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- Volume 25, Issue, 2011
Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2011
Volume 25, Issue 1, 2011
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Introduction
Author(s): Gregory Bochner, Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine and Daniela Rossipp.: 1–2 (2)More Less
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“I saw the yellowish going south”: Narrative discourse in autism spectrum disorder
Author(s): Jessica de Villierspp.: 3–29 (27)More LessThis paper uses discourse analysis techniques to analyze communication breakdown in the conversation of a youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In demonstrating how discourse analysis can reveal unexpected and ordinarily unperceived meanings in unorthodox forms of expression in ways that are clinically relevant, this text analysis uncovers and examines not only ambiguities and conversational breakdown, but also unexpected coherence, in a discourse that appears to be incomprehensible. Beginning with a brief account of ASD, the paper goes on to present the linguistic framework for analysis, phasal analysis (Asp and de Villiers 2010; Gregory 1985a; Malcolm 2010), a contextually based model for the description of English discourse. Specifically, the approach is used for an analysis of prosodic, grammatical and discourse features. Analysis reveals meaningful linguistic patterning that indicates conversational participation, engagement and coherence not previously supposed, with important social and clinical implications.
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Affordance and ability: How do participants replicate linguistic choices in the lab?
Author(s): Jean-Marie Marandinpp.: 30–50 (21)More LessThis paper addresses epistemological issues raised by the use of elicited data in linguistic analyses. A common suspicion raised by experimental settings is this: participants in the lab do not replicate their everyday use of language, due to the artificiality of the tasks and of the contexts involved, so that elicited speech should not constitute a reliable source of data. I set out the experimental settings and results of four empirical studies – two studies investigating the pragmatic value of prosodic focalization through the controversial use of elicited data, one study on dative alternations based on a corpus and on a rating task, and one study on the contextual determinants of intonational contours based on a production task – to dispel this methodological suspicion: the artificiality of elicitation protocols does not prevent participants from using language as they do in spontaneous interactions. Careful examination reveals that the biases observed in the first two studies arise because subjects are not provided with sufficient cues concerning the context. I borrow the Gibsonian notion of affordance to characterise the state in which a context provides optimal resources to enable the production of the targeted construction, and argue that elicited data are reliable only when contexts optimise affordances.
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Metaphor: For adults only?
Author(s): Nausicaa Pouscoulouspp.: 51–79 (29)More LessMany experimental studies from the 70s and 80s show that children do not understand metaphors until fairly late in development (not until adolescence, some claim). I will argue that children’s metaphorical abilities may not be as weak as they first appear. Findings suggesting a poor comprehension of metaphor by young children might be better explained by factors other than purportedly inadequate pragmatic abilities. Furthermore, attested cases of metaphor production by children have often been re-analysed either as cases of overextension (i.e., erroneous extension of the term’s conventional denotation) or as cases of pretence, and are thus not considered to be genuine metaphors. I would like to explore the hypothesis that such re-analyses do not preclude the possibility that young children possess the necessary abilities to produce metaphors. Instead, some aspects of overextension and pretence may pave the way to metaphorical abilities.
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Piecemeal acquisition of boundedness: Degree modifiers of adjectives in Dutch child language
Author(s): Elena Tribushininapp.: 80–103 (24)More LessRecent semantic studies show that adjectives differ in terms of the scalar structures associated with them, which has implications for patterns of degree modification. For example, relative adjectives in Dutch are associated with unbounded (open) scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizing adverbs (e.g. #helemaal groot ‘completely big’, #helemaal klein ‘completely small’). This paper tests the hypothesis that children acquire the relevant distinctions in the domain of boundedness in a piecemeal fashion by storing ready-made modifier-adjective pairings from the input and later generalizing over them. The results of the longitudinal corpus study of four degree adverbs in the spontaneous speech of nine children acquiring Netherlandic Dutch are consistent with the idea that language learners start by reproducing target-like modifier-adjective combinations stored as prefabs from the input. Once a critical mass of such adverb-adjective pairings has been stored, children make generalizations over the stored instances and proceed to productive use. This phase is marked by over-generalization errors that are attested, on average, six months after the emergence of a degree adverb. Most of the over-generalization errors involved combining a degree adverb with an adjective of an incompatible scalar structure. It is concluded that the acquisition of boundedness has a more protracted time course than has been hitherto assumed on the basis of comprehension experiments.
