COURSE SYLLABUS
LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL COGNITION
Instructor: Anne Tamm, PhD
Department of Cognitive Science Central European University Fall term 2013/2014
Course level: MA, PhD
Credits: 2 credits (4 ECTS credits)
Pre-requisites: standard prerequisites for CogSci Phd program admission, and for any other cross-listing program admission
Course e-learning site: http://e-learning.ceu.hu/course/view.php?id=1882 Office hours:
• Mondays after class meeting
(i.e. after15:10, Frankel Leo 30-34, room 206)
• Tuesdays 11:30-12:30 Hattyúház, room 416
• any time by prior email appointment TammA@ceu.hu Venue: Frankel Leo 30-34. Room 206.
Time: Mondays from 13:30 till 15:10
Course Description
Humans are special in having a communication system that employs complex language(s) and advanced social cognition. This course offers an introduction to current research on how these advanced human capacities interact. Language is discussed as a cognitive ability as well as a central feature of human social interaction. During the meetings we discuss how the prominent models and theories of language explain linguistic phenomena that relate to social cognition. What is universal, what is language specific? How are our linguistic concepts and categories connected to social cognitive categories and capacities? How do these two powerful cognitive abilities feed into each other? We will discuss linguistic phenomena from known and exotic languages that, via their special link to social cognition, inform us about how the social mind works. The linguistic topics include evidentiality, generics, duals, possessives, causation, number- measure-mass-count phenomena, negation, case, transitivity, and verbs. The social cognitive topics that are related to them include ostensive communication, reputation maintaining, gossip, epistemic vigilance, Theory of Mind, joint action, norms and values, perspective taking, empathy and the perception of self. The course will also introduce methods, resources and tools (surveys, experiments, databases, corpora) that help us clarify the relationships between social cognitive and linguistic phenomena.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
ü Identify areas where language and social cognition interact ü Relate linguistic phenomena to social cognitive ones ü Use the sources discussed in the course
ü Perform data analysis of social cognitive phenomena in language by means of tools and methods learned during the course
ü Critically discuss the place of social cognition in competing theories in linguistics
Course Requirements
(1) Course participation (20% of the final grade). The points for this assignment are awarded on the basis of regular contribution to the class activities. Bonus points can be obtained by (a) written comments on the presentations of co-students and (b) by contributing a slide with a comment or question by Monday 10 a.m. before class meeting.
(2) Mid-course presentation (30% of the final grade). The grade for the presentation is awarded along the dimensions defined by the first three learning outcomes identified above. The presentation should demonstrate that the student is able to identify an empirical area where language and social cognition interact and to relate a linguistic phenomenon to a social cognitive phenomenon (e.g., values in social cognition and prepositions in a language, gossip and evidentials). For this pairing of a linguistic and social cognitive phenomenon, the presentation should demonstrate the ability to use at least one source discussed in the course to identify relevant data (e.g., the CHILDES database, the WALS database).
(3) Course paper (50% of the final grade). The formal requirement for the paper is 4000 words. The grade/points for the paper is/are awarded along the five learning outcomes identified above. In the paper, the student is expected to undertake the linguistic analysis of social cognitive phenomena in language and critically discuss the place of social cognition in a linguistic theory. In addition to improving the presented material, the paper is expected to demonstrate that the student can perform data analysis by means of tools and methods learned during the course, for instance, a Surveymonkey survey.
COURSE SCHEDULE
1. September 16, Monday.
Language and social cognition: specifically human abilities
Animals are much like us humans. Birds can express themselves by sound sequences following certain rules, i.e., syntax, and are able to voice signals to create new realities in their relationships. Bees are able to transfer meaning in a structured way to conspecifics and thereby to contribute to the collective knowledge. Dogs can understand the connection between sound and meaning.
The coupling of language-like elements––meaning, sound and syntax––in these instances display several combinations. But differently from humans, these elements are never simultaneously present. The second major difference compared to humans is that each instance of combination is limited to a different and highly specific social task. Meaning and structure are connected to contribute to collective benefit, sounds are combined according to syntax to assert the magnitude of one’s presence to conspecifics, and sounds are matched with meanings in order to obey.
