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14 results

  • Implications

  • Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Book:
    Native Speakers, Interrupted
    Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022, pp 281-292

  • Summary

    The results of this study have implications for our theoretical linguistic models of native speaker knowledge, and to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition, transmission, and diachronic language change. Implications for language policies and the education of minority language speakers in the United States are discussed.

  • 2 - Social Contexts and Language Development

  • from Introduction
  • Edited by James Law, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Sheena Reilly, Griffith University, Queensland, Cristina McKean, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  • Book:
    Language Development
    Published online:
    11 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022, pp 23-40

  • Summary

    The acquisition of language is a human universal, achieved by all normal children raised in normal environments. However, normal environments vary widely, with consequences for children’s language development. This chapter introduces the subsequent chapters in this edited volume, providing historical background and presenting findings from two contemporary research projects. The historical background includes shifts in the field of language acquisition from linguistics to a bioecological model of development as the guiding theoretical framework, shifts from universals of language acquisition to individual differences as the outcome to be explained, and multiple methodological advances that have made possible much of the research presented in this book. The current empirical work presented in this chapter includes one project on language development in the bilingual context of immigrant families in the United States and another project on home and childcare influences on the language and preliteracy skill development of children in Denmark, in the context of near-universal childcare attendance.

  • 7 - Sociophonetics and Sound Change

  • Tyler Kendall, University of Oregon, Valerie Fridland, University of Nevada, Reno
  • Book:
    Sociophonetics
    Published online:
    26 February 2021
    Print publication:
    11 March 2021, pp 156-177

  • Summary

    Chapter 7 reviews the major theories of sound change that have emerged over the past centuries, honing in on more modern user-based theories most synergistic with sociophonetics.The chapter examines how sociophonetics, and its growth from work in sociolinguistics, has redirected the focus on sound change from a historical and system internal perspective to one forged by and crucially interconnected with the social needs of its users.Along these lines, the discussion emphasizes the empirical approach to the "problems" of sound change articulated in the foundational work by Weinreich, Herzog and Labov in 1968.Turning to recent research that explores these "problems" from a sociophonetic perspective, the treatment suggests that sociophonetics does not just continue a tradition of interest in sound change, it provides new opportunity to understand at a more fine-grained level than ever before the mechanisms underlying language change.

  • Conclusions

  • Andreas Buerki, Cardiff University
  • Book:
    Formulaic Language and Linguistic Change
    Published online:
    06 April 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020, pp 209-219

  • Summary

    The final chapter draws together results of the analyses of the different chapters and synthesises findings: the analyses have shown that social and cultural change plays a very important role in language change. Investigations of individual cases supply clear evidence for a close connection between cultural change and MWE-change. Significantly, analyses have demonstrated that cultural motivation of linguistic change extends to types of MWE-change traditionally analysed as semantic, syntactic and morphological change, which suggests that language as a system, rather than merely language use, is more closely tied to the specifics of the culture of a speech community than has hitherto been acknowledged. The chapter closes with an outlook.

  • Construals of iconicity: experimental approaches to form–meaning resemblances in language

  • Part of
  • MARK DINGEMANSE, MARCUS PERLMAN, PAMELA PERNISS
  • Journal:
    Language and Cognition / Volume 12 / Issue 1 / March 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 March 2020, pp. 1-14
    • Article
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  • While speculations on form–meaning resemblances in language go back millennia, the experimental study of iconicity is only about a century old. Here we take stock of experimental work on iconicity and present a double special issue with a diverse set of new contributions. We contextualise the work by introducing a typology of approaches to iconicity in language. Some approaches construe iconicity as a discrete property that is either present or absent; others treat it as involving semiotic relationships that come in kinds; and yet others see it as a gradient substance that comes in degrees. We show the benefits and limitations that come with each of these construals and stress the importance of developing accounts that can fluently switch between them. With operationalisations of iconicity that are well defined yet flexible enough to deal with differences in tasks, modalities, and levels of analysis, experimental research on iconicity is well equipped to contribute to a comprehensive science of language.

  • Treatability Statements in Serious Illness: The Gap Between What is Said and What is Heard

  • JASON N. BATTEN, BONNIE O. WONG, WILLIAM F. HANKS, DAVID C. MAGNUS
  • Journal:
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics / Volume 28 / Issue 3 / July 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 July 2019, pp. 394-404

  • Empirical work has shown that patients and physicians have markedly divergent understandings of treatability statements (e.g., “This is a treatable condition,” “We have treatments for your loved one”) in the context of serious illness. Patients often understand treatability statements as conveying good news for prognosis and quality of life. In contrast, physicians often do not intend treatability statements to convey improvement in prognosis or quality of life, but merely that a treatment is available. Similarly, patients often understand treatability statements as conveying encouragement to hope and pursue further treatment, though this may not be intended by physicians. This radical divergence in understandings may lead to severe miscommunication. This paper seeks to better understand this divergence through linguistic theory—in particular, H.P. Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. This theoretical approach reveals three levels of meaning of treatability statements: (1) the literal meaning, (2) the physician’s intended meaning, and (3) the patient’s received meaning. The divergence between the physician’s intended meaning and the patient’s received meaning can be understood to arise from the lack of shared experience between physicians and patients, and the differing assumptions that each party makes about conversations. This divergence in meaning raises new and largely unidentified challenges to informed consent and shared decision making in the context of serious illness, which indicates a need for further empirical research in this area.

