Language

Generative Oscillation - A Cognitive Model for the Emergence of Language

by Thorold (Thor) May

Research Material for a discontinued PhD

DRAFT COPY ONLY

NOT READY FOR PRINT PUBLICATION

The GO model proposes a co-generative view of the emergence of language. Most conventional linguistics models conceive... more The GO model proposes a co-generative view of the emergence of language. Most conventional linguistics models conceive of language as a representational system of symbols which refer to events, either mental or external to the organism. This representational function is said to motivate the linguistic system and (depending upon the linguistic model) largely control its form. The GO (Generative Oscillation) model proposed here recognizes the representational role of language. However it notes that as the mental linguistic system itself becomes efficiently organized, it creates an internal logic and drive of its own. To some extent this internally motivated linguistic system is conceived to override the external motivation to represent another reality. Since the internal linguistic system is dynamic and generative, it may give rise to linguistic output which seems strange in an inter-human communicative context (or even within the reflective mind of the creator). Thus while the external communicative context can become a constraint on unmotivated non-representational "internal language", it might not eliminate it. The Generative Oscillation model proposes that actual language production is an oscillating compromise between the representational function of language and the mental "language bot" itself (i.e. an internal self-organizing system) which is generating language strings just because that is what language language bots do. As far as I know, the Generative Oscillation Model, or anything like it, had not been suggested before in linguistics at the time of writing. Some conventional linguists may find it a bit "off the wall".

In The Shadow of Heroic Suicides

by Miguel A. Cruz Díaz

An extended version of a previous paper, this is a revised treatment to my as yet undefended Master's dissertation from the University of Puerto Rico.

The written word draws emotive power from symbolic language, and is the principal agent to propaganda. The use of... more The written word draws emotive power from symbolic language, and is the principal agent to propaganda. The use of symbolism in propaganda on Puerto Rico during the Second World War sought to construct popular support in a colonial society impregnated with a high level of religious piety and strictly defined moral and gender roles. This was achieved by exploiting the mechanisms of fear and otherness, manipulating existing social constructs of religiosity, morality and domesticity in order to ensure a consenting public opinion. The control of the flow of information, and the language that codifies such information, facilitates the manipulation of perception, and therefore, reality itself. Propaganda is, therefore, the mechanism that seeks to (re)imagine the rhetoric of reality.
 

Language Background and Literacy among Hispanic Young Adults

by Vilma Ortiz

Purposive Constructions in English

by Thorold (Thor) May

The detailed analysis of Purposive Constructions in this long paper will help researchers to clarify these phenomena in English, even though the linguistic model employed, Chomsky's Government and Binding, has (in my view) been superseded.

Abstract: This thesis* explores some of the syntactic & semantic properties of Purposive Constructions in English.... more Abstract: This thesis* explores some of the syntactic & semantic properties of Purposive Constructions in English. The term "purposive" is recognized as a semantic concept which finds regular expression in a small range of syntactic configurations. Purpose Clauses (PCs) and Rationale Clauses (Rat.Cs) are examined in some detail. Briefer reference is made to several other configurations, notably Because Clauses, So-That Clauses and Infinitival Relatives. In general Purposive Constructions comprise rather fuzzy semantic categories. Nevertheless, the main syntactic features are fairly clear. Interpretation of the constructions requires a systematic account of the control of empty slots (ellipted NPs) by thematic elements in the matrix clause. General conditions of Government and Binding appear adequate to predict the distribution of gaps in most Purposive Clauses. However, the relationship between propositions predicated of a common argument in these constructions is found to sometimes require matching conditions too subtle for syntax alone to predict. A concept of Thematic Coextensiveness is introduced to account for such matching.

Language Tangle - Predicting & Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education - PhD Thesis - ThorMay

by Thorold (Thor) May

Doctoral dissertation in knowledge worker productivity (specifically language teaching productivity) awarded by the University of Newcastle, NSW in 2010. The abstract and links to supporting documents including the thesis itself may also be viewed at http://thormay.net/lxesl/lxtangle_abstract.html. The full dissertation title is "Language Tangle - Predicting and Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education".

This thesis argues that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only reach its proper potential when it... more This thesis argues that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only reach its proper potential when it is accorded priority, second only to language learner productivity, amongst the many competing productivities which are always asserted by stakeholders in educational institutions.

A theoretical foundation for the research is established by examining the historical concept of productivity, and its more recent manifestation as knowledge worker productivity, especially as applied to teachers.

The empirical basis of the thesis is sourced from a chronological series of twenty biographical case studies in language teaching venues in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania and East Asia. The biographical case study methodology, although rare in applied linguistics, is justified by reference to its wide and growing application in other fields of qualitative research. The case studies are analysed for common patterns of productivity, as well as teaching productivity inhibition or failure.

It was affirmed across all of the case studies without exception that external parties could not control or even reliably predict what individual students might learn, and how well, from instances of instructed language teaching. This was regardless of the power of institutional players, external resources, curriculums or the teacher. Student belief in the immediate value of what was to be learned in a given lesson, and personal confidence in an ability to learn it were the most critical factors.

Teaching productivity was found to turn, ultimately, on the teacher's ability to influence the probability of student learning. The teacher could best influence learning probability by enhancing student motivation. The most effective environments for teaching productivity were seen to be those where the teacher was professionally equipped and politically enabled to exercise judgements which maximized opportunities for student language learning productivity. A negotiated pact concerning both curriculum and method often proved effective, especially with mature students, and at times required some deception of institutional authorities.

Empirically, the encouragement of reciprocal learning relationships between teacher and students was found to be powerfully enabling for language teaching productivity in the case studies.

