Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-03-06DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101625
Ivana Marková
{"title":"A dialogical perspective of interaction: the case of people with deaf/blindness","authors":"Ivana Marková","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101625","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article considers dialogicality as a dynamic ontology and epistemology, and as interaction in concrete daily situations. These two features of dialogicality are presented in selected examples involving communication of people with congenital deaf/blindness and their carers. Since people with deaf/blindness cannot use verbal language in their dialogues, they make themselves understood to their partners by using a variety of innovative non-verbal strategies. For example, they improvise, repeat touching gestures, overextend meanings of signs, guess meanings of co-participants, and otherwise. Each dialogical situation is a unique single case, in which participants use simultaneously different modalities of communication and attempt to balance their subjective and intersubjective activities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101625"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140052713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-03-05DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101628
Simon Borchmann
{"title":"A little less conversation – On the completeness of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials","authors":"Simon Borchmann","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101628","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study analyzes the relation between utterances and human activities with a view to determining how and under what conditions discourse-initial verbless utterances can be considered pragmatically, semantically, and grammatically complete. The study is empirically based on a set of observations of discourse-intital action-guiding verbless speech acts, which for a large part have been observed in a cognitive ethnographic field study of the activity of gliding. Using the concept of illocutionary acts and ecological value theory as an overarching framework, the analysis shows how discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials are enabled and constrained by the activity, i.e. the lawful constraints, the available affordances, the information that specify affordances, and the values that guide the activity. The analysis shows that a discourse-initial action-guiding subsentential is a response to a present or emerging discrepancy between the state of variation a current action causes and the state of variation that the values that guide the activity requires. The conventional effect and the contextual conditions for the effect of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is specified and provide the criteria for what constitutes a meaningful unit and thus also the criteria for semantic completeness. The semantic structure of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is identified as a specification. On the basis of this semantic analysis, the grammatical patterns that realize this semantic unit is identified. It is a single-word focus construction. Based on this grammatical analysis, another more complex grammatical construction that realizes two communicative tasks is identified: a specification of an affordance and an indication of the condition for rightness of the action possibility. It is argued that this combination of communicative tasks is conducive to the performance of activities, and hence, may exert a functional pressure on the conventionalization of grammatical construction. In this way, it is shown how subsentential constructions can emerge from non-conversational, practical activities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101628"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000124000172/pdfft?md5=1272e48fe504e1f363731ed85e4c4ac6&pid=1-s2.0-S0388000124000172-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140030825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-03-05DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101624
Stephen J. Cowley
{"title":"Other orientation: uncovering the roots of praxis","authors":"Stephen J. Cowley","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101624","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In honouring Per Linell's achievements, I pursue how dialogue was traced back to praxis. Hence, I begin with how, countering generative theory as overblown, Linell found a hard middle way and, thus, adopted a modest realism. In early work, he traced phonology to what can be heard and, later, diagnosed exclusive emphasis on things or rules as written language bias. Since much depends on how we speak, verbalizing derives, in part, from the influence of others. In modelling speech performance, he therefore turns to a duality of planning and execution. Activity can be orienting to others and/or their doings and sayings. The pattern recurs in initiative-response analysis which effectively tracks isomorphisms in the push and pull of dialogue (initiative and response). Given samenesses, forms, ways of acting, and uses of wordings, we sustain the sociodialogical consciousness of practical and linguistic knowhow. Praxis prompts people to act, transcend situations, use dialogue, construct practical theories and, slowly, change their languaging. In scaling down, I argue that the future prospects of Linell's work lie in rethinking the interdisciplinary area that is concerned with languages, human practices and, above all, their effects.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101624"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000124000135/pdfft?md5=25575226ab803af36e3a669a94c680dd&pid=1-s2.0-S0388000124000135-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140041424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-03-04DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101630
Sarah Bro Trasmundi
{"title":"Festschrift in honour of Per Linell: dialogism as a general epistemology for the language sciences","authors":"Sarah Bro Trasmundi","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101630","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101630"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140024106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-03-02DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101623
Roger Säljö, Eva Hjörne
{"title":"Situated action, double dialogicality and the sociogenesis of categorizing in institutional practices: Diversity in schooling from vicious children to neuropsychiatric diagnoses","authors":"Roger Säljö, Eva Hjörne","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101623","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The background of this article is an interest in institutional communication. The context in which this has been studied concerns how diversity (in social background, ethnicity, school success etc.) is, and has been, interpreted in schooling, historically as well as in contemporary society. Through history, a range of categories allegedly accounting for school failure has been suggested, and the categories invoked reflect the position of schooling as a meso-structure in society. The categories adopted in public discourse and politics, and reproduced in media, create identities, and serve as arbiters of opportunity for children. It is argued that the dialogical perspective outlined by Linell, and focusing the contingencies between macro-, meso- and micro-structures in social interaction, represents an important step in defining an empirical strategy for analysing the interrelationships between situated action, situation-transcending practices and the sociogenesis of categorizing practices.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101623"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000124000123/pdfft?md5=b6e6b6e3fa136001c8985f528551fd1b&pid=1-s2.0-S0388000124000123-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140014524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101627