Humans are unique both in terms of the number of linguistic relationships and the social functions that can be performed by them. Firstly, we have a communication system that captures meaning, sound and syntax and thus gives evidence of more possibilities of combination between levels of linguistic representation. A basic set of human linguistic representations and interfaces between them consists of three representations, phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures, each of them connected with each other via an interface. A simple figure adapted from Jackendoff illustrates a basic set of human linguistic representations and interfaces between them, Figure 1.
Figure 1. Basic human linguistic representations and interfaces
In this basic set, there are three interfaces between three types of representations.
Humans share the interface between the phonological and syntactic structures with birds, the interface between syntactic and semantic structures with bees, and the interface between phonological and semantic structures with dogs. But the relationship between social cognition and linguistic capabilities of humans is unique. The difference between humans and animals is in the more complex structure of interfaces in the latter case and in the ability of humans to use their language to teach new social skills and values. Humans also engage in complex
social interactions that demonstrate and require particularly highly developed social cognitive abilities. The intricate symbiotic system between language and social cognition determines what we think about ourselves or others, how we pursue individual and common goals and how we manage ourselves and our relationships to others. Unlike other animals, whose linguistic-social functional pairings are rather simple, humans combine the linguistic representational abilities of bees, birds and dogs in the examples with more types of social functions. As a result, we can accomplish much more than obeying, contributing to the collective good, attracting a mate and setting boundaries on a territory.
The complexity of social cognition and language has much to do with the fact that human children have a longer period of immaturity than any other living beings.
Language is one of the principal channels of the transmission of social norms and values during several sensitive periods. Language learning is in turn guided by social cognition.
Reading:
t.b.a. - the mandatory and complete further reading list will be announced after the first session in September, since it will be finalized on the basis of the research topics of the students enrolling for the course.
You can expect the complete reading list to be available by the beginning of the Fall term on September 16.
Further reading:
• Fitch, W. T. (2010) The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: /Cambridge University Press/. Fitch, W. T. (2011). Unity and diversity in human language.
/Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B/366:376-388.
• Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, W. T. 2002. The faculty of language:
What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298:1569-79.
• Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Jackendoff, R. (2007). Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Premack, D. G.; Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4): 515–526.
• Tallerman M, Gibson K, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
2. September 23, Monday
The advantage of having a language
One of the advantages we have just because we have language is that we are able to convey information that is beyond our deictic sphere and thus cannot be perceived directly. Unlike animals that express or respond to their experience directly, humans have a rich inventory of linguistic means that mediate socially relevant knowledge but also reveal our social cognitive biases, either in spontaneous expression or in the grammaticalization or lexicalization patterns.
We can let the others know (by a generic marker) whether we have learned the knowledge in a community, and if it is an unquestionable norm or value, whether we have figured it out on our own, or whether we are just repeating a phrase heard from others (with an evidential). Bees cannot preface their information on food source with the authority of elder bees knowing about a traditional food source, or with caveats that they inferred the knowledge putting together multiple pieces of evidence, and birds cannot explicitly state that they ‘quote’ another bird’s songs.
We can also indicate what we perceive is missing from a normal state of affairs by negation. While a dog would learn to differentiate between specific imperative and prohibitive expressions, it would not understand the negation of a proposition in a narrative. Some languages can use a dual to signal a social or functional relationship between two participants in a described event.
By language we can categorize the transmission of food from one participant to another as taking or giving, and reflect the social perspective through different verbs and argument structures as in give (a three-place predicate) and take (a two-place predicate). Language gives a form to the social perspective on participants of events, allowing an asymmetric encoding by means of optional and obligatory arguments, arguments and adjuncts. In some morphologically rich languages we can use case marking to indicate if the state of affairs corresponds to our idea of sufficiently good and bad value, and we can indicate by case marking if a sentence conveys knowledge that is to be learned or should be tested first, because it expresses episodic experience. Unlike birds, we can settle our territorial disputes by using possessives, which can be used in creating various connections between entities but also emotional connections between conspecifics. We can count the possessions and indicate their absence or magnitude; moreover, we can talk about social norms and values as well in terms of polarity and their magnitude.
In summary, humans display a link between social cognitive aspects in a way that is linked to various aspects of language in a highly integrated way.
Reading:
t.b.a
Carey, S. The Origin of Concepts, Chapter 7 (Repeated for next class as well).
