This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection – a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of formulations account for many instances throughout the corpus, understanding this particular formulation in CA terms does not (...) explain its drastic rejection by the caller. We therefore turn to an in-depth examination of strategies for lexical and syntactic resonance as a stance-taking device throughout the interaction. In so doing, we not only shed light on the anomalous interaction, but also offer an answer to a provocative question previously put forward by Haddington concerning which of the two – stances or actions – have more meaningful consequences for the description of the organization of interaction. In the particular interaction analyzed here, stances play the more significant role. We propose that the intersubjective stance-taking of participants may be viewed as a meta-action employed among participants as they move across actions, sequences, and activities in talk. (shrink)

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

This article reviews Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction 978-1-108-47361-3.

Tomasello provides compelling evidence that children understand that people are morally obligated toward members of their social group. We call for expanding the scope of inquiry to encompass the full developmental trajectory of humans’ understanding of the relation between moral obligation, sociality, and stancetaking in interaction. We suggest that humans display a lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation.

We agree with Branigan & Pickering that structural priming experiments should supplant grammaticality judgments for testing linguistic representation. However, B&P overlook a vast linguistic literature that converges with – but extends – the experimental findings. B&P conclude that syntax is functionally independent of the lexicon. We argue that a broader approach to priming reveals cracks in the façade of syntactic autonomy.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 465-477.

In this article, we investigate the functional itinerary followed by Hebrew be'emet, through a close exploration of its synchronic uses in the contemporary spoken language. Since this utterance, derived from the noun 'emet, is so profoundly tied in with the speaker's beliefs and attitudes towards his or her discourse, we consider issues of metalanguage, modality, evidentiality, and stance. Be'emet is traditionally classified as `adverb', but in our corpus of naturally occurring Hebrew conversation, only 22 percent of all tokens function in (...) this role. Whereas these tokens function referentially, the great majority of tokens function in the interpersonal realm of discourse, manifesting properties of discourse markers: 44.5 percent of all tokens function as full-fledged discourse markers serving mirative, reprimanding, or negating any doubt roles; 22.5 percent function to ratify a previous stance; and three percent function to latch onto a new topic, requesting its elaboration. An intermediate category is composed of tokens functioning both referentially and interpersonally, mid-way between an adverb and a discourse marker, in a way that is particularly illuminating for understanding the changes undergone by be'emet as a result of its employment in discourse. The study thus lends support to previous studies of subjectification and intersubjectification in the process of grammaticization of discourse markers. (shrink)

In this paper we test the hypothesis that tautologies are actually not tautologies. Indeed, when exploring natural language use, it seems that, having...

The framework of depicting put forward byClark (2016)offers a schematic vantage point from which to examine iconic language use. Confronting the framework with empirical data, we consider some of its key theoretical notions. Crucially, by reconceptualizing the typology of depictions, we identify an overlooked domain in the literature: “speech-embedded nonverbal depictions,” namely cases where meaning is communicated iconically, nonverbally, and without simultaneously co-occurring speech. In addition to contextualizing the phenomenon in relation to existing research, we demonstrate, with examples from American (...) TV talk shows, how such depictions function in real-life language use, offering a brief sketch of their complexities and arguing also for their theoretical significance. (shrink)

In this review, I briefly explain some of the key concepts of the book in order to offer a panoramic view of the theory of linguistic bodies. Following the book's structure, I first describe the authors’ notion of body, then refer to their notion of dialectics, after that, I expose the steps of the model and, finally, get to their conception of languaging.

Studies of joint productions have often focused on instances where a recipient anticipates through completions what a speaker might be about to say, or through expansion what that speaker could plausibly go on to say. However, recent work suggests that grammatically fitted continuations may also alter or redirect the projected trajectory of a prior speaker's turn or utterance. In this paper, building on this prior work, we focus on cases in Japanese interaction where grammatically fitted continuations of one speaker's turn (...) or utterance by another speaker accomplished through "format tying" effects some kind of transformation of the action or stance implemented by that prior turn. We term these "transformative continuations," and propose that while they are invariably disaligning, they may nevertheless implement both affiliative and disaffiliative stances. We propose that an analysis of transformative continuations thus leads us to a consideration of both the degree to which participants may orient to these as affiliative, as well as the ways in which the respective participants may be held accountable for such instances of joint production. (shrink)

Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational (...) aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. This separation of language and music was accompanied by their (re)unification in songs with words. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWithin the framework of the Defaultness Hypothesis, automatic responses to “fully abstract phrasal patterns,” involving strong attenuation of highly positive concepts, are sarcastic. Such g...

Findings from two experiments argue in favor of the superiority of default, preferred interpretations over non-default less favored counterparts, outshining degree of non-salience, non-literalness, contextual strength, and negation. They show that, outside of a specific context, the default interpretation of specific negative constructions is a non-salient interpretation 1; their non-default interpretation is a salience-based alternative. In contrast, the default interpretation of the affirmative counterparts is a salience-based interpretation ; their non-default interpretation is a non-salient alternative. When in equally strongly supportive (...) contexts, default yet non-salient negative sarcasm is processed faster than non-default, non-salient yet affirmative sarcasm and faster than non-default yet salience-based negativ.. (shrink)

In my general aim to probe a non-reductionist Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement, considering social self-other relations and the epistemic 2PP in social syn-aesthetic tuning-ins, synchronisations and tuning-outs, this paper amplifies the Aristotelian common sense concept κοινὴ αἲσθησις2 by analysing the concept and metaphor of “resonance”3 in contemporary debates on >resonance< as acoustic and multimodal figure of thought. Resonance as shown in scientific models derived from acoustics will be applied to an aesthetic comunity of sensing and making music together as explored (...) in Alfred Schütz, as well as in social relations in social psychology. Finally, this paper puts resonance to test as well in technical atunements of social relations and closes with the necessary resistance to imposition of social resonance, introduced in this paper as xenoresonance. (shrink)