Hannele Dufva
{"title":"From ‘psycholinguistics’ to the study of distributed sense-making: Psychological reality revisited","authors":"Hannele Dufva","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101627","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The paper discusses the ‘psychological reality’ of human languaging. Basing on the dialogical and distributed arguments, the point of departure is in observations of the actualities of languaging in different modalities and environments. Arguing against the psychological reality of ‘mental grammars’ as storages of internal rules and representations, the concept of decontextual and amodal language knowledge is replaced by a know-how that is associated both with the modality and indexicality of usages. Further, instead of a ‘grammar’, the reservoir of agentive knowledge is approached as a personal repertoire that is discussed, using the concept of timescales, as an assemblage that develops during the agent's personal trajectory, but that at the same time is made possible by developments over cultural-historical and evolutionary timescales. The discussion is associated particularly with the field of applied linguistics, and aims at offering new theoretical arguments for the research on language learning and teaching.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101627"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000124000160/pdfft?md5=5152c04773878d736cb843ee0ad13034&pid=1-s2.0-S0388000124000160-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139999939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-02-28DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101629
Sarah Bro Trasmundi
{"title":"Introduction to the festschrift for Per Linell, May 2024","authors":"Sarah Bro Trasmundi","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101629","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 101629"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139986602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-02-21DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614
Awino Ogelo , Emanuel Bylund
{"title":"Spatial frames of reference in Dholuo","authors":"Awino Ogelo , Emanuel Bylund","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The aim of the present article is to investigate spatial frames of reference in Dholuo, a language from the Nilotic family. Spatial descriptions were elicited by implementing a novel task, the New Man and Tree Task, which is a photo-object referential task (as opposed to the more traditional photo–photo referential tasks). The New Man and Tree Task fully crosses the categories of featured vs. unfeatured, thus addressing potential shortcomings of various previous referential tasks. Testing a total of 40 native speakers of Dholuo, it was found that the decision of a participant to use a spatial frame of reference largely depended on the complex nature of the spatial scene, while the type of spatial frame of reference chosen partly depended on whether the stimuli was featured or unfeatured, and potentially how salient that specific frame of reference was in the mind of the speaker. Overall, both the relative and the object-centred spatial frames were the most preferred across all three feature categories which correspond to findings from an earlier study showing both as used in solving everyday tasks in Dholuo.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101614"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139914546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101613
Hasiyatu Abubakari , Lawrence Sandow , Samuel Akugri Asitanga
{"title":"A structural analysis of personal names in Kusaal","authors":"Hasiyatu Abubakari , Lawrence Sandow , Samuel Akugri Asitanga","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101613","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>New names are created on daily bases but old names never change in form. Thus, names offer a window where the archaic linguistics structure of a language can be traced. This study explores the grammatical structure of personal names in Kusaal by focusing on their phonology, morphonology and syntax. Phonologically, the paper explores the phonotactics of personal names; morphologically, it discusses the various morphemes that constitute this category of names, and syntactically, it analyses the rules that underlie the construction of personal names that are phrases, clauses and sentences. The meaning of personal names in Kusaal have been discussed extensively in previous studies for which reason minimal attention is dedicated to it in the current work. The findings show that personal names in Kusaal conform to almost all the structural rules of the language. They occupy specific positions in the noun phrase and in the sentence; they are neutral to syntactic features such as definiteness and plurality. Personal names also take prefixes and affixes and can be compound words. There are instances where insertions and deletions are observed in the compound formation of personal names in the language. The study uses the Basic Linguistics Theory for its descriptive analysis of personal names. Both primary and secondary data are used in this study.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"104 ","pages":"Article 101613"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139898747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Language SciencesPub Date : 2024-01-31DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101612
Jiaxin Chen, Dechao Li, Kanglong Liu
{"title":"Unraveling cognitive constraints in constrained languages: a comparative study of syntactic complexity in translated, EFL, and native varieties","authors":"Jiaxin Chen, Dechao Li, Kanglong Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101612","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study examines syntactic complexity in Translated English (TE) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), drawing comparisons with Native English (NE). The objective is to explore the unique syntactic features of these constrained languages, which we hypothesize are influenced by inherent cognitive and social constraints. We operationalize syntactic complexity using five constructs, namely length of production units, sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and specific structures. The data reveals differential syntactic patterns across the language varieties studied. In our analysis, we observed that TE and EFL display a tendency for extended sentence structures, as indicated by higher mean lengths of clauses (MLC) and T-units (MLT) compared to NE. We propose that this inclination might stem from first-language interference in the writing and translation. The study also underscores a decrease in sentence complexity and subordination in constrained languages, a pattern which potentially mirrors the simplification phenomenon often reported in second language acquisition and translation research. Conversely, coordination measures exhibit an increase in TE and EFL, suggesting a syntax preference possibly informed by the linguistic structures of the speaker's or translator's first language. Our findings resonate with the idea of “constrained communication”, illuminating shared syntactic tendencies between second languages (L2s) and translated languages, which may be attributable to similar processing constraints. This investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on complexity and simplification in constrained languages, and encourages a merger of the traditionally separate fields of second language acquisition and translation studies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51592,"journal":{"name":"Language Sciences","volume":"102 ","pages":"Article 101612"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139653811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}