Carey's talk at CEU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBzQu1G1cuU
The Origin of Concepts-2.pdf
Croft, William. 2009. Toward a social cognitive linguistics. New directions in cognitive linguistics, ed. Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel, 395-420. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Everett, Daniel L. (2005). "Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology 46 (4): 621–646
Gumperz, J., S. Levinson eds. (1996), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sapir, E. (1983), David G. Mandelbaum, ed., /Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality/, University of California Press
Traugott, E. C. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In Hickey, R.
(ed.) Motives for language change. Cambridge: CUP, 124-139.
Verhagen, A. 2005, Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: OUP.
Whorf, B. (1956), John B. Carroll (ed.), ed., /Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf/, MIT Press (_http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/632_)
.
3. September 30, Monday
Introduction to theoretical frameworks in linguistics
This meeting introduces the main theoretical frameworks in contemporary linguistics and how they address social cognition. The lecture presents the methodologies built up in formal-generative research and the achievements of the functional-typological approaches and sketches how they can be connected to experimentally verifiable questions.
While it is widely recognized that linguistic and social cognitive phenomena are related, it is difficult to find clarity in the conceptual frameworks in linguistics.
How are these representations and processes integrated into the linguistic models and theories? Functional linguistics addresses aspects such as values, norms, perception of self and other and joint action, but it has no adequate conceptual apparatus distinguishing between representational levels. Formal generative linguistics deals with the theoretical relationships between the various levels but fails to incorporate the growing evidence about mismatches in the mapping between these levels and the variation stemming from social cognitive factors.
Functional linguists try to capture linguistic structures in terms of the functions they carry out. Theories that are functional in nature thus by definition deal more with the social function of linguistic expression. The prevailing belief in this research tradition is that the two are intertwined; language has a function that is intrinsically social. Many subdisciplines within linguistics that deal with variation data, for instance, historical linguistics or sociolinguistics, are more often than not conducted within the functional frameworks. However, there may be some core social cognitive aspects that are separate from the core linguistic ones, and there may be yet other aspects that are common. The fact is that all human languages are still more similar to each other than any of the animal ‘languages’, despite the knowledge that is being accumulated by field linguists about vast language diversity.
The following questions present themselves:
Why are the differences and similarities patterned as they are cross-linguistically?
What can form a body of evidence for parallels between aspects of social cognition and language variation?
Reading: t.b.a. Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
Asudeh, A., M. Dalrymple and I. Toivonen 2008. Constructions with Lexical Integrity: Templates as the Lexicon-Syntax Interface. Proceedings of LFG, Sydney, July 2008.
Asudeh, A. 2006. Direct Compositionality and the Architecture of LFG. In M.
Butt, M. Dalrymple and T. H. King (eds.) Intelligent Linguistic Architectures:
Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 363–387.
Börjars, K. and J. Payne 2013. Dimensions of variation in the expression of functional features: modelling definiteness in LFG. Talk at LFG Conference.
University of Debrecen, July 19, 2013.
Bresnan, J. (ed.) 1982. The mental representation of grammatical relations.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bresnan, J. 2001. Lexical Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Butt, M, M. Dalrymple, and A. Frank.1997. An Architecture for Linking Theory in LFG. In M. Butt and T. H. King, (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Cinque, G. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic perspective.
Oxford: OUP.
Croft, W. 2009. Toward a social cognitive linguistics. In V. Evans & S. Pourcel (eds.) New directions in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 395- 420.
Croft, W. A. (2001). /Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dalrymple, M. 2001. Lexical Functional Grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Evans, V., B. Bergen & J. Zinken. (2007). The Cognitive Linguistics reader.
London: Equinox. (Introduction, pp. 2-36) .
Evans and Levinson 2009. The myth of language universals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32:5, 429-492.
Everett, D. L. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã Current Anthropology 46, 4: 621–646.
The second attached file is the reading for next week:
Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner (2003). The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books.
Fillmore, J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul, Hanshin Publishing Co., 111-137.
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hengeveld, K. & Mackenzie, L. 2008, Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure. Oxford: OUP.
Jackendoff, R. 2010. The Parallel Architecture and its Place in Cognitive Science, in B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 583- 605. Oxford: OUP.
Langacker, Ronald (1987, 1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. 2 vols.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994), The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Perennial.