This paper discusses the discursive and interpersonal functions conveyed by the Italian negative operator no(?) ‘no’, suggesting a possible pathway of functional enrichment that can account for its high degree of polyfunctionality. Drawing on the KIParla corpus of contemporary spoken Italian, we chart the values of no(?) as a discourse marker, which are all clearly connected to the incremental co-construction of discourse in interaction, either in terms of turn management or of shared knowledge and mutual alignment. We then explore its (...) sociolinguistic distribution, showing that register variation plays a major role in this respect. We argue that conversational uses of no(?) as a discourse marker, including its role as a pause-filler, are motivated by cooperative needs in discourse construction, shaping its functional profile at the intersection of mental processes and communicative practices. (shrink)

Language is a rewarding field if you are in the prediction business. A reader who is fluent in English and who knows how academic papers are typically structured will readily come up with several possible guesses as to where the title of this section could have gone, had it not been cut short by the ellipsis. Indeed, in the more natural setting of spoken language, anticipatory processing is a must: performance of machine systems for speech interpretation depends critically on the (...) availability of a good predictive model of how utterances unfold in time (Baker, 1975; Jelinek, 1990; Goodman, 2001), and there is strong evidence that prospective uncertainty affects human sentence processing too (Jurafsky, 2003; Hale, 2006; Levy, 2008). The human ability to predict where the current utterance is likely to be going is just another adaptation to the general pressure to anticipate the future (Hume, 1748; Dewey, 1910; Craik, 1943), be it in perception, thinking, or action, which is exerted on all cognitive systems by evolution (Dennett, 2003). Look-ahead in language is, however, special in one key respect: language is a medium for communication, and in communication the most interesting (that is, informative) parts of the utterance that the speaker is working through are those that cannot be predicted by the listener ahead of time. (shrink)

One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which I will call “logical”, views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the “monological” one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, “dialogical”, conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of (...) fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment – the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances – makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed (...) with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on (...) a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality. At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest. (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

The human capacity for intersubjective engagement is present, even when one is limited in speaking, pointing, and coordinating gaze. This paper examines the everyday social interactions of two differently-disposed actors—a non-speaking autistic child and his speaking, neurotypical mother—who participate in shared attention through dialogic turn-taking. In the collaborative pursuit of activities, the participants coordinate across multiple turns, producing multi-turn constructions that accomplish specific goals. The paper asks two questions about these collaborative constructions: 1) What are their linguistic and discursive structures? (...) 2) How do embodied actions contribute to these constructions? Findings show that the parent and child repeatedly co-produced multi-turn constructions that had consistent structures, implying a sophisticated ability to anticipate the completion of action trajectories. Examining the embodied actions of interactants revealed that the child often accommodated to the parent’s demands for participation. Nonetheless, the child occasionally pursued his own goals by improvising with and within multi-turn constructions. He launched constructions to redirect parental attention, and otherwise produced surprising actions within the turn-taking structure of these constructions. The paper concludes that multi-turn constructions in the midst of activities are a primordial site in which to begin observing the competencies of non-speaking autistic children for intersubjective engagement. (shrink)

This article reviews Interactional linguistics: an introduction to language in social interaction.

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with mental health problems that emphasises promoting dialogue between multiple perspectives within an individual person and between all the people present, including the therapists. Therapists’ own perspectives are often introduced during conversations called reflections, which present a potential source of different perspectives. Using conversation analysis we analysed 14 hours of video-recorded Open Dialogue sessions with a focus on therapists’ reflections. We noticed that therapists did not display explicit agreement with each other’s reflections. This (...) absence of explicit agreement was displayed through a variety of verbal and non-verbal forms. Eliding agreement facilitated deference to the epistemic authority of the client, assertion of epistemic rights from second position, emphasis of a positive perspective or to voice multiple perspectives. Therapists avoided consensus and thus presented multiple perspectives to the family while also attending to issues of contingency. The implications of epistemic primacy and asymmetry connected to sequential structures in talk pose a challenge to the generation of collaborative reflective dialogues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to illustrate the contribution of Acquisition Linguistics combined with the dialogic view driven by Bakhtin’s ideas, in order to describe morpho-syntactic acquisitions. According to the first approach, interaction is the main driver of syntactic acquisition processes, especially adults’ adjustments to the morpho-syntactic attempts of children and children’s repetitions of adults’ speech. In parallel, a dialogic approach to language acquisition focuses on how the two speakers’ co-construction of discourse leads children to use and acquire the linguistic ability (...) to share and construct meaning in discourse. We analyse conversations between adults and children aged between 2 and 4 years old, with typical and atypical developments. Our results show how inter-discursive facts in dialogue and repetition in interaction are major contributors of language acquisition processes. (shrink)

Given the growing consensus that grammar emerges as language is used in social interaction, how grammar emerges through interaction still remains much unknown. This study demonstrates that the beginnings of the emergence of constructions can be found in individual interactions. Through an investigation on videotaped English conversations and corpora using discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and corpus linguistic methodologies, I find that conversational participants have a tendency as high as 80% or more to reuse words in prior turns. I argue that (...) reuse as the mechanism of resonance motivation and modification as the mechanism of relevance motivation work competitively and conjointly, shaping the emergence of grammatical structures of a language. Reuses lead to formation of the fixed frame; modifications form the category for an open slot. In summary, grammar emerges through interaction among participants who are constantly reusing and modifying prior utterances to achieve current interactive goals. (shrink)

This article reviews The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics 9781107118447.