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Adjectival vs. nominal categorization processes: The Rule vs. Similarity hypothesis
Author(s): Galit W. Sassoonpp.: 104–147 (44)More LessClassification of entities into categories can be determined based on a rule – a single criterion or relatively few criteria combined with logical operations like ‘and’ or ‘or’. Alternatively, classification can be based on similarity to prototypical examples, i.e. an overall degree of match to prototypical values on multiple dimensions. Two cognitive systems are reported in the literature to underlie processing by rules vs. similarity. This paper presents a novel thesis according to which adjectives and nouns trigger processing by the rule vs. similarity systems, respectively. The paper defends the thesis that nouns are conceptually gradable and multidimensional, but, unlike adjectives, their dimensions are integrated through similarity operations, like weighted sums, to yield an overall degree of match to ideal values on multiple dimensions. By contrast, adjectives are associated with single dimensions, or several dimensions bound by logical operations, such as ‘and’ and ‘or’. In accordance, nouns are predicted to differ from adjectives semantically, developmentally, and processing-wise. Similarity-based dimension integration is implicit – processing is automatic, fast, and beyond speaker awareness – whereas logical, rule-based dimension integration is explicit, and is acquired late. The paper highlights a number of links between findings reported in the literature about rule- vs. similarity-based categorization and corresponding structural, distributional, neural and developmental findings about adjectives and nouns. These links suggest that the rule vs. similarity (RS) hypothesis for the adjective-noun distinction should be studied more directly in the future.
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Lexical reduplication and affective contents: A pragmatic and experimental perspective
Author(s): Daniela Rossipp.: 148–175 (28)More LessThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how the use of a linguistic form (lexical reduplication) can communicate affective contents. Lexical reduplication, understood as the intentional repetition of a word, is defined as a pattern XX used to convey, on the one hand, a content which differs from the “basic” meaning of X by involving, for instance, intensification, narrowing, or expansion, and, on the other hand, an affective content that results from the evaluation of the state of affairs at hand. To test reduplication as well as the derivation of affective contents linked to its use, I have relied on a recognition task: after hearing a short story, participants were asked if the items presented on the screen occurred in the story or not. The results obtained suggest that the formal pattern of reduplication plays the role of a trigger.
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Contribution of working memory in parity and proportional judgments
Author(s): Jakub Szymanik and Marcin Zajenkowskipp.: 176–194 (19)More LessThis paper presents experimental evidence on the differences in a sentence–picture verification task under additional memory load between parity and proportional quantifiers. We asked subjects to memorize strings of four or six digits, then to decide whether a quantified sentence was true for a given picture, and finally to recall the initially given string of numbers. The results show that: (a) proportional quantifiers are more difficult than parity quantifiers with respect to reaction time and accuracy; (b) maintaining either four or six elements in working memory has the same effect on the processing of parity quantifiers; (c) however, in the case of proportional quantifiers subjects perform better in the verification tasks under the six-digit load condition, and (d) even though the strings of four numbers were better recalled by subjects after judging parity there is no difference between quantifiers in the case of the six-element condition. We briefly outline two alternative explanations for the observed phenomena rooted in the computational model of quantifier verification and the different theories of working memory.
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Squib: A deflationary account of invited inferences
Author(s): Ira Noveck, Mathilde Bonnefond and Jean-Baptiste Van der Henstpp.: 195–208 (14)More LessThis squib reconsiders Geis & Zwicky’s influential proposal on Invited Inference, according to which conditionals are regularly “perfected” to biconditionals. We first show that the “regularity” assumption attached to conditional perfection is doubtful in light of established experimental findings concerning other logical terms, such as Some and or and the conjunction and. We then review existing conditional data with the aim of making them cohere with these other experimental findings. We argue that (a) the process that leaves the impression of a biconditional reading (the acceptance of a fallacious argument such as the Affirmation of the Consequent) arises only after all participants detect a violation on-line from what is essentially a surprising minor premise and that; (b) some participants make an effort to adjust to such unexpected violations at a relatively small cognitive cost in order to accept invalid arguments while others persist in rejecting whatever follows and at a greater cognitive cost. Both of these features of conditional processing undermine claims from Geis & Zwicky’s proposal.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 37 (2023)
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Volume 36 (2022)
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Volume 35 (2021)
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Volume 34 (2020)
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Volume 33 (2019)
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Volume 32 (2018)
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Volume 31 (2017)
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Volume 30 (2016)
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Volume 29 (2015)
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Volume 28 (2014)
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Volume 27 (2013)
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Volume 26 (2012)
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Volume 25 (2011)
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Volume 24 (2010)
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Volume 23 (2009)
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Volume 22 (2008)
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Volume 21 (2007)
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Volume 20 (2006)
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Volume 19 (2005)
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Volume 18 (2004)
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Volume 17 (2003)
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Volume 16 (2002)
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Volume 15 (2001)
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Volume 14 (2000)
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Volume 13 (1999)
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Volume 12 (1998)
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Volume 11 (1997)
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Volume 10 (1996)
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Volume 9 (1994)
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Volume 8 (1993)
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Volume 7 (1992)
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Volume 6 (1991)
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Volume 5 (1990)
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Volume 4 (1989)
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Volume 3 (1988)
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Volume 2 (1987)
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Volume 1 (1986)
Most Read This Month
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A question of commitment
Author(s): Christine Gunlogson
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Metaphor: For adults only?
Author(s): Nausicaa Pouscoulous
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Quotation in Context
Author(s): Bart Geurts and Emar Maier
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