Languages, Misc

Issues in the construction of knowledge -- Language, mind and cognition -- Aspects of language -- Curricular areas.

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un- can be added to many verbs, but not all (e.g., roll/unroll; close/*unclose). This study compared theoretical accounts of how this is done. Children aged 5–6 (N = 18), 9–10 (N = (...) 18), and adults (N = 18) rated the acceptability of un- prefixed forms of 48 verbs (and, as a control, bare forms). Across verbs, a negative correlation was observed between the acceptability of ungrammatical un- prefixed forms (e.g., *unclose) and the frequency of (a) the bare form and (b) alternative forms (e.g., open), supporting the entrenchment and pre-emption hypotheses, respectively. Independent ratings of the extent to which verbs instantiate the semantic properties characteristic of a hypothesized semantic cryptotype for un- prefixation were a significant positive predictor of acceptability, for all age groups. The relative importance of each factor differed for attested and unattested un- forms and also varied with age. The findings are interpreted in the context of a new hybrid account designed to incorporate the three factors of entrenchment, pre-emption, and verb semantics. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of tense and aspect in Romance languages. Its goal is to develop a compositional, model-theoretic semantics for tense and temporal adverbs which is sensitive to aspectual distinctions. I will consider durative adverbial distributions and aspectual contrasts across different morphological tense forms. I will examine tense selection under habitual meanings, generic meanings and state of result constructions. In order to account for these facts I will argue that temporal homogeneity plays a fundamental role in tense selection (...) in Romance languages. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures (...) of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information. (shrink)

All over the world, local languages are facing possible or probable extinction. The situation is nowhere more acute than for First Nations* in the regions now called the United States of America and Canada. In the face of this situation many people have become interested in studying endangered languages. Interest in threatened languages comes from many different sides: commercial, academic, scientific, religious, and more. The most immediately affected are of course the very speakers of the languages and the communities where (...) they live or have lived. (shrink)

About: the tensions between the inner and outer view of R-languages ("real languages"), the language-centered and theory-centered study of languages, the (often foreign) linguist and the (sometimes linguist) native speaker, description and theory, a language as a set of choices and extensions of universal grammar and as a concrete realization in a particular culture and history. The materials for this paper are drawn mostly from First Nations languages, especially those of the Pacific Northwest.

Jackendoff comes to some appealing overall conclusions, but several of his assumptions and arguments are questionable. The present commentary points out the following problems: oversimplifications in the translation-based argument for the independence of language and thought; a lack of consideration of the possibility of unconscious use of internalized natural languages; insufficient consideration of possible characteristics of languages of thought ; neglect of the possibility of thinking in example-oriented and metaphorical ways; unfair bias in contrasting visual to linguistic imagery; neglect of (...) other types of imagery; and neglect of the possibility of unconscious attentional processes. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic analysis of data like It is getting colder and colder. Their meaning is argued to arise from a combination of a comparative with pluractionality. The analysis is embedded in a general theory of plural predication and pluractionality. It supports a semantic theory involving a family of syntactic plural operators.

The problem of the emergence and evolution of natural languages is seen today by many specialists as one of the most difficult problems in the cognitive sciences. We believe that a key to unravelling this enigma is the close relationship of language to mathematics.

We begin with the following quotation from Karp [1964]: My interest in infinitary logic dates back to a February day in 1956 when I remarked to my thesis supervisor, Professor Leon Henkin, that a particularly vexing problem would be so simple if only I could write a formula which would say x = 0 or x = 1 or x = 2 etc. To my surprise, he replied, "Well, go ahead." Traditionally, expressions in formal systems have been regarded as signifying (...) finite inscriptions which are—at least in principle—capable of actually being written out in primitive notation. However, the fact that (first-order) formulas may be identified with natural numbers (via "Gödel numbering") and hence with finite sets makes it no longer necessary to regard formulas as inscriptions, and suggests the possibility of fashioning "languages" some of whose formulas— such as that in the above quotation—would be naturally identified as infinite sets. A "language" of this kind is called an infinitary language: in this article we discuss those infinitary languages which can be obtained in a straightforward manner from first-order languages by allowing conjunctions, disjunctions and, possibly, quantifier sequences, to be of infinite length. In the course of the discussion we shall see that, while the expressive power of such languages far exceeds that of their finitary (first-order) counterparts, very few of them possess the "attractive" features (e.g., compactness and completeness) of the latter. Accordingly, the infinitary languages that do in fact possess these features merit special attention. In §1 we lay down the basic syntax and semantics of infinitary languages and demonstrate their expressive power by means of examples. §2 is devoted to those infinitary languages which permit only finite quantifier sequences: these languages turn out to be relatively well-behaved. In §3 we discuss the compactness problem for infinitary languages and its.. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Ermanno Bencivenga offers a stylistically and conceptually exciting investigation of the nature of language, mind, and personhood and the many ways the three connect. Bencivenga, one of the most iconoclastic voices to emerge in contemporary American philosophy, contests the basic assumptions of analytic approaches to these topics. His exploration leads through fascinating discussions of education, courage, pain, time and history, selfhood, subjectivity and objectivity, reality, facts, the empirical, power and transgression, silence, privacy and publicity, and (...) play—all themes that are shown to be integral to our thinking about language. Relentessly bending the rules, Bencivenga frustrates our expectations of a "proper" theory of language. He invokes the transgressions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein even as he appropriates the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein's _Tractatus_. Written in a philosophically playful and experimental mode, _A Theory of Language and Mind_ draws the reader into a sense of continual surprise, therapeutic discomfort, and discovery. (shrink)