  • 2 - History and Historiography since 1945

  • Edited by Roger E. Backhouse, University of Birmingham, Philippe Fontaine, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan
  • Book:
    A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences
    Published online:
    05 September 2014
    Print publication:
    22 September 2014, pp 29-61

  • Summary

    This chapter reveals that certain tensions, methodological holists against methodological individualists, constructivists against realists, materialists against idealists, for example, have been more or less continually present, including within individual works. At the same time, the actual disposition of competing positions in terms of access to institutional power has varied greatly. The chapter focuses on the broader question of why grand narratives and turns have persisted in spite of awareness of their problematic nature. Historiography may involve critique of concepts, the chronology of interpretative fashions, or social or cultural histories of academic life. Political history was strongest in West Germany, where scholars had to define themselves against East German Marxism. By the early 1990s, historians across the discipline were evoking a cultural turn. Linguistic theory, poststructuralist or not, has been used relatively infrequently in general histories of historical writing.

  • 20 - Tense, aspect, and modality

  • from Part V - Syntax and the internal interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 746-792

  • Summary

    Raising and control are two phenomena that have been at the forefront of linguistic theory. This chapter examines these phenomena and surveys the basic approaches to them in linguistic theory. The first section of this chapter surveys the basic properties of raising and control structures. Raising and control constructions differ in their ability to nominalize. The second section of this chapter presents the current Minimalist views on raising and control. The third section of this chapter shows the main approaches to raising and control in unification-based lexicalist theories. This chapter has presented the empirical foundations of raising and control constructions and has outlined major theoretical approaches to these constructions, with a focus on syntactic analyses. The true success of the debate between the syntactic and semantic approach to raising and control is to uncover a broader range of natural language phenomena.

  • Glossary

  • Edited by Keith Frankish, The Open University, Milton Keynes, William Ramsey, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science
    Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2012, pp -

  • Summary

    This chapter integrates linguistic theory with more general concerns of cognitive science. In the context of cognitive science, language is best thought of as a cognitive system within an individual's brain that relates certain aspects of thought to acoustic signals. In order to appreciate the sophistication of the child's achievement in acquiring language, it is useful to examine all the structure associated with a very simple fragment of English such as the phrase "those purple cows". A major line of approach to linguistic combinatoriality, embracing a wide range of theories, is specifically built around the combinatorial properties of linguistic structure. The regular rules of grammar, like words, idioms, and meaningful constructions, are pieces of structure stored in long-term memory. A debate of over twenty years' standing concerns the distinction between regular and irregular morphological forms in language. Most experimental work on sentence processing concerns speech perception.

  • 16 - Pidgins and creoles

  • from Part IV - Multilingualism and language contact
  • Edited by Rajend Mesthrie, University of Cape Town
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    06 October 2011, pp 283-300

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses sociolinguistic divisions associated with differences in social prestige, wealth, and power. Class divisions are based on status and power in a society. The linguistic data illuminates the structure of society, and identifies social divisions and points of conflict and convergence. The four central problems on language and class are the definition of class, the description of language use, the explanation of language change, and the construction of linguistic theory. One of the most influential thinkers on the subject of social class is Karl Marx. In Marx's view, the basic dynamic of human history is conflict between classes. The basic difference Bernstein sees between social classes is the range of codes they command: working-class people tend to be confined to the restricted code, whereas middleclass speakers are also versatile in using an elaborated code. The problem for linguistic theory is the variation in the meaning systems of language.

  • 16 - Orthography development

  • from Part III - Responses
  • Edited by Peter K. Austin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Julia Sallabank, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 March 2011, pp 312-336

  • Summary

    This chapter addresses structural aspects of language endangerment from two perspectives: the contributions that the study of endangered languages make to typology and linguistic theory, and the structural consequences of language endangerment, including the kinds of changes that can take place in the phonology, morphology and syntax of endangered languages. Typology is closely associated with the study of linguistic universals, which can be understood as the common characteristics of the world's languages, usually with the goal of providing insight into the fundamental nature of human language. Though there are various ways in which languages can become extinct, the most typical is through language shift when a language gradually comes to have fewer and fewer speakers who use it in ever fewer domains until finally no one is able to speak it in any context. This process is sometimes called language obsolescence.