Taylor, J. R. (2002). Cognitive Grammar. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
4. October 7, Monday
Introduction to the phenomena
By examining the functioning of specific linguistic phenomena of grammatical categories and the lexicon, such as genericity, evidentiality, duals, possessives, number and mass-count, negation, case marking, and verb argument structure, one can tap the interaction between social cognitive and linguistic representations and processes. The following phenomena will be introduced during this meeting as examples of interaction:
• Genericity, evidentiality, and social learning (primary focus, example of analysis)
• Evidentiality, epistemic vigilance, gossip and reputation
• Possessives, the social deictic center and empathy
• Negation, social cognition, and the constraints on the modality of communication
• Number, measure, mass-count and part-whole relationships
• Duals and joint action
• Argument encoding and values and norms
• Predicate-argument structure and the social perspective on events Remember to go the talk given by George Lakoff at the CEU later this week.
Reading (see the reading lists under the specific topics):
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
General:
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Murphy, G.L. (2002) The Big Book of Concepts. MIT Press.
Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5. October 14, Monday
Genericity and social learning
Out of the phenomena presented in the previous class, genericity will occupy the most central role, since this is the area where the interaction of the grammar of language and social cognition plays out in the most transparent fashion. In linguistics the topic of genericity appears through the analysis of the generic markers. A generic marker is part of the grammar system and it conveys the meaning of the English word generally as in Generally, tigers are striped. While the opposite grammar markers (meaning, approximately, not generally or in this specific instance) appear in several languages, genericity is a category that rarely appears as a linguistic marker. The possible exceptions known from literature are Wolof, Isekiri, West Greenlandic and Maori.
Recently, genericity has received much attention in cognitive science, philosophy and formal semantics. In cognitive science, it is studied in relation to ostensive gestures, such as pointing. An ostensive gesture indicates that the signal that follows will be a deliberate act of communication about something of relevance to the receiver: ‘I am about to tell you something useful’. A number of scholars within cognitive psychology have established the relevance of ostensive communication in learning. Csibra and Gergely (2011) argue that ostensive communication enables fast and efficient social learning. Observational learning mechanisms alone would yield too slow progress because cultural knowledge is cognitively opaque. The authors claim that information communicated ostensively to infants is generic in nature. This was also studied by Butler and Markman (2012) in an experiment with children. They found that if the object is presented to infants in a pedagogical setting, that is, with ostensive signals such as ‘Look!’
or pointing, the children learn more efficiently about the properties of the object than if they experience the object through observation or exploration. They generalize more, which is shown by the effect on the behavior of the child while exploring the properties of the new object. Evidence gained from pedagogical, ostensive communication leads to generalization and the tolerance of counterexamples.
In languages that have generics, this observation can be checked against the use and understanding of generic markers. A grammatical generic marker should in principle lead to generalization along similar lines with the results of the experiment described above. Those instances when grammaticalization occurs must be particularly interesting for theoretical linguistics, philosophy and cognitive sciences, but the representatives of these disciplines rarely possess the research tools necessary for their study, as such an endeavor would require both familiarity with the relevant abstract theoretical frameworks and excellent knowledge of the respective languages. So students who have a background in both of these areas or who are native speakers of a language with a generic marker
are particularly encouraged to complement the ongoing research in cognitive science and linguistics by choosing a topic related to this area for the paper.
In this meeting I will present a way to gain knowledge about the phenomenon of a grammatical marker expressing genericity (joint work with Aksu-Koc, Caglar, and Csibra). This involves an experiment conducted in Istanbul in 2013. Turkish has a generalizing modal marker -DIr that appears in sentences expressing generic statements. Similarly to the Butler and Markman’s experiment, pedagogical demonstration was contrasted with sentences presenting the properties and objects with the generalizing modal markers. According to preliminary results, the Turkish general modal markers have the effect of tolerating counterexamples, and they also lead to generalization, so they can be indeed regarded as generic markers.
Reading: t.b.a. Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September. Further reading:
• Butler, L. P., & Markman, E.M. (2012). Preschoolers use intentional and pedagogical cues to guide inductive inferences and exploration. Child Development, 83, 1416-1428.
• Carlson, G. and Pelletier, F. J. (eds.). 1995. The Generic Book. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
• Csibra, Gergő & György Gergely 2011: Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation – Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366, 1149-1157.
• Dahl, Östen. 1995. The Marking of the Episodic/Generic Distinction in Tense- Aspect Systems. In Carlson, G. and Pelletier, F. J. (eds.). The Generic Book.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 412–425.
