This book explores the usage-based claim that high usage frequency leads to the entrenchment of complex words in the minds of language users. To probe the correlation between corpus-extracted usage data and mental entrenchment, the author operationalises entrenchment in Gestalt psychological terms and conducts a series of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments.
This book explores the usage-based claim that high usage frequency leads to the entrenchment of complex words in the minds of language users. To probe the correlation between corpus-extracted usage data and mental entrenchment, the author operationalises entrenchment in Gestalt psychological terms and conducts a series of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments.
In this groundbreaking book, Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained "language instinct" to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.
The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predictive and descriptive in their research goals and rely on experimental or naturalistic data. But they share the common goal of seeking to explain how social structures, ideologies, and identity impact on the grammatical and conversational features of code-switching and language mixing, and on the emergence of mixed languages. Given its scope, this volume is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching. It is also of relevance to the general debate on the inter-relationships between language and society.
This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Jörg Schmid explains how this multiple feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage. The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact.
This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.
The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used. On the basis of several case studies combining quantitative corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments, it is shown how a usage-based approach sheds new light on a number of issues in argument realization and offers frequency-based explanations for its organizing principles at three levels of generality: verbs, constructions, and argument structure alternations.
Why our use of language is highly creative yet also constrained We use words and phrases creatively to express ourselves in ever-changing contexts, readily extending language constructions in new ways. Yet native speakers also implicitly know when a creative and easily interpretable formulation—such as “Explain me this” or “She considered to go”—doesn’t sound quite right. In this incisive book, Adele Goldberg explores how these creative but constrained language skills emerge from a combination of general cognitive mechanisms and experience. Shedding critical light on an enduring linguistic paradox, Goldberg demonstrates how words and abstract constructions are generalized and constrained in the same ways. When learning language, we record partially abstracted tokens of language within the high-dimensional conceptual space that is used when we speak or listen. Our implicit knowledge of language includes dimensions related to form, function, and social context. At the same time, abstract memory traces of linguistic usage-events cluster together on a subset of dimensions, with overlapping aspects strengthened via repetition. In this way, dynamic categories that correspond to words and abstract constructions emerge from partially overlapping memory traces, and as a result, distinct words and constructions compete with one another each time we select them to express our intended messages. While much of the research on this puzzle has favored semantic or functional explanations over statistical ones, Goldberg’s approach stresses that both the functional and statistical aspects of constructions emerge from the same learning mechanisms.
This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.
Conceiving of language and cognition as biological phenomena, these lectures provide and illustrate a coherent, integrated theoretical framework for studying essentially any aspect of language systems, language use, language change, and language evolution.