In many venues a small but effective minority of 'intimate learners' were also able to leverage their language learning productivity by forging more personal relationships with the teacher.

The wider cultural paradigm within each of the countries represented in the case studies sanctioned different paths and limitations for both language learners and teachers, and hence was seen to influence teaching productivity in critical ways. It was found that under certain conditions, notably (but not exclusively) those prevailing in many East Asian educational institutions, that certification of foreign language skills had a higher cultural, employment and monetary value than the actual ability to exercise foreign language skills.

A negative influence on teacher productivity in many of the case studies was an ignorance about language learning and teaching amongst institutional players. The disregard of language teacher professionalism was fed by a belief that being able to speak a language was all that was necessary to teach it, and reinforced by misinterpreting the meaning of test results. Related to this, an imbalance of power relationships between teachers or students with other institutional interests was consistently found to interfere with teaching and learning productivities. Overall, the model of productivity understood in institutions instanced by the case studies tended to reflect a 19th Century economic paradigm of capital, raw materials (students) and labour (dispensable classroom workers) rather than any more sophisticated grasp of knowledge worker productivity.

It was demonstrated in the context of the case studies that productivity, and in particular knowledge worker productivity, is a complex concept whose facets require detailed analysis to arrive at a proper understanding of the role that foreign and second language teachers play in educational institutions.

Banjalung* - Transcript for a Language Course

by Thorold (Thor) May

* Banjalang, aka Bundjalung, Bunjalung, Badjalang, Banjalung & Bandjalang, is a middle Clarence dialect of a NSW, Australia Aboriginal language

This is a rudimentary phrase book for the Australian Aboriginal language Banjalung, constructed in co-operation with a... more This is a rudimentary phrase book for the Australian Aboriginal language Banjalung, constructed in co-operation with a surviving speaker and designed to encourage Banjalung language revival. It was undertaken in 1983 at the request of Southern Cross University (then Northern Rivers CAE) and local community members.

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features.

by Sonja Eisenbeiss

Authors: Penke, Martina, Janssen, Ulrike & Eisenbeiss, Sonja; published in 'Brain and Language' 90, 423-433

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature... more This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it
appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative
feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.

Wittgenstein on the Gridiron: Gestures and Language Games in American Football

by Armando Lopez

Term paper for my Wittgenstein conference course.

In this essay I will examine the sport of football as a case study for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of... more In this essay I will examine the sport of football as a case study for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “language-games” as expounded in Philosophical Investigations. I will then go on to critically evaluate the extent to which some fairly common movements in football, such as head-fakes, might count as linguistic practice or gesture, and whether they might be better understood as non-lingustic indicators of action. I will argue that such movements are best understood as “instruments” or “elements” of language, but that the context in which they are performed is based on non-linguistic indication or inference.

El proceso ontogenético de la significación

by Adolfo Perinat

1994. In colaboration with Marta Sadurní i Brugué. Substratum, 2(5), 17-39.
Re-edición en publicación en inglés: The ontogenesis of meaning: An interactional approach (1999). In colaboration with Marta Sadurní i Brugué. Mind, Culture and Activity, 6, 53-76.

Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: The Irresolvability of the Gadamer-Habermas Debate

by William J. Urban

class paper written Good Friday, April 6, 2012

Monitoring metrical stress in polysyllabic words

by Judith Peters

A large, searchable, web-based database of aphasic performance on picture naming and other tests of cognitive function

by Ted Strauss

Statistical Learning and Language: An Individual Differences Study

by Jennifer Misyak

Misyak, J. B. & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Statistical learning and language: An individual differences study. Language Learning, 62, 302-331.

OnnisSpivey2012

by Michael Spivey

When do you grasp the idea? MEG evidence for instantaneous idiom understanding

by Veronique Boulenger

Origins and Grammar of the Mazovian Language

by Bartlomiej Wrzesinski

Origins and Grammar of the Mazovian Language

by Bartlomiej Wrzesinski

Putting things in places: Developmental consequences of linguistic typology

by Sonja Eisenbeiss

Authors: Dan I. Slobin, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Bhuvana Narasimhan. To appear in: J. Bohnemeyer & E. Pederson (Eds.) (2008), Event representation. Cambridge: Cambridge

In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children... more In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children begin to talk about such events in their very early multi-word utterances. Our aim in focusing on the domain of “putting” events is to allow us to identify some important semantic and psycholinguistic factors that influence the course of acquisition. The overarching question is to determine the extent to which the development of linguistic event representations is influenced by the particular language the child is learning. Events of “putting” are frequently
discussed in interactions between caregivers and children, providing us with a rich crosslinguistic database in a high-frequency semantic domain. By examining language-specific characteristics of early event representations, we can make inferences about the cognitive resources and abilities that children bring to the task of learning how to talk about events in their native language.
A major motivation for working crosslinguistically is to investigate the role of language typology in children’s mapping of meanings onto forms—in this case, the expression of particular sorts of transitive motion events. In his well-known typology of how languages encode motion events, Talmy (1991, 2000) distinguishes between “satellite-framed” languages and “verbframed” languages on the basis of the element in the clause where information about path is
characteristically encoded. Our analyses show that this typological distinction does play an important role in the course of language acquisition, but other features that crosscut this typology play a role as well. These include properties of the target language’s inflectional morphology and
its semantic categories. We examine eight languages—four satellite-framed (English, German,Russian, Finnish) and four verb-framed (Spanish, Hindi, Turkish, Tzeltal).

Becoming a social agent: Developmental foundations of an embodied social psychology

by Moritz Daum

Sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and New Erthnicities in Interaction

by Ben Rampton