• Futó, Judit, Téglás, Ernő, Csibra, Gergely & Gergely, György 2010:
Communicative function demonstration induces kind-based artifact representation in preverbal infants. – Cognition 117: 1-8.
• Gelman, S. A. 2003: The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hollander, Michelle A., Susan A. Gelman & Jon Star 2002: Children’s Interpretation of Generic Noun Phrases. – Developmental Psychology 38(6):
883–894
• Kratzer, Angelika. 1995. Stage-Level and Individual-Level Predicates. In G.
Carlson and J. Pelletier (eds.): The Generic Book. Chicago (Chicago University Press), 125-175.
• Krifka, M., F. Pelletier, G. Carlson, A. ter Meulen, G. Chierchia, and G. Link.
1995. Genericity: An Introduction. In G. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier (eds.) The Generic Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1–125.
• Leslie, S. J. 2008. Generics: Cognition and Acquisition. Philosophical Review, 117(1). 1–47.
• Nordlinger, R & L Sadler. 2008. From juxtaposition to incorporation: an approach to generic-specific constructions. In M. Butt & T. H. King (eds) Proceedings of the LFG08 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 394-412.
6. October 21, Monday
Evidentiality, social learning, epistemic vigilance, and reputation
Evidentials encode the source of information. The optionality of evidentials is a puzzle that cannot be solved well without understanding the role of social cognition. Frequently evidentials appear in subordinate clauses or are logically understood to be embedded (I heard that PROPOSITION, [I heard [that CP]]).
However, there is a form-meaning mismatch because there is variation across languages regarding marking in the evidential clauses. Evidential markers are optional in contexts where they would be required according to the logic of applying evidentials. For instance, in Estonian contexts such as quotations of others Kolumbus ütles, et maakera on ümmargune 'Columbus said that the earth was round', we would expect the verb on to appear in the evidential form, as olevat. An evidential form would be justified because the clause is a quote, and one cannot directly experience the roundness of the earth. Yet, in fact olevat is optional and rather dispreferred. In other languages (Turkish, several native American languages) evidentials are obligatory.
It seems that the optionality of evidentials is regulated by causal mechanisms that are related to social cognition. I illustrate one possible way of obtaining by means of a survey. I demonstrate how I studied the role of grammaticalized evidentials in social cognition, more specifically, reputation maintaining (joint work with Giardini and Fitneva). By indicating that the source of information is other than the speaker herself, the speaker can convey the information that is for her or for the common good but simultaneously hide her own agency or epistemic state, and, by doing so, retain her reputation. I ran a survey with 200 Estonian, 100 Turkish, and some Hungarian, Russian, Khanty (Ostyak) participants. I found out that the optional Estonian evidential is significantly more used to hide the epistemic state in situations of competition, whereas in case of the obligatory Turkish evidentials the same effect is more muted. I will discuss the implications of these findings in the class as an example of how the student paper could conduct the analysis and discuss its results.
Reading:
t.b.a., further reading:
• Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004: Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Aksu-Koç, A., Balaban, H. Ö. & Alp, İ. E. 2009: Evidentials and source knowledge in Turkish. – New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development 125: 13-28.
• Faller, Martina T. 2002. Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
• Hintz, Daniel. 2012. Building common ground: The evidential category of mutual knowledge. Presentation at the Nature of Evidentiality, Leiden, June 15th, 2012 http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/tne-2012/keynote/hintz.html
• Mascaro, Olivier & Dan Sperber 2009: The Moral, Epistemic, and Mindreading Components of Children’s Vigilance towards Deception.
Cognition 112: 367–380
• Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi & Deirdre Wilson 2010: Epistemic Vigilance. – Mind and Language 25(4): 359–393.
• Tamm, Anne 2009: The Estonian partitive evidential: Some notes on the semantic parallels between the aspect and evidential categories. – Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop & Andrej Mal’chukov (eds): Papers from TAM TAM: Cross-linguistic semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality. Benjamins, Amsterdam: 365-401.
7. October 28, Monday.
Methods.
This lecture is given by a guest lecturer. Discussion of presentation topics.
The topic will be announced in September.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
further reading:
Laura A. Janda, ed. Cognitive Linguistics: The Quantitative Turn. The Essential Reader, 1-32. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
8. November 4, Monday Methods.
This lecture is given by a guest lecturer. Discussion of presentation details.
