visual objects: A hypothesis of the vision-language interface
Publication date: March 2019Source: Language Sciences, Volume 72Author(s): Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Paolo AcquavivaAbstractWe propose an interpretation of the vision process and a structural analysis of nouns and nominal reference which make it possible to relate the visual/cognitive and the linguistic encapsulation of objecthood in a rigorous way. The result of this integrated hypothesis is a predictive account of possible and impossible nouns lexicalizing visual objects. Visual objects are indexed relations between stimuli interpreted via visual properties, such as [round], and what we define as object concepts: a red b...
Source: Language Sciences - February 8, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Perception of lexical stress and sentence focus by Korean-speaking and Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English
In this study, 32 Spanish learners of English and 38 Korean learners of English completed a lexical stress and a sentence focus oddity test. The results revealed that having lexical stress and phrasal accent in the L1 facilitates the acquisition of L2 prominence, but that differences in how this information is instantiated in the L1 may have a negative effect in its acquisition. (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - February 7, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
This is not an interrogative: the prosody of “wh-questions” in Hebrew and the sources of their questioning and rhetorical interpretations
This study of wh-questions in natural Israeli Hebrew speech demonstrates that taking prosody into account makes this standard view untenable for Hebrew. The analysis of the accentuation of the wh-word and of the final intonation shows that the function of the utterance is compositionally constructed from its basic constituents. The construction is an expression of an open proposition, underspecified with respect to its “prototypical” function. The contribution of the utterance is constructed from the direct marking of a few designated categories, such as interest in gapped information and an appeal to the addressee. In...
Source: Language Sciences - January 10, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Such similatives: a cross-linguistic reconnaissance
Publication date: Available online 3 January 2019Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Johan van der Auwera, Kalyanamalini SahooAbstractThis paper is a preliminary exploration of the semantic and formal properties of the English word such and some of its counterparts in other languages. The proposal is that such words are ‘demonstrative similatives’ (or, equivalently, ‘similative demonstratives’), i.e., their meanings lie at the intersection of the semantic dimensions of similarity and demonstration. We show that this kind of classification is straightforward for languages like Latin and Sanskrit, in which the counte...
Source: Language Sciences - January 3, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Linguistics as a biased discipline: Identifications and interventions
Publication date: Available online 24 December 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Simon Borchmann, Carsten Levisen, Britta Schneider (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - December 25, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Bit and beat are heard as the same: Mapping the vowel perceptual patterns of Greek-English bilingual children
Conclusions are drawn about the interference of native Greek with the learning of English vowels and the acquisition of the foreign language stimuli in a classroom environment. (Source: Language Sciences)
Source: Language Sciences - December 20, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