The topic will be announced in September.
Reading:
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
t.b.a.
further sources and further reading
• CHILDES = <http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/>.
• WALS = Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2011. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, Available online at http://wals.info/
• Christopher Butler, Statistics in Linguistics, available online:
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/llas/statistics-in-linguistics/bkindex.shtml
9. November 11, Monday Possessives.
Student presentations.
Possessives are grammatical forms or relationships that indicate ownership or belonging. Consider the following Hungarian examples in (1a), where the accusative case is optional on objects that have 1st and 2nd person possessive suffixes. Possessive suffixes can render the accusative optional in 1st and 2ndperson only; third person does not allow the omission of the accusative marker, as illustrated in (1b).
(1) Hungarian
a. Lát-om a kocsi-m-at/ kocsi-d-at/ kocsi-m/kocsi-d.
see-1S.DEF DEF car-PX1S-ACC car-PX2S-ACC car-PX1S car-PX2S
‘I see my/your car.’
b. Lát-om a kocsi-já-t/ *kocsi-ja.
see-1S.DEF DEF car-PX3S-ACC car-PX3S
‘I see his/her car.’
There are no structural differences between the possessive markers of the first, second, and third person that would warrant their different use in the object position. But in terms of social deixis, talking about entities that belong to me and you is different from talking about objects that belong to third persons. The omission of the accusative is even more frequent if the objects are personal pronominal forms, which supports the hypothesis that the omission is sensitive to the aspect of being in the social deictic center:
engem(-et) I-(ACC) ‘me’
téged(-et) you-(ACC) ‘you’
ő-t him/her-ACC ‘him/her’
The question is whether possessions of first and second persons are perceived differently from possessions of third parties. In the class we explore some analyses for explaining these distributional peculiarities.
It seems to be a near-universal that possessives are used to manipulate emotional connections, like in the utterance: ‘You and your computer––when does this constant reading stop?!’. In this utterance, the speaker conveys annoyance with the attention that the reader has “wasted” on the computer. Some languages have grammaticalized this device (a more positive but also more exotic example will follow). One can illustrate morphologically induced empathy with an Udmurt narration, where a goat runs away from a woman called Ekaterina and is stumbled upon accidentally in a dark sauna by little Ivan. This narration works as an entertaining story not because of its plot, which is rather uninteresting, but because of the possessive markers. These possessive markers are used for establishing joint attention between the speaker and the hearer and to focus attention on a participant (‘your’ Ekaterina, ‘your’ Ivan) with whom the hearer should feel empathy. As the
example below shows, the second person possessive marking appears not in the first sentence introducing the referent, but in the second sentence, in order to establish empathy towards Ekaterina’s sadness.
(2)
The second person possessive marking persists on the inflected noun phrase referring to Ekaterina throughout the narrative until the boy Ivan is brought in.
After introducing Ivan, Ivan is referred to by a pronoun. Thus, in example (3), the third person pronoun ta-id 3S-2PX ‘literally: your he’ refers to Ivan, who is already introduced in the narrative.
(3)
The fact that the second person possessive marking appears on a pronoun demonstrates that this marker links the participants of speech event and narrated event as part of grammar.
By comparing languages that do not use possessives in narration with those that do, I hope to find out whether the distinction is universal or specific for some languages. How is it in your language? The experiments can target what the generality of this phenomenon is: whether it is a language-specific idiosyncrasy or it reflects a general cognitive bias or strategy.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
10. November 18, Monday
Number, measure, and the mass-count distinction in languages. Norms and standards. Negation, social cognition, and the constraints on the modality of communication, Sign Languages. Duals and joint action.
At first glance, number, measure, and the mass-count distinction have little in common with social cognition. Number and problems of mass and count are studied in relation to the partitive case and object and subject case alternations. In Finnic, these phenomena relate to argumenthood and argument expression as well as to the expression of genericity. Social cognition enters the picture via social norms. The partitive argument patterns with the lack of norms or a situation where the norm is not obtained.
The area of negation that is targeted in this study concerns the abessives, which are related to implicit values and norms or expectations of normality in some languages. The differences and convergences between negative structures are partly social and partly induced by other cognitive and linguistic factors, which is witnessed by the phenomena in spoken and sign languages. What are the convergences and divergences in comparing the forms of negation in Hungarian and Hungarian Sign? The challenge here is to examine the social cognitive differences that are reflected in these languages that share official national culture and diverge in modality. How much of the structure of spoken Hungarian can be found in Sign, what is missing, and what are the regularities? We see that certain pragmatic strategies of spoken Hungarian (e.g., wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?) are missing in Hungarian Sign. There is a possibility that a Hungarian Sign speaker will join the course meeting.
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. The English ‘both’ refers to two entities and can thus be regarded as a comparable form that appears in many better-known languages. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages. However, several Uralic languages have duals that are used to refer to “socially combined duals” or “social pairs”, as opposed to any randomly occurring but precisely two entities. For instance, if two persons are described as living in a town, then a dual is preferred if they are a couple or if they work together, and the plural is preferred if they have no common projects.
It is unclear whether there is a cognitive disposition to couple social entities together regardless of dual marking and whether the use of dual affects interpretation.
Reading:
Mandatory and optional t.b.a.
Jackendoff, R. (1991). Parts and Boundaries. In Levin, Beth & Pinker, Steven.
Lexical & conceptual semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Jackendoff, R. 2006. The peculiar logic of value, Journal of Cognition and Culture 6, 375-407.
The interview with F. Grosjean
http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/interview_en.html
11. November 25, Monday
Lexical concepts. Argument encoding, values and norms. Predicate- argument structure and the social perspective on events.
This week we will concentrate on lexical matters. Lexicon also contains phenomena that are sensitive to social cognition: mapping to arguments. An argument is an expression that is required to complete the meaning of a predicate, such as the verb give. Give has three arguments, as in Mary gave John a book: the one who yields an object, the object given and the recipient of the object.
Arguments are distinguished from adjuncts, which are optional: in Mary gave John a book in the library on Monday, the phrases in the library and on Monday can be omitted.
What are the principles that regulate the linking of the concepts of events (giving) to predicates (give), and the linking of the event participants to linguistic arguments or adjuncts? The linkages are shaped by the social cognition of the events, since the perspective––on which side of the object transfer one is as a participant of the event––clearly matters for the optionality of the arguments. This can be proved by investigating the opposite social perspective on a giving event––
a taking event. Give and take have an identical number of participants in the objective transfer event, but the corresponding predicate has one obligatory argument less in take: John took the book (from Mary). Looking at the transfer event from the perspective of taking, the predicate of take allows for the optionality of the argument that corresponds to the person yielding the object (Mary).
Argument structure is thus a linguistic representational level that partly builds upon social cognition, on our social perception of possessions, harm and benefit arising from the transmission. Levin 1993 shows for about 3000 English verbs the correlations between the semantics of verbs and their syntactic behavior. I concentrate in this meeting on social exchanges, mainly verbs of transfer of possession or information. These verbs are described as having the Lexical Conceptual Structure pattern: [eventGO+poss([thing ], [path ])]. Verbs of transfer of possession include 9 classes in Levin 1993. Value judgments about the transfer
(e.g., the transfer is illegal or unjust, a robbery) are not accounted for in previous classifications, but there is evidence that a normative stance plays a role in argument realization of the two social agents in interaction, compare the regularities across languages: Mary gave John a book (3 obligatory arguments), Mary took a book ((from John), 2 arguments), I robbed him of his wallet (3 arguments, both social agents obligatory). Therefore, the lexical conceptual structure, which I take as the structure that is linked to thematic and argument structures, should also interface with social cognition.
What are the social cognitive causes for convergence and divergence between the arguments? There are many factors that will be discussed in this meeting.
Reading:
t.b.a.
Mandatory reading and complete further reading will be announced in September.
Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual change in childhood, Cambridge, MA,MIT Press Clark, E. V. (1993). The Lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge UP.
Jackendoff, R. (1991). Parts and Boundaries. In Levin, Beth & Pinker, Steven.
Lexical & conceptual semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Kittila. ed. Beneficients and maleficients. Benjamins.
Levin, B. 1993 English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.
12. December 2, Monday
Concluding remarks. Discussion of the papers.
How are the two specifically human cognitive areas, language and social cognition, related? Could we answer any of the questions that we asked in the first meetings? Can social cognition be built into language modeling? What are the ways to test if the model works?
You can expect the complete reading list to be available by the beginning of the Fall term on September 16.
